Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Daniele Bolleli

Episode Date: September 10, 2015

Daniele Bolelli (On The Warrior's Path, Drunken Taoist) joins the DTFH and we talk about gladiators and institutionalized human sacrifice!   This episode brought to you by SQUARESPACE.COM go to squarespace and use offer code duncan to recieve 10%off your first order!

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We've transcended. I'm going to have an actual professional studio now with video capabilities, and I intend to stream this son of a bitch before the end of the year. We've got some other big news, but I'm losing my voice, so I'm going to save it for a later podcast. Now, let's just dive right into this episode with Danielly Bielelly after a quick word from our sponsors. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by the super luminous web geniuses over at Squarespace.com. These heroes of the internet age have created a service where for only $8 a month, you can get a simple, powerful, beautiful website with 24-7 customer support via live chat and email,

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Alright, let's get this show on the road. Today's guest is the author of two wonderful books, Create Your Own Religion, and On the Warrior's Path. He's also got a fantastic podcast called The Drunken Taoist. Now everybody, please welcome to The Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, the great Danielle Bollelli. Welcome back to The Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. God damn, it's good to see you.

I'm very excited of being like a giggly girl for the last couple of days since we said let's record one more. I miss this. This is awesome. Well, this is the only way that I have friendship interaction anymore, weirdly, and it's so odd because when you came over before you started recording, and I'm like, man, I'm suddenly in a really great mood, and I'm thinking like, what happened? Why did I suddenly get in such a really good mood?

I'm like, you're friends here, dumbass. You don't hang out with your friends enough, except when you're recording the conversations, and that's sick. But I'm glad to get to spend this time with you. This is going to be fun, but why do you think? Is it just being crazy busy that we all are that way? No, it's not busy. I think busy is a good excuse.

It's a wonderful excuse, man, but the truth of it is that it's easier to stay inside and to be distracted by your cell phone and video games and to be in the shelter of your home than it is to leave your home and go through traffic. Right. And in the long run, all that you're doing is choosing comfort over freedom. And whenever that happens, whenever you make that decision,

you are generally instantaneously punished by the universe. As it should be. As you should be, so I apologize. We got to hang out more. Let's do that. I'm quite pumped for that. Let's make that happen. We'll figure out, you know, especially in the US,

we have this thing that unless there's a reason to get together, people don't. So it's kind of like, let's do lunch a month from now, from 12.15 to 1.15. And it's like, otherwise, the only way people get together is, you know, we go to the same gym then you get together, because you're working out together. Or we do, you know, there's an activity,

otherwise people don't make it. It's kind of weird. It's really sick. Like the way that I help understand just how bizarre human existence is, is I imagine what if my dogs did that? And then, and then like, because if you, if you're dogs, actually, if you're, if your dogs did anything that you did, like if you came home and your dog was like,

gave a kind of weak like bark and then just was like, went back to like playing some game, like Squirrel Chaser. Right. On the, on the iPad. You, you, you are even worse if your dog was just like, and then like scrolling through pictures of other dogs at parks on Instagram. Look at that one, the way that one lifted the leg. Oh God, that's hot.

Yeah. Yeah. Looking at like, yeah, like what is your dog was like looking at whatever the Suicide Girl version of dog Instagrams was mixed in with like athletic dogs, mixed in with dogs, like dogs in the Adirondacks or something. And just like, you know, would look at it dog a gram and then stop it and then go and like lap up some water in its bowl and then take a six hour nap. You would, if your dog was doing what you're doing, you would take away its phone.

Yeah. I think you would take away the dog. You would be like, fuck you. Dogs would go extinct because nobody would put up with them anymore. It's like, well, you want food? Fuck you. It's not going to happen. Vets, vets would just have baskets of dog cell phones that people left there after they

had their dogs, you and I. Yeah, exactly. It's better for it to die. Yeah. Yeah. Now, yeah. So I think that, that the, if you consider your dog making appointments or any other, if your dog had a busy calendar or not busy calendar,

if your dog kept a calendar, you would think to yourself, this is an awful thing that has happened to this dog. So yet for humans, it's just part of life. Yeah. We have to accept the fact that that's how it is and hope that it's leading us to some glorious future that we're as of yet unaware of. Yeah. And I think I don't have the, you know, our friend Chris Ryan, he has the whole civilization

going down a bad path and it's all, it all sucks. I don't feel it all sucks, but it's, it's a mixed bag. You know, there are blessing courses in the whole thing. And we need to figure out ways to navigate to get the best out of it because there's so much that's good about it and staying away from the nasty parts that are a lot. There's a lot of bad shit going on. So it's like anything else is like figuring out that dance to get some of the best without getting settled down with all the heavy weights and the bullshit of it all.

Yeah. I think it is something about a balance. And I think anytime you find yourself pining over the past, whether it's your recent past, whether it's your childhood or whether it's the childhood of your species, you're still kind of engaged in a, in a, in a form of nostalgia that doesn't seem to me to be very utilitarian. Not that you need a purpose to be nostalgic, but it does seem like, well, you know, let's imagine that in the past, you know, it was just like every animal was. Not only delicious, but gave blowjobs and just like, like the trees would massage you

and the ground was made of boobs. That's like my image. That's the awful version of life. That's actually, I just described hell. I just described so good if you're walking on boobs all the time, like animals are eating or sucking you off. Your blowjobs? No.

It's awful. Anyway, so it's a bad example, but you can get my point. I got your point. Even though I'm right now picturing hot trees with boobs, I don't know, there may be something to that. It's scary. It could be. It's scary.

You don't want to, at first it's kind of cool, but like at night when you're walking, you bump into a blue tree. That would be disturbing. So you're working on a new podcast now, huh? Yeah. I'm pumped. I'm doing, it started actually a while back because I started putting two and two together and I listened to Hardcore History by Dan Carly.

Yes. I love Dan. He's just an awesome human being, a brilliant podcaster. And then I realized, wait, wait, wait, wait, I teach history in college. That's what I do. And I dig Dan precisely because we have a similar taste for how to present the material. And I do podcasting. How about I put the two together and I play with it as well?

Definitely. That seems like a no-brainer there. It's a complete no-brainer, but of course it took me about three years to figure out. The best no-brainers, too. And now the only thing that I understand why it took me three years to figure out is because it's an amount of work that's not even funny, you know? Right. Because you can just sit down and like, oh, let's see what we can bullshit about today

and play and make it great and creative. No, it's not. You have to prepare like a motherfucker. You have to study, I don't know, the average episode, you have to read 3,000 pages or something that just to get ready to roll. Then you have to put all your notes together in a way that flows then. So it's a hell of a lot of work. That's why the last year and a half or so have been working on it because I didn't want

to do a release episode one. And then in six months, see you guys, I'll get you episode two, you know? So you got to do, though, basically an entire course. Yeah. But it's not even a course. It needs to be entertaining. Absolutely. You've got to figure out a way to weave all of these points together that if by themselves

read, read, read off, read off, remarkable, maybe boring. Yeah. The books you read are painful. The books you read are not fun to read. They are like torture, but you're like digging for gold there. You know, you find your one little gold nugget and they are like, oh, this is awesome. Surrounded by a horrible, boring, tedious language, heavy academic stuff. And then by picking out all these little gold nuggets, then when you have them all in front

of you, you figure out a way to put them together in a way that delivers. We take it with passion, you know, with the Game of Thrones versions of history, right? That's what history was. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. When you look at it, there are stories that they don't give you in school. They tend to, even when they touch on the cool topics, it presented in such a way that it doesn't really spark a fire in anybody.

And it's crazy because the source material is there. You know, it's right there for you to pick and just deliver it as it's supposed to. You're not even doing something crazy. And it will be exciting. It will be passionate because it's about crazy humans involved in wild sex and killing and heroic stories and horrible stories. You know, there's so much passion in human history. And it really doesn't take much to highlight it.

It almost takes more to make it boring, but apparently that's the name of the game in a lot of academia. A good history teacher is like the Hubble telescope compared to those shitty old, the most other ones. Because like an astronomer can look at, I don't know, can look at microwave signals. I'm just talking about this on another podcast and get excited about that. Whereas anybody else who looks at it, they're like, it just looks like a bunch of shit on a black whatever. I don't care what this, I don't care if Godzilla farted this out at the beginning of time.

