00:03:58.560it's going to resonate with so it's it's a real honor to to speak to you on here
00:04:03.300thank you so much uh this whole podcast does not quite have the reach that i would like but
00:04:13.480certainly has the quality of reach that i would like uh speaking of i have to commit to admit
00:04:21.540to a horrible sin as a a host of a book interview uh dear listeners i am in the same shoes as you
00:04:31.080i have not read uh this is not a criticism however because i have not started the book
00:04:37.960it's not the case i like started reading in the yacht board and stop it's that i have literally
00:04:43.180not read one page of the of the book i i am a horrible i'm a horrible host and worst friend
00:04:50.020for this but uh these are the these are the hazards of being in in writer's youtube and
00:04:58.040writer's substack uh every one of my friends has been in fuck and and the process of getting
00:05:06.380through all the books that i have either bought from friends or been gifted is going to take me
00:05:12.680at least a decade to catch up with it so i i'm i'm so sorry well it's daunting it's daunting for
00:05:20.860you hopefully not a decade i mean i think the message in this book is is pretty urgent but
00:05:25.820also you know i want to sympathize with you a little bit because um and i found this because
00:05:32.600i've had a few other interviews and some other social media um situations and it is hard to get
00:05:40.580people you know who think the way we do to read fiction because it's basically been written off
00:05:46.840as a genre it's been completely you know taken over by the gay race communists and we feel like
00:05:55.260there's nothing there and yet you know my response is that all art is fundamentally right-wing art
00:06:00.940um it's all traditionalist um and you know it's all the same story over and over and over again
00:06:07.560And that's why, you know, that's what separates the good artists from the bad when they find new ways to say things, not just find new ways to say some new thing that has no resonance, especially, you know, a more eternal resonance.
00:06:23.300so there there is a barrier to overcome when it comes to um getting people like us to look at
00:06:32.080fiction again and you know there is based fiction out there and it's hard to find and there aren't
00:06:39.700a lot of curators there are some but there aren't a lot of curators out there so you know i'm on
00:06:44.120here and i'm trying to make the appeal that you know here's one you're going to find out why
00:06:49.440very much very much so and this has been like this has been a problem mine that has been trained
00:06:59.440into me that i only read history at this point because it's the only thing it's one of the few
00:07:07.660things that's like okay the publisher can't lie too much about what's in history or you can cross
00:07:14.060reference it and figure out out uh what what's faking game what's not whereas fiction uh we've
00:07:22.540been trained to expect the faking gay ending we've been trained to expect the violence is never the
00:07:27.420answer uh absolutely unless you're unless you're reading like very old texts like the the iliad or
00:07:34.380like more darlings you know you read that and it's like reading a video game with how much
00:07:41.000violence and like like how many like how many like morally gray or like really just
00:07:49.360adventuresome and like gloriously and cavalier choices people make uh i cannot recommend as soon
00:07:57.960enough but uh you say something really important there about you know we've come to assume that
00:08:05.240we're going to read books and violence is not the answer and we've been drilled into our heads from
00:08:10.180our you know our our female public school teachers and so on that you know violence never solves
00:08:16.860anything violence not the answer war is not the answer and you know it's that is complete that is
00:08:22.280100 untrue and much of the time uh through history and we're coming up to another period in history
00:08:28.400again where this will will prove itself to be imperative that violence is the answer violence
00:08:33.340war does solve in some cases everything and i think this is a lesson that is you know like
00:08:41.900you said you find it in the odyssey you find it in beowulf um this book i've written takes place
00:08:47.840in 3300 bc at the very dawn of our ancestors the indo-europeans um and you know for them
00:08:55.740it was obvious that violence was needed for most things to get done and and to think otherwise
00:09:02.300otherwise they wouldn't have said oh that's gay race communism they just wouldn't have not they
00:09:07.420wouldn't have understood what that meant so this is very much a book that is written with that
00:09:13.040mental attitude in mind amazing stuff and and uh i i've i've chatted with you ton i know you're
00:09:24.220exactly the kind of person who can translate that to page maybe one of like the only people alive
00:09:30.660who can like really translate uh those that like timeless vision to page uh this is one of the
00:09:41.280this is one of those themes that like like uh homer of the odyssey uh and and like several of
00:09:50.000the ancient books but like the odyssey uh caesar's gallic wars that's non-fiction yes by
00:09:56.740by romanticizing it like uh tens of these ancient books like the lesson the story is to understand
00:10:03.960how much violence you'll have to use like like you like you're expecting this much you take it
00:10:10.980way 10 times more than than that if you want to if you want to really win like that's the theme
00:10:17.240of the odyssey is that like like within the last chapter odysseus kills 10 times more people than
00:10:23.060And he has the entire first half of the book, and, like, that's a measure of his greatness.
00:11:50.460they believe their only hope lies in wielding a divine weapon of the stony skies the nature of which is as impenetrable to them as the will of their gods the toll of fortune sweeps across the neolithic and copper age
00:12:06.860From the Don River to the Danube, invoking the primal rhythms of daily life of the first
00:12:13.000Indo-Europeans, cultural and genetic ancestors nearly half the modern world to people, the
00:12:19.600doomed quest to bring us face-to-face with our ancestors in a way that's both alarmingly
00:25:35.900But yes, I want to make sure you knew that, dear readers, so you can get the physical copy with the gorgeous illustrations and all the Sanskrit and runic alphabet and everything else that goes into this.
00:27:37.060one went along the coast of the mediterranean the other went up you know the through the danube
00:27:41.260plain the hungarian plain the bohemian highlands and then to the rest of europe but that just gives
00:27:47.860you kind of the generic geographic outlay but these people they were the first farmers they
00:27:54.180didn't really compete with the hunter-gatherers that were there you know the hunter-gatherers
00:27:58.160or you know hunting in the forests and foraging and these are the
00:28:01.700these are the the people who had been there since the last ice age they killed off the neanderthals
00:28:10.740they thought they did um but they you know they had been there since the ice age but they mainly
00:28:16.200stick to the forests the bogs places where you know hunting and and forging and their quarries
00:28:22.160is found they don't really interact too much with the um farmers the farmers they they spread out
00:28:27.880The thing with the farmers is that they developed this farming package, and you have to understand that these people are descended from some of the very first farmers from Mesopotamia.
00:28:38.580They're not too genetically related to Mesopotamians.
00:28:42.260I won't go into too much of the genetics, but suffice to say that they had a farming package, and the idea was that you'd build your longhouse.