It's the most uninteresting thing I've ever seen. But if you look at like, when you see those crazy Hubble deep field images of the stars, almost humanoid clouds that are billions of times larger than our sun floating out there, it makes you, it gives you this incredible, swooning sense of awe. And a good history teacher does the same thing when you realize that you're perched at the very top of this precarious temporal tower that contains within it level upon level upon level of the most atrocious brutality, the most insane shifts in paradigms that as an end result has allowed you to come emerging out of your mother's vagina in one piece.

And that makes you, it makes you feel crazy. It is. And it is like literally like, why do people like Game of Thrones? You know, you do get that. You do get the horror, the heroism, the beauty, the disgusting. It's all to the 10th power. And it's right there in history. You just have to highlight it the right way.

What is it? What is your, can you talk about what your theme of this first podcast is going to be? Yeah, the first one is going to be about the slave wars in ancient Rome. There were like three major rebellions that turned into full-fledged wars by enslaved people within Italy who got pissed off and decided to go after the Romans. The third one is the most famous, Spartacus. The first two are a little less known, but they are. How long ago is this?

This is about maybe 2100 years ago. 2100 years ago. So 2100 years ago in Rome, they are keeping, where are the slaves coming from? You know, the fact of being a big military power meant that as they were conquering more and more people, they would enslave more and more people, prisoners of war. And then the other thing that they did was they would force some of their subjects to pay crazy high taxes. And if you didn't, couldn't pay, well, too bad now you're a slave.

So there were a ton of people who ended up in slavery. So how did Romans collect taxes? They had a system where they would have, it's kind of privatized in a way. They had guys who had the job to go out and collect taxes and bring the money back to the state. How they did it, nobody gave a fuck. As long as you bring the money back, we're all happy. But how do they keep records? What were they writing on?

Oh, yeah. They had, what did they used to write? Fuck if I remember. I can't remember what they used to write, but we aren't talking about... Papyrus or something? Yeah, you are talking about something along those lines. It's not anymore the old style, cuneiform table, that kind of thing. This is actual writing, I think, is literally like pen as in, like, feather, two paper type of stuff.

Did they have filing cabinets? That's, if you're rich, you have a lot of shit that you could... Yeah, basically you have documents upon documents. You have historians, you have medical treaties, you have a lot of stuff that gets written. And in that regard, the technology for writing didn't really improve that much until for, like, good thousand-plus years after that. It's just weird to imagine that then, back then, there was some bastard who had a fucking chest full of scrolls that contained... And he would go through it and be like, oh, this guy owes me however much money, and he would come to your house and arrest you? Or would he send guards to get you?

Or would he just come and say, look, you have one more chance to pay? Well, he would have his enforcer who come with him, and he's very mafia-like, you know, in that sense. It sounds like a mafia. It's kind of like, hey, you haven't paid, I think we need to break a leg. Instead of breaking a leg that doesn't get you money, you enslave them. Then that gets you money. So you would sell them? Yeah.

You would take the person to some prison, a debtor's prison kind of situation, then you sell them into slavery. Yep, you put them up on the slave market, you still make money, you give a cut to the state, everybody wins. What happened to their kids? Like, what if you had kids? Maybe we'll enslave them too. So the whole family goes? Yeah. Or you end up in a situation where you have the mom and kids left without the father, so that would cause even more economic decline,

which then would require even more people being enslaved. If one of those laborers is funny because there's romis involved with somebody trying to invade them, there's like these Nordic tribes, sort of what the Romans was, a bunch of barbarians trying to invade them, and they are successful, they are kicking Roman ass left and right. Yeah. And they have to turn to some of their subject states and say, okay, send us some people for the army. And these guys are like, we got nobody left, because you have been harassed in all the young men and put them all, you enslave them all. We have nobody left to send you.

Wow. And so the Romans are like, oh, shit, that's not good. So then they have to try to figure out a way to free some of the slaves that were arrested because of taxes, because they were too heavy and promised that they are not going to do that anymore, so that they can throw them into the army to settle. Good news and bad news. You're out of jail, but now you got to go fight the goddamn, what are they called? The starts of the G, doesn't it?

Which ones? The barbarians. Oh, yeah, there was the two main tribes at that time were the Kimbrian and the Teutones, and they were pretty badass. Yeah, they were not the guys you wanted to go fight just for the fun of it. Now, the term barbarian, these weren't really barbarians, these were just indigenous people, or who were they? Like, why do they get, when I think of, or are they like, when I think of a barbarian,

I think of like the guys in Game of Thrones, the guys on the other side of the wall, the animal skins, painted faces. A little of, like, the barbarian is obviously a racist idea, right? You're not like us, so you're a barbarian, you know, it's like, that's actually the word itself, it was a Greek word, because to the Greeks, the sound that these other people would make when they spoke was like, ba, ba, ba, ba, so it became barbarian because of that, because it sounded like a bunch of, like, meaningless syllables. Are you fucking shitting me, man?

Yeah, that's where the word barbarian comes from. So their name for them is the equivalent of when somebody says something to you and you go, gip, gip, gip, gip, gip, gip, gip. That's exactly it, yes. That's hilarious. The word is like, yo, those are the bee, bee, bees. Exactly. What?

I can't understand what you're saying. I'm just going to take your fucking land anyway. That's precisely where barbarian, the barbarian comes from. That's so fucked. We're going to war with a gip, gip, gip, gip, gip. That's, you nailed it. So what happens is that from the point of view of these guys, you know, we are civilized Greeks.

We are civilized Romans. We are, anybody who was not like them was like, you are fucking barbarians. You speak weird. You go around tending to your flocks rather than building big cities. Right. Fuck you. But basically they were mostly pastoralists, the guys coming in. So they had giant flocks.

They could be, they meant they could be nomadic. They didn't have to be in one place. So they didn't build an urban culture. And that's such that they are considered barbarians. Did they keep slaves? I'm pretty sure they did. Just about anybody did at that time. So back then, you just, if you could get somebody to be your slave, they were your slave.

You do. Yes. I mean, what, what was keep, like, let's say that I'm a barbarian and then I see a weaker dude walking in front of me as I'm tending my sheep. Am I allowed to just throw a lasso on him and be like, sorry, man, you're my servant. If he's not one of your guys, you know, if he's one of the people in the tribe, no, you'll get somebody else who is their protector and will be trapped. But if he's somebody else, if he's from another people, yeah, fuck them.

They are not as a soap. Okay. So it was open game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of the, because I like to think about like modern worries versus ancient worries. Yeah, that's a big one right there. And, you know, like modern worries are very real and very scary. But no, when I walk, when I went to get breakfast, I'd set definitely on my mind

was like, shit, man, I hope I don't get turned into a slave. Yeah, that's my thought. I had exact same thought. I always thought like, what if, you know, you're there tending your land, planting seeds, doing your thing, and all of a sudden right above the hill, you see like 200 guys on horseback with giant swords coming in. What the fuck do you do? You're done.

There's nothing you can do. You're like, no, you're just like, all right, here we go. Gonna be a slave, I guess. It's like, I hope I got to be a slave and they don't decide just to chop my head off and use it as a drinking vessel instead. Oh yeah, right. Because that, I mean, that's the other option. Being a slave is like, that's a good day.

Like that you're lucky. You're alive. Yeah, you're alive. You got to live. So what was the, it seems like there must have been a fairly grim outlook of life back then. Like most people must have had a fairly sad, depressed approximation of what it was like to be alive. You're, well, I guess it becomes one of those existential trips because, of course, life

was insanely hard. You know, life expectancy wasn't that much. Or rather, you know, people could live a long time, but there were crazy high infant mortality, lots of diseases, lots of warfare, lots of violence. There were 3 million ways to die young. So obviously, many people did not have a plan for 80 years from now kind of mentality, which is not good because you're dealing with serious existential threats to your life on a regular basis.

But at the same time, you take the future less for granted. So there's a lot more to pass on the wine right now. Let's go have sex right now. Let's have a big party because who the hell knows what a year from now is going to be like. So it's kind of, this is, I'm sure you, have you seen the wild and wonderful whites of West Virginia? No.

It's a fantastic documentary about this family in West Virginia. It's a really large family of what you would safely call like hardcore white trash. Like deep, deep, like, you know, doing things like snorting oxy-cotton in the hospital next to your newborn. Wow. And, you know, that kind of level of depravity and just complete insane survivalist living. But one of the points they make is that these are descendants of coal miners. And the coal miners, their life expectancy was short.

They didn't know what was going to happen to them every time they went into that mine. They could die. And so it created a sort of fatalism. And fatalism often produces a kind of sad hedonism, this kind of melancholy hedonism, which is fuck it. Just fuck it. You seriously want me to not inhale this wonderful powder that makes me feel like I'm not about to die and that my life isn't more pointless.

Yeah, exactly. It's like so that maybe, yeah, because you're right. Because there are 3,000 other things that can kill you now. So they're like, eh, fuck it. I'll just have fun. Yeah. So this is like generational fatalism that got passed down. So probably back then there was some similar kind of world outlook.

And it was a must, people must have been, were people more, were people, was the individual more violent back then? Yeah. The level of violence was insane, which is why I think there's actually a connection with this existential fatalism and the fact that in Rome the gladiators were such a big hit. I mean, think about what that says about a society where your form of entertainment is, you know, let's bring the family to go watch some dudes slicing up each other with swords and while you're eating your lunch and commenting on the fights, you know.

Wow. If that's your number one form of entertainment, that's saying something about the culture. Right. Okay. That's so effective. Recently on the news, this, yet another atrocity. A lunatic with a gun blasts a reporter on TV. It is fucked.

It is so fucked that it instantly, I'd say within eight minutes, pretty much the entire planet with access to the internet is aware that this event happened. In Rome, this was happening every day and was commodified. So people would just go and watch slaves who couldn't pay their, you would go and sit in arena watching men who couldn't pay their taxes hack each other to death while you ate fucking fast food. That's exactly how it was. Now to throw a weird curve to the story, though, while what you painted is exactly true, because the majority of gladiators were slaves and that's exactly what happens.

You're there in the bleachers, eating your fast food, seeing two guys killing each other. The two guys killing each other is actually the best part of the game, best from modern perspective. They were like executions where criminals got thrown to the beasts to be eaten. There's all sort of crazy. They got really creative with their execution. They would do this like Roman snap plays, basically, where they would reenact like meats with the convicts. So they would do like some guy with, they would put them up on a tower with wings and then they would throw him off saying, Icarus, look, this is the meat of Icarus right here.

And the dude is just plummeting to his dead and everybody claps and go, that was a great play. You had crazy perverted weird shit that was like stories about Zeus taking the form of a bull. Zeus was always busy seducing women beside the goddesses. And so Zeus taking the form of a bull to have sex with a woman. So they decide, hmm, we have a woman who's been sentenced to death. We are going to have a bull have sex with her and literally kill her in the process of having sex. Wow. Stuff like that where you're like, what the fuck, how dark does it get?

When they were selling tickets for these shows, did they list what was going to happen on the, were people aware? Yeah, there was the program. There was a program. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you could actually make, did you know in advance, like when you came in, you could be like, what's up today? Yeah, you were like, I saw the Icarus thing. I don't really care about, oh shit, they're going to let a woman get fucked to death by a bull. In that case, please.

I want to see that one. Okay. Where are the tickets? Daddy, I want to see the woman get fucked to death by a bull. Yeah. Because there'd be kids there. Of course. And the reaction is not one that now if anyone witnessed this, the reaction would be one of like, you know, you'd be depressed for, you'd probably have some PTSD.

Yeah. You'd be, you'd wake up screaming. Well, I think you did even back then have PTSD, but the culture turns it into something. All right, there is still this PTSD, but it's normalized where it's like, there's a story about one of the Roman emperors. I forgot if he was Commodore Circle Eagle, but one of the totally crazy ones who grew up and once he grows up is a badass, mean motherfucker. But there's a story of him as a kid and they bring him to the games and they see when they throw a bunch of prisoners to the lions and the lions tear them apart. And the kid is freaked out and he's trying to look away and his parents are like, no, this is what we do as Romans. You need to enjoy this and kind of turn his face and make him watch.

Now, as he grows up, he goes, you know, he becomes a sadistic, crazy motherfucker. So the odds that that had an influence on the A caused B, it seems pretty likely. Or if he's not hosed 100 percent, he sure as hell gave a push in that direction. Well, now, when did it start? Is there, does anyone aware of the gladiatorial stuff? Yeah. Yeah, the gladiators. There's one of the common theories is that this was popular either with the Atrozcans, which were right before the Romans and then leading into Roman times.

Or it was something from Campania, which is southern Italy, Greek origin. Like they even have in like in the Iliad or something, they have this idea of for somebody's funeral. This was part of funeral games originally. They weren't games as entertainment as they become in Roman times. Funeral games. Yes, somebody dies and you have a contest with people shedding blood to basically feed the spirit of the dead. Because there was this idea that the shedding of blood would give them would give them nourishment. And so you have two guys just go at it.

It could even be three people or after a while when three people decided, yeah, I don't really want to kill myself because that other guy died. How about we grab some slaves and have them do it? And so if we follow this down the line, it ends. It must rather begins with a crazy person who was very charismatic. That sounds like what it is. It's a person who was strong and scary or charismatic and he was around a group of people in the dark and he said to them, listen, I don't want to do this. You don't want to do this. But Jack died.

And what's his ghost going to eat? Yep, need some blood. We got to get some blood guys. Yep. So I came up with a game where we could play it as funeral where we make our slaves fight each other. Yep. So it's just a crazy. It starts with a crazy person and it starts with a circle of gullible people who I guess succumb to the crazy.

Because you know whoever came up with this idea. You know, way, way, way, way, way back when whoever came up with this idea, some, his friends, a lot of them are like, no, I don't think we should do that, man. Are you sure? And he's like, I was right about the time we got the deer. And they're like, yeah, you're right, I guess. Or it could even be the other way because probably what happened before the games was that they would just grab somebody and sacrifice them straight up, right? And it would be just a human sacrifice at the grave of this big important person who died. Yeah.

And so it could be that what happened is one of the people to be sacrificed say, whoa, time out. How about we do this? We're still giving you blood. Okay, it's still gonna happen. Right. But rather than just grabbing me and tearing out my heart and dropping blood on top of this guy grave. Why don't you give me somebody else, another guy to be sacrificed? You give us sword.

So yes, somebody will die. Somebody will shed the blood. But we make a contest out of it. So you guys can have a good time watching. And at least you have a chance. And do you know how they responded to that guy? Exactly. Throw him a sword and just stop talking.

You can fight. So this, I'm really interested in this because in the same way that one of the great mysteries of planet Earth is the moment inorganic life. Became organic life. Became organic life. We'll never know exactly what process has happened. We can theorize. But unless maybe we'll know, but maybe we'll have a time machine or something. We can go watch it happen.

But right now we don't know. So it's a big old mystery and it's a wonderful mystery. In the same way, there's the mystery of the first human sacrifice. There's the mystery of the first, the first time one person got so terrified that his solution to this internal turmoil was to kill his brother or sister in the name of an invisible non-existent being. And that person, there must have been a first. Sure. And it echoed all the way down and through time and became more complex, more organized. And that brings us to the Roman arenas.

That brings us to what you're talking about right now. You're seeing this thing that is morphed through time. And now here it is. And this, you know, when you came in, you saw I'm reading this book by Sam Harris called Waking Up. And I was telling you, I love the book. Not just because the writing's great, but because I vehemently disagree with him on certain points. And I love disagreeing with him. And it's great.

You don't want to read something you disagree with. It's fucking awesome. So I sit there reading and like, I've actually tried to send him an email through his website just because I'm like, it's a weird email too. It's an authentic, I fucking love this book, man. But, you know, saying certain things I don't, I don't understand that he's saying or I just don't agree with. But one point he's making. And when you tell me these stories, it really seems to put that point in italics. It seems to be that if, you know, one superstition becomes institutionalized,

what starts off as really cute turns into the most brutal fucked up shit ever. Yeah. I mean, think about like the Aztecs or the Maya where human sacrifice was like, you know, what do we do on Sunday? Let's tear out some hearts, you know, it's or, you know, you have that in the most brutal way possible. Hell, in the Bible, you have like Jewish patriarchs setting people on fire as a sacrifice. You have, you know, snipping off the tips of dicks. You see all over the place, right? And then you see sacrifice at the other way where I probably originated where it was originally somebody doing it to themselves,

where you still see today like somebody sun dancing where they pierce and they shed their own blood. They don't die, but there's the idea of the shedding of blood to give strength to your prayers and everything else. May we stop for a moment? May I have you read something? I want you to read something if I could. By all means. Okay, great. I'm going to pull it up.