00:28:52.320you'd have your call it a garden wasn't really fields but you'd that's where you'd farm and then
00:29:00.060you know when things got too crowded people would go off and they'd find the next farm and again
00:29:05.040they did this over a thousand years or so they've i'll call it two thousand years they they spread
00:29:11.420from greece to even the orkney islands even um and then whatever parts of scandinavia can be
00:29:16.800farm and the thing is is this this was the longhouse culture um and it was a package of
00:29:24.540cultural tools and technological tools that they reproduced and you can imagine you know everything
00:29:30.660you've heard but the longhouse a lot of it's pretty much true it was it was dark it was smoky
00:29:37.000there were no windows it was communal living it would have been absolutely filthy um people you
00:29:44.320know from from what we've seen from the archaeology they they worshipped these these just so many
00:29:49.600these female figurines and idols a lot of archaeologists used to think this is that this
00:29:55.660month they were matriarchal they actually weren't they were still patriarchal they weren't as
00:30:00.840patriarchal as as uh the indo-europeans but they were so they were they were more matriarchal but
00:30:06.620they weren't on an absolute scale what we might call matriarchal in other words there were male
00:30:11.900leaders or they tended to be but they worshipped all these bizarre female figurines you know the
00:30:18.020the the cretinized versions like the venus of willendorf you you find that as well these
00:30:24.260quote-unquote fertility goddesses if that's what they actually were i mean some people said maybe
00:30:28.620this was like ancient forms of porn you'd have a female guy i don't know i'm that that's speculation
00:30:33.320but you know you don't know and so it's worth at least mentioning this this speculative so they
00:30:39.220they had this this civilization that what you'd call and it rose and it fell like a lot of
00:30:44.820civilizations do and they had their long houses the the here was the problem they had like i keep
00:30:50.640talking about this package they had this package and it was they did the package right they they
00:30:55.220farmed five types of grain that's it they mostly got their animal protein from pigs from um from
00:31:02.940goats a little bit of a few other things cattle and so on that they had you know this all these
00:31:07.140have been domesticated a couple thousand years earlier but that's where they got the animal
00:31:11.260protein and they only tended to farm on certain types of soil so that it kept them very segregated
00:31:17.120also limited where they could go to anyway their civilization rose and i'd say by like call it 3600
00:31:24.800bc they had some spectacular uh spectacularly sized settlements um north of the carpathians
00:31:33.240there was a um a culture there called the kukutani trapilia culture and they had settlements that in
00:31:40.080some cases got to 40 000 people i mean this is massive and the first cities of ur and uruk
00:31:45.160were maybe reaching those sizes at their peak but even that's subsequent in time to what i'm
00:31:53.100describing but these civilizations fell and well you i don't want to get into the argument about
00:31:59.140what qualifies a civilization what what doesn't that's a whole different can worms but the bottom
00:32:03.860line was the the these longhouse farming uh cultures they had their peak called the mid
00:32:11.180fourth century bc so 3500 bc and what happened to them was a few things one the climate got cool
00:32:19.800it got dry yeah shoot uh it's be to just give the readers a feel of like the longhouse culture
00:32:56.860uh the or is that something different no no good good question like the mounds in northern europe
00:33:03.720they come well let's see they come a little bit later i think i think they peak a little bit later
00:33:11.600um although there are some that are from from earlier i don't want to get too much into those
00:33:18.540because those are different cultures that in some cases were actually um mixed with hunter gatherers
00:33:25.440so the farmers spread across europe and they pretty much if they they either weeded out the
00:33:33.040hunter gatherers or out competed them or or killed them in a few cases the hunter gatherers joined
00:33:38.060them but there was one case in like france called the mitchellburg culture and like the paris basin
00:33:43.840where there was this massive resurgence of hunter gatherers and i think there is um some of these
00:33:49.300these big mounds and tombs and stuff they they may come and descend from those but those were
00:33:54.880different cult those were different cultures the ones i'm talking about by like the mid 3500s
00:34:00.540they're living in long houses life is not good for them right it never was all that great to begin
00:34:05.560with i mean think about it you're you're living this communal life in this filthy dark you know
00:34:12.640place right and it's not built of stone or anything it's it's all just it's all built of like
00:34:18.620basically like clay and and sticks and so you can imagine how the filth is and i mean the reason we
00:34:29.620know this too is because we know so much about them from digging through their garbage piles
00:34:34.500called midden pits and we know all this stuff but what they ate how they died with all the diseases
00:34:39.580they had because they have they had these massive piles of garbage outside so again you're living in
00:34:45.900this shithole and you have a literal shithole right beside it i mean this was not and again
00:34:53.260another thing too like i said they only grew their five types of grain on one type of soil
00:34:59.760generally so that really limits where you could go and you didn't have a lot of ability you didn't
00:35:05.960have a lot of freedom you couldn't roam around this wasn't the pioneers i mean in some way it
00:35:10.580was like the pioneers in the prairies right because they there weren't a lot of great places to
00:35:14.220to live and to grow not to mention there was always the the danger coming from the uh
00:35:20.780the hunter-gatherers but i would say this time 3500 bc this is when um this is right before the
00:35:29.240first season in mesopotamia um this is and when the book starts happening 3300 bc that's certainly
00:35:35.180around the same time i think it's also around the same time that egyptian civilization starts
00:35:40.500to get going i think the pyramids are dated to a few centuries after that so just just to give
00:35:46.700people context and i do make references to what are the egyptians and what are the mesopotamians
00:35:52.080in some culturally relevant ways in the book this is who was living in europe right at this time
00:36:00.400and like i mentioned the climate started getting colder um these are subsistence farmers so you
00:36:06.640know you're you're growing next year's crops with whatever grain you got so if you eat it if you eat
00:36:11.520your seed grain you're fucked for next year but if you don't eat your seed grain you're gonna starve
00:36:16.400so then you're really fucked anyway i mean this is the situation so these people are they're getting
00:36:21.060they were already and here's another thing too just to kind of paint the scene
00:36:25.640they grew only five types of grain they had a really meager diet and it's like if you go to
00:36:31.280your if you go to your grocery store and you pick up any of those industrial made breads and you
00:36:37.100look at the disgusting ingredients in them right and they should really only be like what flour and
00:36:41.860egg and water and bread basically and some yeast you see all the niacin and folic acid and all
00:36:47.060this stuff and it's because grains are especially the like wheat grains are so low in nutrients
00:36:53.160that in the second world war they just said okay from now on it's the law you're putting all the
00:36:58.640and they're like all these nutrients and vitamins and so on because they're so low nutrients and
00:37:04.300that's what these people were eating definitely not the only pre-modern um you know people to
00:37:09.000have a nutrient meager diet but they were not only dealing with subsistence farming and dying
00:37:15.840from famines but they were also and millet was another thing that they would eat right
00:37:21.440millet has a ton of um anti-nutrients in it in the form of phytic acid so these are things that
00:37:29.460stop the body from taking in vitamins and so on so they're there's famines it's cold they're
00:37:36.400getting sick because of all you know they're only eating the same thing and it's around this time
00:37:43.360that um you know our ancestors the ancestors of our culture the end of europeans they come
00:37:49.420they come onto the stage um and so the first chapter in the book is a prelude showing the
00:37:57.160destitution of these people it shows the destitution it shows them giving a kind of
00:38:03.880religious or spiritual meaning to us you know from these people's perspective i mean it's 3300 bc
00:38:14.120most people think that anything that doesn't have an easy explanation must have a you know
00:38:18.820religious or a supernatural explanation and they think okay what's happened is it's the the end of
00:38:24.640the world is coming um and they they say that there's a great cold that's coming and that it's
00:38:31.260being motivated by a return of basically they kind of call them monsters ice monsters whatever you
00:38:38.700whatever you want to call them i i don't i don't like to land on a specific term because it has
00:38:43.300a lot of connotations that we might have but the whole idea is that like i said there were these
00:38:50.160hunter-gatherers there before and they fought off the the neanderthals right they they one had bigger
00:38:57.320brains than neanderthals and knew how to cooperate you know tactically to fight them they also had
00:39:02.160dogs too that really helped fight neanderthals and they thought that they killed off the neanderthals
00:39:08.740neanderthals probably or we think they died off like
00:39:11.580tens of years before that right so it's it's long gone it's no longer a problem
00:39:17.600but blood memories last a long time especially among like traditional people with folklore
00:39:23.680and as their history and oral history as their main method of you know teaching lessons down
00:39:32.240the generations and so they're they immediately start to think and again this is all in the
00:39:37.340prelude to the book that there has been this this huge change in the universe i think the cold is
00:39:44.100coming back and with it are you know the people they said well not people the the monsters they
00:39:48.920associate with the cold which are some kind of well we would call it now like an earlier form
00:39:53.760of hominid you know and maybe it's you know as an author you know i there's enough room in there
00:40:00.120that you know you could maybe it is the neanderthal maybe it's something else but the bottom line is
00:40:04.980It's a people who were there before they are, and they're coming with the cold.