We're going to stop for a second just because we're talking about human sacrifice right now. Cool. I'd like you to read a little bit from Alistair Crowley's essay on human sacrifice, just because it's a very astute, awesome, creepy thing that's fun to put on the podcast. One second. Let me find it. A reading from Danielli Bollelli of Libre Four by Alistair Crowley. It would be unwise to condemn, as irrational, the practice of those savages who tear the heart and liver from an adversary and devour them while yet warm.

In any case, it was the theory of the ancient magicians that any living being is a storehouse of energy, varying in quantity according to the size and health of the animal and in quality according to its mental and moral character. At the death of the animal, these energies liberated suddenly. Yeah. That's pretty intense. I think it nails it as far as where the Aztec idea came from, where probably early Roman, before it became entertainment, where the gladiator stuff was tied to religion, where that's... Pretty intense. I'm curious to imagine that as the Romans sat around the dying slaves, watching them get eaten by animals, watching them get hacked to death,

what they were actually doing was absorbing their life energy as it exploded out of them. It was more of a coven of vampiric witches who thought they were there for entertainment, unaware of the fact that what they were really doing was sucking in a tiny bit of that being's dispersed life energy. Almost like the splitting of the atom, only instead of an atomic explosion, it was a spiritual explosion. And that to this very day, the reason so many people have clicked play on the YouTube video showing this woman getting shot is not because there's some kind of perverse voyeuristic desire to watch someone die, but that that woman's life energy has somehow been digitally encoded and is now being transmitted to the entire planet and what happened was an inadvertent human sacrifice that is being amplified by technology. You're a master, my man. Yeah, that's trippy to think, but I wouldn't put it past to the fact that that was a lot of what was going on originally.

And I think all those motivations mix. The voyeuristic, I want to see blood, sure is a part. The original religious aspect was a part. There are so many different motivations that I think even the people watching half of the time don't understand. In the romance case, this is a weird guess. This is how flat out schizophrenic the attitude was. On one hand, they despise gladiator because they are slaves. They have to, with their bodies, give entertainment to other people through their death, which is considered such, you know, worthy of a slave.

It's like a low class thing. On the other hand, gladiators were heroes and they were people who worshiped them. They became celebrities. They became kind of like the sport, the top athletes of the day. Or they became like American Sniper. Yeah, but even like literally almost like NBA kind of thing where you women would line up to have sex with them. Men would idolize them. Right.

And it's like the same one that is despised as this low class slave. At the same time, he was probably the only slave who had a chance to climb to the top of fame, popular worship and everything else. Because in another kind of way, what is that the gladiator did? What was the whole thing about? It was really about fighting on where everything is hopeless. You know, the life of a gladiator is pretty grim. The odds are high that you'll die in the arena in front of a screaming mob who said, die, bust or die. And so what is that the Romans admire?

How you handle that? You know, if you are able, if you are scared and you go in and your hand is trembling and you run away when the other gladiator is trying to hack you, everybody's like, what a waste. This is sad to watch. This is pathetic. But if you go out with this sense of like, I don't give a fuck. I'm gonna fight the last second. And not only that, I'm gonna fucking enjoy it. I'm gonna enjoy this death struggle against hopeless odds.

It's the ultimate slave mentality. Yeah, then you become a hero because the reality of the Roman world was that everybody had to deal with that shit because everybody was dying left and right, not in the arena in other ways. And suddenly the gladiator gave them a model to live after. It's like that spirit. If I can channel that in daily life, that's what it is. So in an odd way gladiators became they would teach a master class in stoic philosophy. Well, they teach a class in how to worship your master. They're the ultimate example of pure and absolute servitude in the most perverse and sick way.

The gladiators are an example of somebody working at a fucking 7-Eleven, or not a 7-Eleven, or some place where you're not getting paid enough and you're having to do too much shit and you're being mistreated in the most extreme way and you're giving up your life to somebody who's turning it into a profit for them and you're getting nothing back. They're an example of somebody who in that situation on their lunch break has conversations about how awesome their boss is. Oh, he's great. Mr. Williams, he gives me five minutes of an extra break. Mr. Williams gave me a free hot dog yesterday. I didn't have enough to afford it, but he lets me eat the hot dogs for free when I work here. Oh, he's great.

That's on the goddamn, that's on the gladiator spectrum. It's just because here you have a slave with a sword. Who could, instead of attacking some other fucking slave who's in the exact same predicament, could turn around to whoever his captors are and at least decapitate a few of those motherfuckers before going down. And that's gotta be what starts these slave rebellions that you're talking about. That's where the Spartacus rebellion is super famous because this was a bunch of gladiators who decided fuck this, we're out of here. Because the masters were aware of the fact that you give weapons to people who are likely to die in the arena for your entertainment, probably these guys are not gonna be so happy about it. So they would always lock up the weapons, they would do all this stuff. So Spartacus rebellion literally starts with about 70 guys grabbing kitchen knives and skewers that they were used for roasting a pig or something.

And they kill the guards with those and then get the guards weapons. And then they kind of like graduate to better and better weapons with each one they beat along the way. Wow, it's like a video game. Yeah, until they become a full-fledged army. I mean, by the end, the Spartacus thing is probably has like 70,000 people with him. Can you not to do a spoiler, but how does that rebellion end? No, well, which is why as a general rule, you don't see many slave rebellions. You see people running away because one guy running away.

You have a shot. You can run away. You see, you know, stuff like that. You see big scale slave rebellion. I mean, what are the odds that you're going to be able to take down this huge power who's able to enslave hundreds of thousands or millions of people? Even if you give it a hard time like Spartacus is super successful. He defeats like seven Roman armies in a row. It's unbelievable in Rome.

They are really freaking out for real. The end of the day, they steal the way it's going to end after this last giant battle in which Spartacus forces get chopped to pieces. There are about like 6,000 people who are captured and the ones who didn't die in the battle. And the Romans will line them up from roughly modern day Naples, Capua technically, which is right next to it, all the way to Rome. It's like 100 miles, 110 miles, something like that. And every 40 yards, they crucify one of these guys. So you have this forest of crosses that go from Naples to Rome along the main way with the crucified slaves every few yards. Yeah.

That's a message of don't fuck with us. Anybody thinking of rebelling again? Take a look at this first. You know what sucks? If you've got to deliver a fucking package on that 40 miles a weekend. Yeah, you pass. The smell. Yeah.

You're just like, God damn it, man. Could you have crucified these guys like a little off their route? I've got my commute. Is there any way you could have crucified these guys? Why on the road? That's precisely because they want as many people as possible to see it. Oh, the stink, of course. I know.

Yeah, they want to scare people. The messages. This is what happens when you fight Rome. This is what happens when you're not a good slave. Yeah. It's funny because the heroism that Rome worships is decried the moment that it turns onto its true enemy. And it's funny that way, isn't it? That you can apply so much of what's happening back then to modern life, which is that you take somebody like Snowden, for example.

Somebody who's enlisted in the military, or not Snowden, rather, manning. Someone who's enlisted in the military, who sees what's actually happening, which is that people or reporters are getting gunned down in the most fucked up way, like the sadism that's happening. There's just something that nobody who is in the United States would want their military to be doing for any reason at all if they had any modicum of sanity. And he does a truly heroic act. Right? Oh, man, what a heroic act that was. He fucking gets that information out into the world, knowing he has to. Moral character.

He knows I can't ignore this. I've seen it. I either do something about it or I spend the rest of my life as a half person. He does it. Now, he's in solitary confinement in what I think is super max prison, where I believe that he's being held in solitary confinement for things like having the wrong kind of toothpaste or something like that. So he's being tortured. And they're letting the information get out that he's being tortured in the most obscene ways because that's the new form of crucifixion. Yeah, that's the message.

It's like, anybody else think about leaking stuff like that? Take a look at this guy. Look at this guy. Yeah. That's the truth. Here's who you're up against. Yep. Just so you know.

You're up against someone who won't crucify you because we can. Yeah, exactly. But if we could, we would. Oh, gladly. We would. If they could have, if they could have, they would have had Manning in front of the White House on a fucking cross. Yeah. And there would probably be bus loads of Republicans coming in from churches in the local area to watch him get crucified while they ate popcorn.

Absolutely. That's the game. That's why in fact, human psychology hasn't really, humans are humans, you know, you don't change them culture or influence you and stuff. You're more likely. But some of the stuff that made the romance sit down to watch gladiatorial fights is in us now. You know, it's not that we can temper it. We can, but the instinct is there. That's why like, I don't know, you know, when you go watch UFC sometime, you know, you're enjoying the fights for the technical aspect.

You're already enjoying the fights for the bravery of somebody. I trips me out every time I see somebody was like yelling, Boston motherfucker up, snap the legs, break it, break it, break it. I'm like, Jesus Christ, you're sick. What's your problem? I mean, it's one thing to appreciate the bravery of the contest and the technique, but to actually be there because you want somebody's bone to poke through the skin and see it. You want to see some blood? Look, man, I'm sorry. I would love to like tell you that because you're a martial artist you train.

I got to admit when I went to see the UFC, I've been training a little bit. That's what in Muay Thai. That's awesome. A little bit. But enough where now it's like, Oh God, this is the most beautiful, incredible, spiritual. Discipline that I've ever encountered. It's amazing. The effect it has on your life.

It's magic. It's terrific. So now when I watch fights, it really is this beautiful thing when you realize what they're doing. And even now I barely understand it, but I understand it enough to be awed by it. Right. But I will admit, initially, part of what was the excitement was the thrill of watching somebody get knocked out. Right. It was sickening.

Yeah. Also, it's pretty entertaining, man. I mean, there is a thing inside. Of course. I mean, I will admit that I'm sick. I'm sexually depraved. And I suppose, I don't really think it's depraved, but nobody's going to say that I'm having missionary styles. But in the same way, but I don't think that's depraved in the same way.

I just don't think it's fair to say somebody's sick necessarily because they're like getting off on someone, getting the shit kicked out of them in an arena where prior to the fight, they're playing war drums. Right. You know what you have to see when Elvis is out of the blue? It's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That kind of sound does not generate a thing. We're like, man, I hope these guys hug. Yeah, exactly. I like to see these two friends get together and have a nice chat in the middle of this group of people who are half drunk.

That's not one of the guy, Evan Tanner, who was an early UFC fighter. He won the middleweight championship at one point way back in the day before Anderson Silva, before Rich Franklin. And Evan Tanner was a very interesting guy, super complex because he was a genuinely sweet and nice guy and he would go in the cage and elbow people in the head. So he had this weird tension because on one hand he felt like he loved the fighting because of what he forced him to dig in inside of himself spiritually to kind of be brave in the face of stuff that scared the hell out of him. So he loved the tension of the fight and what he brought out in him. And at the same time, he was kind of bummed out that it's like for me to experience that, I have to leave another dude in blood. And so his whole thing was like, I wish there was a way to get this side of the equation without having to pay that price that to him doing it was kind of ugly. If you want to get high, you got to cough, right?

I guess that's the name of the game. You're getting high. Right. Let's face it, you're getting high on these very intense endogenous chemicals that aren't coming out of those sweet synaptic vesicles unless your fist is banging into somebody's fucking head in the middle of your entire planet. I guess the closest that I could think of what Tanner was talking about, like when I saw people Sundance where you see guys, so you're not doing anything to somebody else, you're doing it to yourself. You see guys pierced through their chest and be tied to the tree or they pierced from the back and they have buffalo skulls tied to this rope that they drag around for round after round after round until either they break loose or they will get kids to sit on the buffalo skull, pinning them down and you push forward and break loose. When you hear about it, it's nuts.

It's like, who the fuck does that? Why? Why would you do that to yourself? When you see it, it makes perfect sense in a non-rational kind of way. There's something actually beautiful about that because there is that high of the tough, scary, but you embrace it in a way. But in this case, you're doing it to yourself so you don't have anything that involves somebody else, whereas somebody else has blood. So it goes back to Crowley's very sinister assessment of human sacrifice or animal sacrifice or sacrifices of any sort, which is that no matter what, if you're alive right now, you're alive because you've absorbed the energy of a thing that you've eaten. Now the thing that you've eaten may have been plant matter, but it was alive.

I don't know if it has consciousness or can feel or if it's just a kind of blank photosynthetic machine, but you fucking killed it. You can't deny the fact that it was alive and it's dead so that you could live. If it's an animal, it's the same thing, obviously, but it goes even further. If you're listening to this through a cell phone, then you have within your pocket a thing that was more than likely constructed in a society where the people are not being fairly compensated for their work. The chemicals within the thing itself have been probably the process to create them has created some level of environmental degradation, perhaps small, more likely fairly extreme. A lot of it was mined in regions where people are in the middle of or often find themselves in terrible civil wars. A lot of it has been is being defended. The thing in your pocket is there because the system that is used to create it is being defended by people with high powered weapons that go into places where there's the minerals needed to produce this stuff so that you could have your phone.

So what you're saying is that basically each cell phone is the result of somebody being fucked to death by a bull. That's essentially, if we want to sum it up, that's the image, right? Well, yeah, in a version of being fucked to death by a bull, in fact, there may even be people who've created these things who, if you said to them, hey, would you rather be doing this or we can end it quick? You just got to be fucked to death by a bull. There might be some of them who are like, you know, I'll take the bull. I don't want to sit in this goddamn fucking factory for 12 hours a day in a communist regime where the air is 80% solar. Which is exactly why people chose to become gladiators sometimes. There were volunteers at times where your life sucks so bad that it's like, you know what?

I have one shot of being worshipped by women, by everybody, at glory. Fuck it, look at the rest of my life. This is better. I'll take that. The cycle is, we have that. The snake is eating its tail. And there's no way around that. There's a collie right now that has emerged, that is constantly tearing off the heads of great men and women and putting them in her mouth that is constantly destroying, you know, like ISIS. I talk about ISIS too much, guys.

I don't really care, I just think they're a great example. But ISIS, videos coming out of them destroying these beautiful Syrian temples. Now, take a picture of collie and place it next to the picture of the destruction of the temple of ISIS. And you will see collie at work in the world because collie wears a necklace of heads that are the old gods. Collie represents the tendency for the ice, for glaciers to destroy and powderize civilizations thanks to meteor impacts. And sometimes monkeys do the same thing to each other. So what I mean is it's like, it's an unavoidable and inescapable aspect of human existence at this moment. And if you think that you're somehow out of it, you're fucking nuts.

If you are in any way on the grid, then you are absorbing the life energy of people who are being exploited all over the planet so that you could have some modicum of comfort. And you're probably exchanging your suffering so that you can get more of the other things from other people's suffering. We say that the fucking currency is paper, the currency is suffering. We trade suffering for suffering. And that's the way the system works right now. And from what you're saying, it appears to be the way the fucking thing has worked for a very long time. Very, very much. Is it hopeless? Do you think that the history, these cycles, the Roman Empire, and it seems to be more of a spiral than a circle, right? Things do change. The way slavery works now is not the way slavery used to work, but it's still a form of slavery if you have to survive in this country by finding a boss.

The boss is the master. The master, instead of giving you food and shelter, gives you money that gives you just enough for the food and shelter that you need to work for the boss. It's a word you could say. You could actually even say that in some ways it may be preferable to be a slave in the sense that if you become a slave, at least you've got job security. Yeah, it's like, look, I have TV, I have internet, I got to have my house, I can eat what I want. I'm a good slave. If you're a good owner, you're going to let your slave use your wireless. And there's going to be slave forums. If slavery was around today, there'd be a slave tender. There'd be slave dating services. But anyway, you see these similarities that are less brutal. Yeah, it's still similarly brutal, just in a different way. Do you think it can get to the point where humans are no longer exploiting each other? Can it get to the point where we're no longer crucifying heroes? Do you think it's possible that this spirals into a more utopian version of history, or are we doomed to this consistent, endless echo of violence that has been going on for as long as history has been recorded?