00:40:10.960They have some kind of more supernatural, well, some kind of more primordial connection to the world and the universe than these farmers do.
00:40:25.180And this is a source of doom for them.
00:40:27.160So it's an end that the prelude of the book ends in a pretty gory graphical way.
00:40:34.500And, you know, these people basically think it's the end of the world.
00:40:38.080And then you see and then you see the end of Europeans.
00:40:48.320I might sound like a fantasy staple to your bears at home.
00:40:52.440But remember that it is a fantasy staple because it is a shared collective memory that all northern cultures share, like the Japanese narratives very much like this, like ogres and goblins and various like forest demons and stuff are staple Japanese folklore.
00:41:16.620And you can see this primordial near-human in every culture from late Japanese cultures to every Western culture has its own version of like an ogre or an orc or like some conception of this alien tribe that is forcing up against them.
00:41:41.160And many of those, of course, are informed by later migratory invasions and ethnic conflicts and stuff.
00:41:51.580But there is this deep primordial aversion that you see creep up in all manners, manners of culture.
00:42:01.460And this is really, you know, was my originating thought on this.
00:42:09.140And you think of Beowulf and Grendel, who's to say that Beowulf wasn't a true story?
00:42:16.300Now, Beowulf's a Christianized palimpsest over, you know, an older story.
00:42:21.940And I believe that is from an even older story.
00:42:24.380And that could be that these encounters with ogres and monsters and so on was nothing more than these early European farmers and their longhouses meeting the hunter-gatherers.
00:42:35.540um and maybe the hunter guy because the hunter gatherers would have been much more robust much
00:42:39.580taller right i mean again these these farmers are either eating anti-nutrients they're living
00:42:45.080in these squelitions they're five foot tall well i'm exaggerating a little bit but not much
00:42:50.520and the hunter gatherers were obviously bigger now i'm saying that hey what if it was actually
00:42:57.100these were even older blood memories and that's kind of the premise of the book that
00:43:01.980you look you we there were encounters between whether it was european farmers or into europeans
00:43:11.240or whoever and these older forms of hominids um or or humans or maybe like again older hominids
00:43:19.560and these haunted the the the dreams and nightmares of our ancestors for dozens if
00:43:28.900not hundreds of generations and there would have been a supernatural explanation for that
00:43:36.740and my and my thinking of this was that you know these were the titans right these were
00:43:45.300the things of um well i i i has he had you see all those whatever you call them um and
00:43:53.920you know so when they talk about the titans i mean the titans almost overthrew the gods they
00:44:00.100they were pretty fucking powerful and so this whole notion that you know back in
00:44:06.160see in these people you know you're living of that subsistence alcohol alcohol subsistence
00:44:12.320agriculture um or the or into european ancestors who were living on the step um herding cattle
00:44:19.460these were precarious forms of life uh you know nothing was certain nothing was guaranteed
00:44:24.720the gods could wipe you out in a second and yet were these other even more ancient people
00:44:30.960that had inhabited these lands before them and there you know there's obviously a certain power
00:44:35.400associated with them so to these people the indo-europeans the early european forms these
00:44:41.980were like the titans and we know i mean the neanderthals were much more robust um whether
00:44:47.500or not they were taller than hunter-gatherers maybe not they were they could have been the
00:44:51.780same maybe a little bit but they would have been taller than than the farmers and they were strong
00:44:57.580as fuck i mean you can google any image or whatever um and any of the research now shows
00:45:02.800this they were very strong um so again down the generations this builds into you know as a legend
00:45:10.900into myth legend and legend becomes myth and so on so at the beginning of the book this is what the
00:45:16.780the first the indo-europeans are encountering right it's now a hundred years since that prelude
00:45:23.020where these these farmers said oh my god it's the cold is coming it's the the those those titans are
00:45:28.680back you know they're going to take over everything there's gonna be ice everywhere right
00:45:32.980you know no one thinks about like if there's a if there's a you know it's cool in canada i grew up
00:45:39.140canada so you know you know the spring comes sometimes you know there's snow into april
00:45:45.080whatever but like you know think about those like it was like the the 1882 or one of those one of
00:45:50.780those um summers that never came right because there was a volcanic explosion or something on
00:45:55.500the other side of the world and it snowed into january or july i mean like but you never really
00:46:00.060think about like well what if it just snowed all year long right and this is kind of what happens
00:46:05.240when an ice age sets on it maybe happens slower than that but sometimes not and it just and that's
00:46:11.720just what these people were fears like look the the growing season's shortened it's cold like
00:46:17.040almost all year round now we can't grow anything we're fucked it's you know it's the the in a way
00:46:22.100it's kind of like the white walkers you know i i hate to make comparisons to george r r r um
00:46:27.760fucking martin but in a way it's the same kind of grim feeling of doom that comes with cold because
00:46:36.760you know everything done you know the world that dies in ice and this is what the you know when
00:46:43.280after the prelude the indo-europeans are there it's 100 years later and they're saying okay
00:46:48.380we're starting to see the cold now too you know what's what's happening and that's kind of where
00:46:54.280you know that's entrance to to to the book yes and uh europe is actually a very interesting place
00:47:03.780geologically for those concerns because, of course,
00:47:08.480the entire reason Europe is habitable at all is like
00:47:11.760a weird artifice of the temperate zone
00:52:41.300i love it that's amazing um and then so these are these are the phenotypes where we think of a lot
00:52:50.340you know i mean i think like the red-haired celt and so on a lot of these were adaptations that
00:52:55.460came on um much later like the celts the celts developed around like i think it was like maybe
00:53:04.740in the iron age maybe a thousand bc so my books take place two thousand years before that um and
00:53:10.280you have to understand there's a lot of bottlenecking that goes on with genetics right
00:53:13.660where um you know a plague or whatever it is you just wipes out so many people and there's one
00:53:22.060little pocket of of people survive and hey yeah they have you know they happen to have a few
00:53:28.140fucking gingers and then you know before you know it all these celts you know by the time they get
00:53:33.340to ireland have have red hair so it's hard to place you know like a descriptive or phenotypic
00:53:42.580limits on what they would look like i mean the the indo-europeans put it this way when you
00:53:47.160you look at the reconstructed faces of indo-europeans their culture is called the
00:53:52.880yamnaya that's just you know because all all of these are in this case you know it's you from
00:53:58.220ukraine moldova russia you know they're digging up these bones these skeletons and it's you know
00:54:04.140russian scientists and something like that's what they call it i mean it's it's they call it the
00:54:08.940yamnaya so if you hear me say the yamnaya it's co-extensive with the indo-europeans but when