I think to some degrees, you have to figure out, it's magic. You have to figure out a way to not depend on resources that are limited. Because as long as the resources are limited, there's competition. As long as the resources are limited, I got to eat you in order to survive. As long as you rely on limited resources, that's the name of the game. There's power games to control them. There's predatory games to be able to consume them so that you get them and not the other guy. In a game of unlimited resources, that whole power competition, that whole Tiger 8 Deer game wouldn't probably work the same way, because you don't have to. But of course, that's right now, it's completely utopia, because how the hell do you get unlimited resources? How do you... I don't see any... And again, maybe tomorrow, somebody come along and figure out a way that we press this button and suddenly you can produce food out of thin air and anybody can have anything they want. Then there is none of that game anymore. But right now, this is crazy utopia to a level that granted, all sorts of crazy shit has happened over the last 20, 30, 40 years. The technologies have been developed that nobody would have ever pictured before. And the general attitudes of much of humanity has become a little more mellow about what we accept, at least openly and what we don't.

So, you know, if you look at racism today, it's way less than it was 100 years ago. If you look at attitudes towards violence today, you know, that kind of thing. So there's some stuff has improved, but at the same time, the game can only change so much, as long as people are killing each other over limited resources. And it's safe to say that if you went back to the time of the Romans and had a conversation with the gladiator who was about to go fight a bear, and he said, hey, do you want to go fight the bear? I'm going to take you back to the future where you can work at Starbucks. The gladiator's kidding. 90 out of 100 would have said that Starbucks sound awesome. And then there would have been the one who was like, you know what? Fuck it. I want to go down with the bang and everybody clap at my crazy bravery and screw Starbucks. I want to go for it. Bring on the bear. Yeah, there's going to be some still some dummies who decide or bear haters. Yeah, but that that is. I think that it's I wouldn't be surprised if the Romans when they contemplated their lives, even though they were like, man, this sucks.

They were probably thinking hell of a lot better than it was 100 years ago, man. Yeah. Do you think was it is it always every further generation rationalizes the inherent violence existing in their society by looking at the previous levels of violence and thinking, OK, that well, it's not as violent as it used to be. So we're doing pretty good. It may or may not be about violence. Maybe violence increases, but there's something else they are running away from. And so you feel like an increasing violence is worth it because at least we don't have to deal with that shit anymore. Right. So maybe it's just that you used to live in a swamp and you get beaten by mosquitoes and you die of malaria by the time you're 20 all the time. And so you're like, yeah, right now we have to kill a whole lot of people to keep the system going, but at least we're not fucking getting malaria and dying in the swamps. Right. So, you know, the specifics may change, but that's why to me is like the nostalgia for the past can only work so much because if something else come along and it proves more popular than whatever it was in the past, it means the past wasn't that hot because otherwise people are selfish in the best possible selfishness is not always a bad thing.

They're selfish as in I want what's best for me. Right. And if the new way deliver something that the old way couldn't, people embrace it. If the new way sucks, people will stick to the old way. Right. So there is something to the fact that while there may be awesome stuff about the past, is not that people all flee from some heavenly perfect thing into some hellish demonic stuff because they are masochist is because they're getting something out of it that the old way wasn't given. Right. Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I my my assessment of things continues to be very optimistic. I think it's an incredible time to be alive. But then the more I do the podcast and try to look into things that I don't like normally thinking about like what Chris Ryan teaches, you do get to this point. Like, well, how much of that optimism is based on actual fact and how much of it is based on complete denial? Just just the distance of it all, you know? Sure. And then also the not to not that that should put you in a pessimistic state. I mean, let's face it. We're all gladiators. The arena is time. And the thing that we're battling is, well, you don't have to battle it, but many people are battling the inexorable progression of the aging process towards the complete disintegration of your physical form.

You don't have to battle it. That depends anyway. But it's good to battle for a while, do, you know, exercise, eat good food, you know, like it is good. It is a noble fight. So we're all kind of in the in the in that situation, you know, but but I think that you can have that optimistic approach. You can have the gladiators attitude, right? There is something that we could even still extract from that attitude. It's just you shouldn't turn the sword on your brother who is in the same fight. We should all be turning our swords against the forces that are keeping us from achieving the potential that humans seem like we could achieve, like the species, the species could achieve. If we could harmonize the species somehow, and that's the dream of all hippies and fascists, but if we could harmonize the species to one truth based on reality, as it is right now, not based on sacrificing people for their life energy, but based on transforming our time into energy that can create unlimited resources so that we could somehow erode or disintegrate the current power structure, we would live in heaven. Absolutely. It would be as though we opened a portal into a paradise world and that paradise world came pouring into this world. Why isn't that possible?

That's the fight, man. That's the fight. That's the fight. That's what we want to do. And this is, you know, you hear about the different classes of civilizations, you know, class A, class B, class C, class A civilization being a civilization where there's a unified front that has somehow managed to extract energy from the sun, no longer taking energy that's destroying the planet, but once you do that, and then the class B, I can't remember all the civilizations, basically, it's just varying methods of harnessing energy. We're not even class A yet. No, not even close. Many of us are, our minds are haunted with the ghosts of, we're haunted by all these old ideas.

Like many of us right now are still every single day waking up and looking out at the world and thinking I am a sinner. I have failed my Lord. People think that. Right. I have failed my Lord. I have failed my Lord. My Lord is angry with me. My Lord is a jealous God who is angry with me.

There are people who think that every day. Absolutely. There are varying different versions of this and there's people in parts of the world who think my God wants me to kill Jews. That's safe to say, right? Absolutely. That's not just government propaganda. That's how it is. And there's people who think my God wants me to kill gay people.

And there's people who, and anyway, the end result of those kinds of people thinking like that is that we don't get to experience freedom from the gladiator pit in the way that we could, right? Absolutely. So what do you do? This is where Sam Harris has gotten to my fucking head because the question is what do you do? What does he say? Well, I don't know what is, hopefully some Sam Harris devotee can get him on the podcast for me because I would like to ask what the solution is because I keep thinking about his approximation, his approximation of things, which is, I will admit that I don't understand his complete approximation of things. Listen to his podcast a bit and read his book, but I combined the idea of like shit, man, we've got this, these fundamentalists, you know, fundamentalists, not just Muslims, we've got fundamentalists problems. Any kind.

Yep. And these fundamentalists are getting to have access to the most advanced technology that has ever existed in the history of our species. That is a terrible tarot. This is the power line meeting the puddle. That's a bad situation. That's a very bad situation. Yes. So what the fuck do we do?

Because at some point, an attitude of like, just let them do their thing. It doesn't work. No. The other attitude of like, well, I guess we got to start the camps up and put people who believe in this crazy shit into internment camps and either reprogram them or get them the fuck out of the casino. Right. Because they're going to destroy the planet. That doesn't work either. No, exactly.

So what do we do? That's the big question. Like what the fuck do you do? How do you stop viral thought forms being transferred from one scared person to the next from completely in the long run? Not right now. Right now it's still kind of cute. Right now it's still kind of interesting. But how do you keep it from the in the long run completely, you know, destroying the species or will it?

Or can you just let things run their course and everything will be fine? Absolutely not. No. That's never worked. I think to some degree what you have is that it's already a fight that has been going on and there have been huge victories in that department. Because if you look at the degree of rabid fundamentalism that existed in much of the world 300 years ago versus what exists today, today is like the bonsai version of the giant oak tree that it was 300 years ago. In that sense, there has been monstrous improvement in the regard of how many people are buying the idea that no, there's not a single truth that I own and I have to impose on everybody whether they like it or not. You know, that idea of this, at least in its most violent and blatant form of there's only room for my way is less and less popular.

So in that sense, that's a fight that he's been won slowly, so it takes centuries and the other argument is, yeah, well, there are still a gazillion people suffering because it hasn't been extinguished quick. But it's not a fight that continues to be the same or is on the losing end. There has been tremendous improvement and now that doesn't mean shit if tomorrow some crazy fundamentalist start dropping 300 atomic bombs around the world. It doesn't matter that the tide of history is going to wipe him out. He gets to wipe out the game first. But you know, the reality is that they are losing power every day, completely and totally. It's just an issue of how dangerous our day while the game goes on. And that's why the problem is of not being able because, you know, the fact that, you know, when you bring up Isis is obviously why you do because they are such a stereotypical just bad shit.

You know, most people you can see, I don't disagree with them, but there's 20 percent that I can see their point. You know, Isis is just bad shit, crazy shit. It's almost like when you talk about, you know, the Nazis, they become the stereotypical bad guy where it's like you can't say, well, but the Nazis had a couple of good ideas. No, it's like it's Nazis. They are 100 percent bad. It's sort of like the Isis game. With people like that, you wish that there was an alternative so that if it is something that needs to be stopped and it needs to be stopped. Because as you say, you know, you can't just let crazy sons of bitches, massacre people left and right in the name of their one God. But who's doing the stopping?

Because the problem is, you know, one says, I mean, if somebody tomorrow told me there's a perfectly benign power that goes in and wipe out Isis of the first of the earth in violent fashion. I don't really have a moral problem with it. The moral problem kicks in when who's the one who's stepping in because there really are no good guys on the world stage. It's like what the U.S. government has done all these beautiful nice things in the Middle East all this time. You trust those guys. It's like, I mean, sure, I take them over Isis, but not by match. Right. So the problem becomes...

Definitely take them over Isis. Yeah, of course. Of course. I mean, when I say by not by match... That's on a menu. You're ordering U.S. government. Yeah, totally. And that's what Sam Harris does. He's like, we are the good guys at the end of the game. You know, he's like, yeah, there are a couple of weird things about it, but ultimately we are the good guys fighting the good fight.

And he's like, no, just because you are fighting the horrible bad guys, that doesn't make you the good guy person. Because if you are doing it for the same type of stuff that the U.S. government has been doing in the Middle East, you are obviously preferable to some crazed, rabid, fundamentalist, but you're still an asshole. And you are doing it for reasons that still fuck up the lives of millions of people. In a different way. In a different way. In a less... Well, again, it gets technical there.

But obviously, you know, me today, you take me ISIS or the U.S. government. I take the U.S. government. But that doesn't mean I like them or I even trust them in any way, shape or form to do the right thing in the situation. Well, a lot of people say that ISIS is the dream of the military industrial complex. Because really, I mean, it's like communism, our old enemy, clearly didn't work, doesn't work, doesn't seem to work. So everyone hates it. No one really understands it that much now. And even like bringing it up now, people look at you like you're a fucking witch or something.

It's so brainwashed into us that it's a terrible, awful system. Don't even investigate it, right? Yeah, nobody. So that's one. They won that one. And then Al Qaeda. That fizzled out quick. That fizzled out, man.

We, you know, it seems like we kind of got them, I guess, somehow. Like whatever that narrative is that has been given to us, we got them. And here we have a thing that hopefully, if I'm a weapons manufacturer, my dream would be a world religion that had a population of folks who wanted to die and who wanted to fight. Of course. That's my dream come true. Yep. Because that's like an infinite, they're going to need a lot of bullets for that because especially if you've got a nice feedback loop there, which is that the more we kill them, the more there are other people in the area who've lost everything thanks to war become fanatical. Yep.

And then they're going to want to die too. Yep. I've got one of those ant death spirals going on and I'm making bombs and I'm happy as I could be. Absolutely. So that is a dream come true for the military industrial complex, which is why sometimes I think that my focus on them and me even saying some of the things I just said accidentally fit into exactly what a war machine gearing up would want people to be saying. Yeah. And that's the problem with the two biggest forms of evil in the world. One is the fanatics who are ideological fanatics who want to impose their point of view on everyone else, whether they are religious or whether they were like the Nazis or communists or crazy Muslim fundamentalist or Christian.

Doesn't matter. They are all the same people. They are all the ones who want to impose their viewpoint on everyone else. And that's one type of people. And then you got the other one that's not ideological that just greed. And in this case, when you have the military industrial complex versus religious fanatics, they are the two kinds of evil feeding off each other. Yes. Oh God.

It's a two headed dog biting itself. Yep. Now, this is the problem. Because of all this bullshit, we've become so cynical that should an actual enemy emerge, our ability to combat that enemy is going to be diffused somewhat by the deep skepticism Americans have for the government right now. Of course. That's a real scary problem, isn't it? It is. Because, you know, after you have decades and decades of corruption and weird power games that are really in the name of the greed of a few guys, you can't trust the US government as the good guys, because they're not plain and simple.

And so you do have something real nasty and evil that should be taken out. Who do you trust to do it? The US government? It's like you can't. And so you're kind of fucked because there is, you know, the way back in the day when people had the dream of the United Nations, kind of this impartial body that would just not have an ideological agenda would just stop threats to life on earth, whether you know through genocide, people carrying out genocide, they would just step in, stop those guys and that was it. There was no economic interest or nothing. Well, that was a sweet dream.

Didn't quite pan out that way because that's not the way the United Nations has operated since they started. The idea was great. The reality is not. Well, I, you know, man, I'm, I feel like I, what I ended up doing here accidentally was creating a gloomy sort of approximation of things. And now I need you to work your magic and transform. Let's find our way out. Yeah. How do we get out of this?

Let's claw our way out of the darkness. Let's claw our way out of the darkness. Let's claw our way out of me feeding in yet again. This is just hearing me app like this is just a sign. I'm on the internet too much because really doesn't it, regardless of what's going on out there, how much control do we really have over it? And if you find yourself worrying over fucking ISIS, are you, you're probably not taking vitamins. Right. Unless you live right there in the middle of the action, then which then you have a legitimate worry.

Then yeah, you are so far removed where is not. You're probably not taking care of like shit in your life. You need to be taken care of, right? I'm not saying there's a direct correlation between not dealing or procrastinating with important things in your life and being obsessed with external enemies that have no real impact on you. But it does seem like an easier thing to deal with the threat of some looming, ominous, invisible thing you'll never encounter. Then to deal with your own mortality. Absolutely. Because the reality is you don't have control over ISIS the same way as you don't have control over a million other things.

What is that you do have control? Your body, your attitude, sometimes the influence you can have on the people around you. The influence that you can have on the people around you, which by the way is now magnified monstrously thanks to the internet. So you can actually reach out and get in touch with way more people than was ever been possible in the past. That you do have power on. So as much as it's not as sexy because it's not this one big heroic battle where you win the fight and it's all over and we move on into a better world. The reality is that not environmentally, but from every other standpoint, things have actually gotten better over the last few hundred years. The fact that we don't burn witches at the stake.

The fact that it is kind of frowned upon to be viciously and blatantly racist. The fact that certain things that have made us a bit more compassionate, a bit more empathic, a bit more willing to live with other people without chopping their head off. That's a win. And that's a win that has happened in a gradual, slow way, but it has happened. And so their stuff to be celebrated in what has already happened. And the name of the game is to continue doing it on a greater and greater scale to the point where nobody wants to join ISIS because it's a damn shit to do. It's like, really, I have, you know, it was like I was talking with Cenk Yuger, you know, the guy from the Young Turks. Yes.

And his approach to, you know, crazy fundamentalist was, you know, bomb them with porn, bomb them with, you know, the kind of stuff that, you know, nobody did. Once they, once you hook with sex, pop culture, rock and things that it start automatically sucking the power away from that vibe that feed the rabid fundamentalist. Right. And that's probably a healthier way to go. Now, that does not mean that if somebody is not coming into your village tomorrow trying to raise it to the ground, you don't turn your AK and try to mow them down. But otherwise, since that's not what any of us sitting at this table are going to do tomorrow anyway, what the fuck is the point of fantasizing about it? Let's just worry about what we can do, which is that create trying to create a different consciousness first and foremost for ourselves for the media to love the ones in our life. And then as the circle got bigger and bigger, hopefully hope that the pebble spread as far as humanly possible.

Yes. And I think, and I think that you can begin by combating whatever fundamentalism lives in the villages of your mind. Yeah. Find that place. Find the place where you are living according to ideologies that you have absorbed from terrified people, but that are completely unprovable, not valid, not verifiable. And yet you continue to live according to these ideas specifically that you're not that you're not that you can't have love. A lot of people live according to the ideology or that you're not beautiful, that you're not amazing. Like it sounds so cheesy, but it's so like so many people live according to these very grim assessments of their own subjective universe that aren't based on their actual subjectivity.