00:54:14.380you look at the reconstructed faces they look very caucasian they really do they have and a lot
00:54:20.620of them will have like those big strong jaws although you see the big strong jaws probably
00:54:25.640come from hunter-gatherer peoples because they're having to chew through um some pretty tough food
00:54:32.840obviously it's cooked we've had fire for two million years but that's that's probably coming
00:54:38.100from there but they certainly you know continued that they have long faces um that are also quite
00:54:43.780broad tend to have dark eyes tend to have brown hair but when you see these these pictures of
00:54:48.700them they don't look dissimilar to to a lot of us in a lot of ways um it's just that you know the
00:54:55.540celts the the the gulls the you know the bell beaker people courted where people which which
00:55:01.320you know came even before you know before them although after the first new europeans
00:55:05.560they all had their own phenotypes and so on but this is kind of where it starts when you if you
00:55:12.000go and you google these kind of images or if you could like even on my stub sub stack i have
00:55:15.640pictures people they don't they look like us you know what i mean whereas you know they they don't
00:55:22.340look like um a stereotypical middle easterner or stereotypical um egyptian um you know or anything
00:55:30.780like that and i think that's what you have to imagine when you're when you're imagining these
00:55:36.080these characters in the book is that they really do look like us but they you know the men certainly
00:55:41.540i i would say this is my impression they have very masculine features um you know there's some
00:55:48.040artistic reasons when they reproduce these these images and so on but i think it makes a lot of
00:55:54.160sense but i'll stop there in case you want to say something but but i need to continue because
00:55:59.020there's something more important that is the characteristic about the indo-europeans more
00:56:02.980than the physical all right so so if any of these people were brought back to life and cast in a
00:56:09.340bbc production uh we would not be complaining about the dei casting
00:56:15.420no not at all you well i mean let's say we could go back to a day where we didn't even have to
00:56:21.680worry about that you just think these are properly cast people in the in the types of roles you know
00:56:27.220um like if if imagine that you know bbc they cast someone who was a genetically reconstructed
00:56:34.920caveman i'm sorry um neanderthal okay you would know you would say wait a second that guy doesn't
00:56:40.820look like he belongs you know walking you know on you know wherever in London on Piccadilly Circus
00:56:50.040what have you because they they they look their features were coarse right they don't look like
00:56:56.300any human really um and if you saw these people you'd say okay yeah i don't even think i don't
00:57:06.100even think you'd necessarily be like oh that guy's you know from the bush or from the field or
00:57:10.320what whatever i think a lot of them you know if they're properly groomed or whatever you just
00:57:15.380think they look like so in other words and there is a lot of genetic continuity because we know
00:57:20.560there is and again i don't want to get too much into the genetics i'm not a genetics expert but
00:57:25.580you know i have five degrees including three in scientific and quantitative uh fields so you know
00:57:32.000we can reasonably conclude that there's a lot of genetic continuity we can quantify that genetic
00:57:37.600continuity um and there's also genetic continuity with with the farmers as well right they didn't
00:57:42.340just disappear um i'd say the biggest like extinction event you'll you'll appreciate this
00:57:49.600cat girl um the biggest extinction event probably was in the british isles maybe between like 20
00:57:55.5602500 and you know 2200 BC so a thousand years after the events in my book where the indo-europeans
00:58:03.440if you know they they finally you know have have made it um to almost you know the british isles
00:58:10.240and for reasons i won't go into they take they conquer the british isles and when they do they
00:58:15.200wipe out almost every man of the of the early european farmers and we know that because we see
00:58:22.480in all the genetic lineages that are extant today that there's hardly any of the male you know
00:58:29.780any of the male lineages of the the early european farmers it's all or almost all
00:58:36.160indo-europeans so there was i mean obviously you know our academic archaeologists are
00:58:44.240are um incentivized to explain this away as a not genocide but i don't know what else you
00:58:53.380you should call it i mean i don't think anyone was going around saying you know oh this you know
00:58:58.180back then okay it was a genocide we have to kill all of them although maybe they were i mean we
00:59:01.540know that the native indians operated that way in a lot of cases um but i i mean it was a case
00:59:08.600where in britain the male early european farmers almost completely wiped out so you know this is
00:59:16.480this is the i mean this is the historical reality and we know this from the past almost 10 and it's
00:59:23.760almost 10 years this is brand new it was only with the work that david reich did i i think it's
00:59:30.740so hilarious david david david reich david reich he said he's the world expert on this at harvard
00:59:36.620I just think it's hilarious that there's a Jewish scientist whose last name is Reich, who's basically the world expert on all this paleogenomics and ancient DNA that has brought to life a lot of the stories that really speak to what you have to end on.
01:00:01.200i just there's so many levels of irony in that um but it also speaks to the fact that there are
01:00:07.600people there are scientists out there still who are committed to you know exploring the truth or
01:00:14.020exploring you know what the facts say and you know for unfortunately we're still able to to talk
01:00:20.660about it and we aren't able to talk about ever in in australia um they've banned you can't they
01:00:26.460you can't do any uh excavation any uh research and so on into the local aboriginal dna and so on
01:00:33.240because they've they've banned it for obviously you know woke more correct so i mean there are
01:00:39.620still some people doing it but but this is the genetic reality i mean you had these genocides
01:00:44.880and um you had people taking over and anyway i've i've gotten off topic there but uh yes and i'm
01:00:53.720going to drive us ever so slightly more off topic or like just reinforce it because uh
01:01:00.460i i want to emphasize that uh we usually do not think of uh populations of people getting more
01:01:09.420specific uh so you just talked about how um the differentiation of like uh european peoples like
01:01:17.020celts being a ton of redheads that that could be a later thing and it's and we usually think
01:01:23.660well how could that be a later thing because we're stuck in like 20th century 21st century
01:01:29.000thinking oh yes people they all get mixed together they all become more similar and this is like the
01:01:37.240natural course of history that uh that everyone dilutes down to the shape same shade of brown by
01:01:44.920like 2300 and there will never be another blonde again after that that and like this is a narrative
01:01:51.860that uh everyone has had trained into them now like people start off very very distinctive and
01:01:58.920they all become more similar over time time inevitably and no that's not inevitable at all
01:02:04.960because like the major course force in history is next to people breeding with each other is people
01:02:14.820killing each other and this is a fundamental force of history you know uh sex and violence
01:02:20.260There's a reason these are the two things that are censored on television.
01:02:24.060These are the two things that increase the rating of your film or your video game is how much sex now, which violence are in it.
01:02:30.140And that's because these are the actual two forces of history that the average person can wield.
01:02:39.520It's like, wow, you are altering the course of human genetic history forever when you commit both of those.
01:02:44.880you know if you're well if you add someone to the gene pool you're fundamentally alting the
01:02:50.180course of history and if you take someone else also you're fundamentally altering the course
01:02:55.080of history which is why uh people want to censure it and like create every kind of taboo around it
01:03:03.900because that's how you control the course of history but uh but the thing too is that like
01:03:11.540there is nothing inevitable in history there might be things that are locally inevitable
01:03:16.120because you know forces have momentum and i'm talking you know metaphorically there but nothing
01:03:20.820is inevitable i mean history seems to be a completely unstable dynamic equilibrium
01:03:28.440and you know i think this kind of gets us backs though because what i wanted to really mention
01:03:37.220Okay, the Celts, maybe there was a bottleneck, a bunch of redheads survived, and then they multiplied, and then that's why we associate that phenotype with them.
01:03:48.400But that's because we think red hair means something.
01:03:51.020I mean, it only means something from a sex selection perspective or a cultural perspective.
01:03:57.160And I'm not saying those are meaningless.
01:04:02.120But many of our listeners would insist that the sex selection of redheads is the most important thing, that this is actually the meaning of their life.
01:04:16.580I think I think I think it's I think it's an attractive phenotype.
01:04:19.400But then again, you know, I'm showing my bias.
01:04:21.100I my I'm partly from from from northern England, southern Scotland.
01:04:28.120But anyway, but here's here's the thing.
01:04:30.180And when this huge climatic collapse happened over the years, this flicker, he called it, and the farming cultures started dying out, they were already sickly, they were living these desolate lives.
01:04:47.300and when that happened to them the same thing the same bad climate so was happening to
01:04:53.560our inter-european ancestors and our inter-european ancestors they had migrated north from well this
01:05:00.640is still a little controversial but i'm just going to go with it they'd migrated north probably from
01:05:05.020the caucasus and they were mostly hunter-gatherers they had uh domesticated livestock cattle sheep
01:05:12.360whatever but they were also um mixed with hunter-gatherers from the northern Caucasus region
01:05:20.320and so they like they like to hunt and they mainly stuck to the the river valleys you know there's
01:05:24.500lots of big rivers and uh and so on in that part of Russia the Don the Neapra the Miestra all those
01:05:29.180those rivers well suddenly the cold comes down on them right and you know when the cold comes down
01:05:37.060it also makes life very difficult for hunter-gatherers in fact it probably makes it worse
01:05:40.900because at least as a farmer if you've had a little bit of luck and you've been prudent
01:05:46.240you've stored your grain and you can make it through the winter okay if you're a hunter-gatherer
01:05:51.460and the cold you know shoes off all the animals and kills of all you know the animals and there's
01:05:56.820nothing to hunt there's not in the end you can't forage anything because it's you know cold until
01:06:00.120june or whatever i mean you're shit out of luck right so this is where things get really interesting
01:06:06.900our ancestors the indo-europeans they made a choice when this cold came down and in terms of
01:06:14.060the events in my book this is something that probably that i'm saying happened before um the
01:06:19.600events in my book but but it's worth mentioning because it it created who they are and who we are
01:06:25.780as a people and a culture and what happened is they said you know what we can't stay in these
01:06:32.920river valleys there's nothing to fish there's there's nothing to hunt all that's left is the
01:06:38.200the wide open does a look plain the the step the pontic step and they said let's give it a shot
01:06:46.000let's let's try it it's all we have nothing left we've well we have everything to lose but
01:06:50.440we got to try so so they did and they went out there and here's the thing these people had been
01:06:58.080um trying to domesticate horses for a long time mainly for food uh we know that as early as 4000
01:07:04.200bc maybe even earlier uh hunter gatherers and so on some of our ancestors had been eating horse
01:07:11.060uh you i mean i there's there's a macedonian um butcher half hour from me where you can buy horse
01:07:17.960it's funny and it was food and one of the great things about horses is that unlike other ungulates
01:07:26.560like animals with hooves when it gets cold out they don't just stand there and freeze
01:07:31.080they screep away the snow find the the grass and eat the grass you know cattle don't do that sheep
01:07:38.120don't they just they just they just sit around and go okay i'm no food for me i'm starving
01:07:41.840horses will do that they will they will find food so that them meant they could survive on the plain
01:07:49.680even in these cold brutal winters so that was the first um boon for the indo-europeans um that meant
01:07:57.760that they could live on the plains um maybe it wasn't a great living but it was better it was
01:08:02.680better than starving better than trying to hunt for stuff that's not there and then basically
01:08:07.300what happened is that some clever um indo-european he found some probably a mare stallions would be
01:08:18.220a little too aggressive who was especially dog style maybe he was a full
01:08:23.040and actually figured out how to ride it um and then not just that but he also thought well
01:08:32.420you know ride it or chariot it like uh no no no chariots don't chariots don't come until much
01:08:40.020much later um chariots and and that's important chariots like there are no chariots in my story
01:08:46.260right chariots don't happen until now again it was it was the indo-europeans who invented it
01:08:52.420it was a successor culture of the yemnaya but not for another thousand years really so riding
01:08:59.260horses comes before chariots way before and keep in mind too riding horses they weren't even engaging
01:09:05.880in mounted combat so you might think who fucking cares like they ride and they did they didn't have
01:09:12.160saddles they didn't have stirrups they didn't have bridles they didn't even have bits for the
01:09:16.180horse's mouth so they were not fighting on horseback and this kind of blows people's minds
01:09:23.140because they think oh they they jumped on horses and they were knights it's like no like when you
01:09:27.300think of knights you think of the norman knights from like you know the the 10th and 11th century
01:09:30.660it's like that that's like the apotheosis of the knight of the of the mounted warrior and um
01:09:37.140um anyway no it was it was actually just the fact that they started writing and it was um
01:09:46.200you know it was uh a huge advance because think about it um it was in um all of a sudden you
01:09:56.700could travel distances um that were you know miles in that would take you days to walk and now
01:10:09.620you could travel those distances in a matter of hours and this was revolutionary people think the
01:10:15.560revolution was oh they jumped on horses and you know they got chariots and they started attacking
01:10:19.300each other you know whatever and no that's not it they it was it was more just conquering the
01:10:24.880geography that was huge and the reason why this was such a big deal and it was a big deal too
01:10:29.600when the native indians like the comanche and the apache figured this out as well because all
01:10:35.620of a sudden i can travel five miles over to that asshole neighbor of mine to his herd i could steal