Their actual subjective universe but are based on the way someone told them their universe was. These fucking fundamentalist shitheads, these poor bastards when they were very young, they had some snake human come to them and tell them about a universe that they don't even exist in. Oh, look at that. That's a devil. And look at that. That's a sign of hell. And look at that. That's an indication of why this group of people is evil.

And look at that. There's another indication. All of it wrong. All of it unverifiable. All of it unprovable. In the same way, man, every single person carries around some version of that or some bully, some shithead, some bad boss, angry parent, said to them, oh, you are an idiot. You're just a piece of shit, aren't you? And then you carry that around with you.

You worship those gods, right? Yep. So that's the idea. Mow down with a fucking machine gun of empiricism. Whatever particular thought patterns are keeping you from, well, I guess, from enjoying your life to the maximum or from spreading love as much as possible. And that's exactly the other one, is the level of kindness that you put out to other people. Because, you know, it's easy for I'm a judgmental motherfucker, so I see stuff I don't like and I'm super quick to point a finger. And sometimes it's healthy also to point out for shit for calling it for what it is.

But at the same time, you don't help anybody by doing that. You know, it's like, yeah, okay, good job. You recognize that that's bad, but does it help to yell at somebody, fuck you, look at the bad thing you're doing? How can you figure out a way to kind of really team in a way in a place of health that's better for me and the other person? You know, how can so many of the arguments I see, and again, spending too much time on the Internet, you know, when you see people arguing about stuff. When I see vegans arguing against people with meat. When I see feminists arguing against guys who are pushing a more macho ideology. When I see liberals arguing against conservative religious people against that.

To me, they all piss me off because I'm all like, you are right. And you are right to some degree, the proportions obviously change. Somebody may be very right and the other one a little, but it's never one hundred and zero. And instead, rather than a knowledge in hate, what is a healthy balance? What can we figure? What can we sit down here and figure out what the healthy balance is? People prefer yell at each other across ideological lines trying to my side need to win one at my side. Who the fuck said that's your side?

Your side is my side is whatever is healthy. That's my side. Whatever the balance there between opposites is that's healthy. I like that one. And instead, people are married to ideology and that's source of the problem. It's like we need to start in ourselves to look at, am I saying this shit because I actually am trying to come up with the best possible solution? Or am I saying because it belongs to my preconceived notion of how it should be? That's it.

It's like analyzing your intention anytime you're writing. When you're about to write that, you know, when you're about to write the Cunty Yelp review, when you're about to get into some kind of idiotic fight with somebody on Twitter, who it doesn't matter because you're not going to change anyone's opinion, all you're going to do is amplify people's perception of you as being angry. That's all that comes out of that. Whenever I see any Twitter war between people or whenever I've gotten in a Twitter war, it's not, no one wins that arm wrestling match.

That sucks. All that, as they say, it's a bad look. And so I think maybe that's part of this potential revolution, is we've got to start the dumb, tiny, petty gladiator matches that are happening in the forums and message boards and comment sections on the Internet. Yep. And figure out ways to start joining forces even in the most making impossible alliances. Alliances that make no sense. That's the trick, man.

Absolutely. I had one the other day, somebody on Twitter was saying they were clearly coming from a very religious standpoint, and they were like, you know, I like some of your stuff, but you're too much of an asshole when it comes to religion. You are too aggressive. You say all the bad stuff without pointing to alternatives. And while I disagree with that, because I do think that I put the accent on alternatives, I told him, you know what, to a point, right? Because I do tend to focus on the negative too much.

Right. And it doesn't help. And yes, I can understand why I do it. You know, I can understand that I met with nasty shit that caused suffering in other human beings, and I want to call it for what it is. But you're right. Ultimately, I should spend more time focusing on the positive and trying to find a better alternative. And so we went at it like that, coming from a radically starting point.

And by the end, it was a love fest. He was all like, oh, this was a great chat. I was like, oh, look at that. This is awesome. And he was nice. I was nice. You know, we disagreed, but we are trying to figure out a way to be human to each other. It doesn't always work.

And when that's done publicly, like when two people notoriously opposed, publicly get into some form of debate that ends in a place where they both found it, found a truth they agree on, and their malice has been transformed into camaraderie. That's a miracle, man. That's incredible to watch. That's the ultimate impossible dream. Like imagine invading a country, and yet instead of there being violence, somehow both opposing armies merge and become one unified front.

See, those kinds of novel miracles that I dream about, the potential for these things, the potential exists for that to happen. The potential exists for the people of the planet, despite all cultural paradigms, to discard any kind of ideology or national pride leading towards violence and destruction, and replace it with a sense of just being a unified front when it comes to caring for each other. There were famous stories about World War One when German troops and Allied troops decided not to shoot at each other, and they would just literally wander off like right around Christmas,

meeting the middle where there are bodies everywhere from the previous days, and party it up for a couple of days and exchange gifts, and it was like, and it's trippies, like it was that triumph of being a human being who recognized that the other poor bastard maybe has kids and is nice to his wife and is whatever, and you don't really have anything personal against this guy, that doesn't happen often, the structure of the game makes sure that that will not happen, because you can't have fights, armies that say hello to each other and become friends, otherwise the people pulling the strings are not going to be too happy,

but it can happen, and it does happen. Oh, God, see, that's the real war, that's the real victory. When the armies of the Earth stop fighting each other and start fighting whatever it is that's telling them to kill, see, that's where you enter into the age of Aquarius, brother. Let's smoke s'more weed! Shut the fuck up, hippie! It's never going to happen! Buy more bombs! Invest in Raytheon, hippie!

Shut the fuck up! No fucking fundamentalist goddamn fascist shithead gives two green dollars about your goddamn happy idea that the armies are going to stop. No, it's not. That's like the dream that your cancer cells are going to make friends with your other cells. Yeah, but I guess what is that they care about? Do they want their grandkids to have a good place to live in and have clean water, and if you care about that, okay, forget all the other shit that we disagree on. Let's focus on that part.

Let's focus on how we can make sure that that part happens, you know? There's not often much that you may, like, if I meet somebody who's, as I have met in multiple occasions, somebody who's like hardcore Nazi to this day, obviously our ideologies are not going to click very well. There are going to be like 99,000 sinks where we're going to have problems, so it becomes a challenge to figure out. Mostly a musical taste, right? Exactly, or architecture.

But, you know, it's like, what can I find at a basic human level, something that you care about that I can have respect for, you know? The fact that you fucking care for your kid. Let's talk about your child. Forget about politics. Let's talk about your child for a little bit, you know? And try to slowly work it in a way where, look, I'm not the fucking enemy. I'm not here to try to take away what you really cherish deep at heart and what's most sacred to you. It's just that you go about it in a way that to me is suicidal, horrible and nasty.

I go about it in another way, but again, let's forget about the lecture. And you think that, and they think you're as nasty as you think they are, probably. Of course, of course. So let's go back to square one. What is the one fucking thing we can agree on? You know, it's like, let's start with that, and then slowly figure out how we can do it in a way that if we don't agree, at least we don't have to pull a trigger on each other. That's it, man, and that's got to start now in your life at this moment

with all adversaries, human and thought form. That process starts now. It doesn't start when, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine. He's like, yeah, I'm thinking about going to Africa to help to volunteer, which is a beautiful thing to do. But don't wait to get to fucking Africa to start doing good things for people. Start right now. The war starts now. And the war, the jihad, is a war not against each other.

It's a war against the thought patterns that are making us go to war with each other. Absolutely. I love you, man. You're a wonderful human. It clearly has been too long because we have gone in at least ten directions that could have been a podcast, each one of them. Well, we got to do this more often. Absolutely. And I hope you'll let me be on your podcast soon.

Let's do it right away. Beautiful. Thank you, sir. Howdy, Krista. Thanks for bearing with the air conditioning noise, friends. You'll never be a sail by that again. And a big thanks to Squarespace.com for supporting this episode. If you like us, why not subscribe to us on iTunes and give your dogs extra treats this week?

Won't you? See you real soon. Howdy, Krista.