01:10:43.88050 head of cattle and i can corral them back and he won't even know what the fuck happened and all
01:10:50.000of a sudden i'm so much richer or that other jerk over there who you know raped my sister last
01:10:54.940season or whatever i'm you know could go to his place travel there in like less than a day get
01:11:01.800there at night slaughter everyone and then i'm out of there you know this was revolutionary
01:11:06.300because before that it'd be like you'd be walking there and people would know you're coming so
01:11:11.120we have to understand what where the real revolution was it was a revolution in transportation first
01:11:18.020so i and we know it was the writing because i would have assumed it was like using them as like
01:11:26.380pack mules would be like the really revolutionary thing is the logistical side of it but you're
01:11:33.360saying it's the actual maneuverability no exactly yeah so using animals to carry like bulk um cargo
01:11:44.480here's the thing the when the ancestors to the yamni the ancestors of the indo-europeans when
01:11:50.700they came north from the caucasus and so on they had already they were already using the wheel
01:11:56.280and they were already using wagons um and so in terms of transporting stuff
01:12:03.020they already had that problem settled the the wagons were probably drawn by ox almost certainly
01:12:09.720not drawn by horse um effective um i guess locomotion is the right word with with a horse
01:12:16.680didn't really come until like advances with yokes literally the middle ages so again but but this
01:12:24.220was still a big deal because remember they were in these valleys cold they lost their livelihood
01:12:29.760but because they had wagons they could take their wagons what cattle they had and the horses that
01:12:35.560could live off the steppe they could take them out into the steppe and they could live and they
01:12:39.860could live in their wagon so they became nomadic or semi-nomadic for for for some time but it was
01:12:45.960being able to just ride the horses was was it was a huge technology well i mean i guess
01:12:53.020technological i don't know i don't know what other word you want to um give in terms of animal
01:12:57.400husbandry i mean it was a huge achievement because you could conquer geography that took days and
01:13:02.820And we know that this must have happened because, I mean, the horses are not native to North America.
01:13:12.260Well, at least, I mean, there were horses maybe like 5 million years ago in North America, I think, but they became extinct.
01:15:19.520this will be important in the future absolutely as a motorcycle rider myself i absolutely
01:15:26.600endorse that it's not just in your hind brain and instinct that you want one it it's also the
01:15:32.920the ancient tactics of your people and the and the people to come the road warriors will return
01:15:38.980but uh no listen kula when um when i learned to to ride and it was i wasn't even young when i
01:15:48.520learned to ride um i i was i was the feeling of freedom that you have when you are out on the road
01:15:56.960i mean the memories just it just came back and you know i had a couple like serious accidents
01:16:03.040on my bike too and then knock on wood i you know i survived them but again even with those
01:16:09.900accidents like the blood memories that came back they're just like because you got to figure people
01:16:15.000you're trying to ride a horse they're not really domesticated it's 3 000 bc
01:16:19.460and and the horse is going to kick you off half the time so it was life or death and i guess this
01:16:27.780is what i'm getting at where i didn't the phenotypes don't matter so much right i mean
01:16:33.340and here's another thing i mean if you like if australia up until recently almost all white
01:16:42.740imagine that that is it remained like that for 10 000 years it's very likely that higher
01:16:49.940like the genes that create more melanin in the skin will get selected until like the shade
01:16:57.520of white australian skin would get darker and darker now what that means is just that their
01:17:03.320skin got darker i mean it wouldn't mean anything else it wouldn't change necessarily any of the
01:17:08.680the behavioral habits what have you i mean all things and so this is what i mean that in many
01:17:16.340ways the the fingertips aren't what matter what mattered is think about the change in behavior
01:17:21.980over a few maybe a few dozen generations these people go from being hunter gatherers in these
01:17:28.440river valleys you know they're they're doing that and that's fine to having to take huge risks
01:17:36.480to to to just to just to survive and the risk pays off the horses are able to to manage on the
01:17:44.520step in the in the in the winter and then you start to be able to ride them so you can start
01:17:50.320to you know move your herd around and you can move your herd around a lot more when you have a horse
01:17:55.260than than before that so your herd gets a lot bigger and the horse allows you to to do some
01:18:01.320pretty daring things you couldn't do before like hey those jerks over there i mean they've always
01:18:05.400pissed us off now we're just going to go over we're just going to kill them or you know those
01:18:10.220people they have all those those cows and pigs and stuff we're just gonna go take them now it
01:18:15.980wasn't always successful i'm sure a lot of the time maybe even most of the time maybe even the
01:18:20.180vast majority of the time it ended up being dangerous it was like it was like the bad
01:18:24.640motorcycle accident where god forbid knock on wood you know unfortunately you know it's it's
01:18:29.540sad people people die on motorcycles and this you would have seen this too right you know oh
01:18:34.380we went over to go wrestle their cattle and well you know billy bob and jim bob got you know they
01:18:40.600got killed because the people who owned the cattle they were defending it but more or at least enough
01:18:46.380of the time they were successful that it did two things one it it clicked this light on in the
01:18:52.680human brain that said hey if i take a risk i can reap a huge windfall like i might be like the
01:18:59.320seventh son of some fucking guy and we have our cows whenever but you know in other words i'm i'm
01:19:05.140getting nothing in life right but if i just hop on this horse and go over there i'll come back
01:19:11.580with 50 heads of cattle i mean i'm basically going to be rich it's like it's like all these
01:19:16.000crypto bros think when they go to dubai right but but this is actually real and this was huge
01:19:22.320because it turned on that that that thing in the human brain that said hey if i take this i will
01:19:29.600reap a huge reward it is worth trying and that's not a natural impulse for the european farmer
01:19:38.200right the european farmer and the the their antecedents the mesopotamian farmers it was
01:19:45.480you plow the field you eat the food you plow the field you eat the food and if you're lucky you
01:19:49.780survive year after year you save enough surplus and that's it that's life there's there's no
01:19:54.120taking risks no one's like hey let's try planting some other things and or let's try planting on
01:19:59.160other types of soil whatever it's like no there was it wasn't even worth that because you'd
01:20:02.500probably die it was almost certain you would die but for the indo-europeans all of a sudden like
01:20:07.860taking risks managing risk this became a thing as this is why i say like the phenotypes don't
01:20:14.680really matter because it was this change that happened in response to the the change in the
01:20:22.180kind of behavioral dynamics the the the um risk return dynamics and it created a a distinct type
01:20:32.360of human being and and look the the proof is in the pudding right between 3300 bc and 2300 bc
01:20:42.480In 1,000 years, they had basically been from what's now Russia to Portugal, right?
01:20:51.400They'd conquered everything from what's, you know, well, Greece probably wasn't conquered to the minus in the 18th, but even still, you know, we're talking about 1,000, 1,500 years, all of Europe.
01:21:03.340And then, not even just that, all the way into India, too, right, with the Aryans.
01:21:06.780So, again, I don't think it's so much the phenotypes are the originating or deriving factors.
01:21:14.940It was this complete change of mentality about taking risks and reaping rewards and ideas of windfalls.
01:21:25.420yes uh the the penguin instinct the the ability to empathize with the uh deranged penguin
01:21:35.860i don't think i know that one what's that you don't know the penguin meme oh this that is
01:21:43.060exactly uh this uh this was uh this was famous uh uh it's a clip from verter herzog had a nature
01:21:53.100documentary about antarctica and he was a like mildly obsessed with uh the phenomena of deranged
01:22:00.800penguins like penguins that would like go mad or be ostracized or what but they take off going
01:22:07.100towards the mountain like 70 kilometers away like not to the feeding ground or to to the uh nesting
01:22:14.760area but they go off into what is basically certain death but uh he talked about it out at
01:22:21.380And he'd say, and the scientists explained that if we tried to grab the penguin and bring it back, it would take off directly for the mountain again.
01:22:30.620And this became a massive meme on Twitter and elsewhere because they put aspiring music over in Oslander House and all these like edits or like that penguin would take off and Berger Herzog would say, but why?
01:22:50.120And then all of a sudden, you know, it'd be an edit about, like, deportations, or it'd be an Amelia edit, or it'd be another edit.
01:23:13.820Yeah, a picture of Penguin waddling like off to Mountain Doom, like this vast mountain range with like the feeding ground and the nests of like the collective behind him and like all this aspiring music and all these edits of like Achilles and King Arthur and like, you know, all the film edits.
01:23:36.560Like you've got shots of Troy, you've got shots of like Excalibur and all this in there.
01:23:42.700there's like i i have to interject i i have to interject oh sure go ahead no no no go ahead
01:23:49.660but uh the the big thing the reason this was like so viral this was like so huge on twitter for like
01:23:57.180a week is we have all of right wing twitter of it and all of left wing wing twitter said
01:24:04.440you see the right wingers are suicidal they're just like this psychotic penguin that's going off
01:24:10.300to die and like you all have read it went on about like you see you see the the trump movement it is
01:24:20.060a completely nihilistic and they insisted that like uh they like the right wing said uh oh the
01:24:27.360hero penguin and the left all insisted was the nihilist penguin that uh the that like oh this
01:24:35.180is the embodiment of trump just like all these people marching off to death i guess we'll never
01:24:40.920know because we don't know what the penguins motivation is i think that for the indo-european
01:24:47.440who viewed this kind of risk reward dynamic the way i described it it wasn't erratic necessarily
01:24:56.780what maybe at the very beginning it was erratic behavior but i think quickly people realized holy
01:25:03.540shit dude comes back with 50 head of cattle and like he was nothing before now he's he's basically
01:25:09.780well not literally a king but he's basically a king i mean look he can probably he can have as
01:25:13.380many wives as he wants he can blah blah blah blah and so that inspires the next guy and what so
01:25:20.760the conversion from erratic to behavior that you want to follow was very rapid it was it was
01:25:27.920literally a meme that you know would have been reproduced very rapidly and also now look the
01:25:39.580act itself is going to be risky you very good chance of dying um being maimed and so on not
01:25:47.440just from riding the horse but also you know people defending themselves and so on even if
01:25:51.560Even if you have the advantage of the surprise or whatever, and I think that in addition to the obvious appeal of some huge reward to this risky action, the Indo-European culture evolved right after that to do something else that really hadn't been thrashed out in human cultures before.
01:26:21.060And that is that they invented the song or the story, basically the antecedent of quote-unquote history, the moral lesson, to extol that virtue of taking the risk.
01:26:38.760And this was kind of a way to not just impel the warrior to go and, you know, take on a risk and hopefully get a big reward, but also the fact that maybe there's an 80% chance of death.
01:26:59.220And people, if you sell them, there's an 80% chance of death.
01:27:03.280And these are, you know, there's all sorts of famous, you know, behavioral economics.
01:27:05.980I remember studying this in grad school.
01:27:08.420Behavioral economics, oh, you know, 80% chance of death.
01:27:10.800But, you know, if you do win, you get this big reward.
01:27:13.720And, of course, you meet, there are these averages of how people respond to that.
01:27:19.080but it's really bimodal because you have the people that are really the the well i think are
01:27:24.580the the cerebrally genetic um descendants of the european farmers and they they're like oh yeah no
01:27:33.420i don't want to do that risk's too high i'll just stay home and then there are the you know the the
01:27:37.920the success of the indian appearance in the in your class are like oh no no that's i would totally do
01:27:43.260that because you have the chance that i could make it which is great and so because of 80 percent of
01:27:47.900your people are dying, maybe, and I'm just pulling that number out, then you want to
01:27:52.680come up with ways to encourage them, and I think that the idea of the story, the song,
01:27:58.660the epic, these were ways to show potential warriors or potential risk-takers that even
01:28:05.860if you die, you still have a form of eternality, and this is something that really only developed
01:28:15.280to the degree that developed and, you know, you trace its origins to, you know, Germanic culture
01:28:22.900and to, you know, Greek culture and so on and so forth. And really, it is believed that I think
01:28:30.120strongly comes from the Indo-European, which, you know, had these, created these war bands. I won't
01:28:37.680get into the chorus too much, but they had these war bands. And one of the ways to impel people to
01:28:44.540acts of great risk maybe even what would appear like foolishness was to say listen
01:28:48.640you will live on kind of like that scene in uh in full metal jacket when they graduate and drill
01:28:54.440sergeant hartman's time it's like you might die out there in vietnam but the but the core will
01:28:59.820live on it's it's it's it's it's basically the exact same thing as that and i think that was
01:29:05.780another thing that was invented by the india europeans impel these people and so in the book
01:29:13.020which we haven't barely even gotten to but in the book this they're already ingrained with that
01:29:18.160um and and i will talk more about about the what sets them off on on their quote-unquote adventure
01:29:24.400but it's important to know that they already have in their mind that we will be remembered we will
01:29:30.980be eulogized we will be um there there will be epics um after us you know be simply by taking
01:29:37.600on a heroic action i mean where does heroism come from i you don't see it in any other culture at
01:29:45.860least not the way that it has been articulated and manifested in western culture yes and uh
01:29:52.160this is where i i find stuff like this and of course reading the ancient
01:29:59.120ancient texts but like also like what you're doing
01:30:04.980drawing it into modern drawing it into like a current fiction
01:30:13.080weird to say since that 5 000 years ago but uh drawing it into like fiction being written today
01:30:21.400is the actual like ancient conception of heroism because of course the conception of heroism that
01:30:26.820we have now has been like poisoned by various admixtures of like non-European cultures that
01:30:36.380really don't have a conception of a hero. The Abrahamic tradition really doesn't have
01:30:42.920a conception of a hero in it. Like David is kind of like an anti-heroic figure. He cheats at the
01:30:50.380duel with goliath and uh you don't really really find this hero what concept of your history you
01:30:59.560find this like collect collective of like religious conception of history that's very
01:31:05.980ailing to it but the actual like european hero tradition i find has been like diluted and like
01:31:13.460kind of poisoned like really poisoned over time that like the modern hero that you see on film
01:31:19.260isn't a hero it's like this weird a bit of a like cross between a hero and like
01:31:26.020like an unwitting saint is best way to describe the modern hero like a like a like a dopey person
01:31:36.660whose heart's in the right way but like neither neither like has and like only exercises courage
01:31:44.160for the sake of others you know you know be a good good slave uh who absolutely and actually
01:31:55.860this is a good point for for me to mention something that um the inter-european tradition
01:32:02.520is one tradition and then there's another the semitic and you call it abrahamic um i i call
01:32:08.580it semitic it's not necessarily jewish although you know um the canaanite the the israelite the
01:32:16.180and then later you know islamic traditions but there's there's so many other uh linguistic
01:32:21.920traditions that came out of the proto-semitic languages but this would also be the babylonians
01:32:27.920and the uh it started with the babylonians arguably or the acadians uh well probably
01:32:35.200it's very weird that the jews have somehow gotten a monopoly over the term semi when that like
01:32:41.040denotes a hundred different peoples a hundred different peoples um but there's that there is
01:32:49.200that tradition of and and this is going to this is actually a big focus of the sequel to my book
01:32:54.980um that i'm working on now but there is this very distinct difference with the semitic um
01:33:02.420linguistic and cultural traditions, which come from Mesopotamia, Sumer, where it was the first
01:33:10.000cities, the first urban cultures. The Sumerians were not Semitic. Their language is an orphan.
01:33:15.600It isn't Semitic. However, after Sumer fell, the Semitic cultures, which kind of replaced it
01:33:23.500geographically and otherwise, they adopted a lot of the same life ways and cultural practices
01:33:32.260and i think it gets to what you're saying and here's a great example like even the the epic
01:33:38.740the heroic epic of of gilgamesh like you don't see that trope reproduced again again again and
01:33:47.040again in akkadian in babylonian and you know it gets told it gets um i mean it basically gets um
01:33:55.240the whole the whole story becomes um like deified almost in its own but it's kind of like it's put
01:34:03.780in a museum and that's it whereas in into European culture you see this in all the successor cultures
01:34:09.680in the you know in the Germanic cultures and the Celtic cultures and the Italo-Celtic cultures
01:34:14.980in the Proto-Greek cultures in the Slavic cultures and the Armenian cultures the exact same story in
01:34:22.460a way just being told in a different way with different you know stimuli different you know
01:34:27.160context you know local updates if you will and so it's not just that okay indo-europeans came up
01:34:36.640with the idea of heroism or the heroic epic they came up with the idea of telling it over and over
01:34:42.280and over again in different ways to great effect right so yes um uh and i i i might digress on
01:34:53.480like a few of my like half-baked theories here but uh one of the things that's like very odd
01:35:00.760about the epic of gilgamesh is that like um gilgamesh's kingship is never once questioned
01:35:07.900like usually you have a king who's a hero in a story like uh even in even in like greek stories
01:35:17.180usually like a hero like his quest involves him becoming king or like he loses a kingship and has
01:35:24.420to like get it back you know you've heard the story like a thousand times or like or like he
01:35:29.820should be king but there's a usurper who's like taking his place like uh like the hamlet story
01:35:35.000story like usually if there's a or a oedipus like he thinks he's like a self-made man who's like
01:35:42.500taken over a kingdom but he actually like didn't realize that he murdered the king he's actually
01:35:46.880the rightful king but but now his crown is like like tainted like they don't like there's this
01:35:53.300entire long tradition of like this drama around like the royal court and kingship and the power
01:35:58.280shrivels that take place within it and like um men who weren't king becoming kings or men who
01:36:03.800were kings losing it and then regaining it and whatnot and uh gilgamesh like has none of that
01:36:10.220you know he he bangs a love goddess and befriends like a wild man and like he fights a ball of the
01:36:16.980god and like slays a a god in the woods and like quest for immortality he actually slays humvava
01:36:23.620who who basically is is the equivalent of a titan in my book right he's a monk a primordial
01:37:27.780say too much even though i'm sure i'll blob on but um this is actually the one one of the main
01:37:34.180themes of the sequel of my book which is the the indo-european notion of legitimate political
01:37:42.520authority what is the source of legitimate political authority what we may call king i
01:37:46.560don't like the word king because it refers to it it comes from the word kin um and the
01:37:51.720The concept of king goes far beyond kinship, but more has to do, it's more like a rex, someone who rules, the word reich, the word sovereign, reign, these are all imputations that are very critically germane to the meaning.
01:38:10.240Whereas in the Semitic context, and again, coming from the Sumerian, and if you look at the words for king and ruler and so on in Hebrew and Arabic and these other languages, it's interesting because they come from either the word owner or master.
01:38:29.140um that's one um or um they they come from words that like have nothing to do with the
01:38:39.080indo-european concept if you will like like for instance again i in semitic cultures
01:38:45.060you have a lord right the concept of lordship doesn't exist in indo-european culture and i
01:38:53.800the way i say it is in the indo-europeans bowed but they did not kneel and now i'm being metaphorical
01:39:00.200here but the that's kind of the case with how they viewed political authority and this is in other
01:39:06.920words it was contested i mean kingships were elective until you know the early modern age
01:39:11.080when absolutism um you know came along kingships were always the sovereign was elected because it
01:39:17.640was it was a contestant and that's why there's always these dramas as you just describe them
01:39:25.520stories about the nature of of political authority that doesn't exist in the in this in the semitic
01:39:32.820tradition not even close i mean the nature of authority there started out as as ownership like
01:39:40.140as um i i think if i have notes on this um where the you know a king was basically a the um
01:39:50.380the your the owner or the master you know um so that's that's that's one type of um of of ruler
01:40:19.200It features prominently in Hebrew prayers, um, which gets interpreted as Lord.
01:40:25.640Again, you know, you don't hear anything of Lordship among the Indo-Europeans, but it,
01:40:30.700it really comes back to judging so there's so there's the ruler who judges and then there's
01:40:36.080the ruler who's your master who owns you whereas in the in the European concepts um it goes back
01:40:44.020to risk and that is it is the the rex determines what is right but if you look at how rex or
01:40:57.680kingship was constructed um going back as far as we can tell you have a king that you have a
01:41:06.860peacetime king and you have a wartime king the peacetime king has virtually no powers um and
01:41:12.460the war um but the wartime king he has basically absolute power kind of like the difference between
01:41:17.800a dictator and a consul in rome in fact they kind of institutionalized this difference um but i it
01:41:24.700It was, no matter what, it was elective, and, you know, connotes concepts of rule, of determining what's right.
01:41:36.320So there is, so the judging kind of comes in through there, but that's not necessarily the main concept.
01:41:42.980But what I really like about it is, and I don't want to spoil anything here, but I really think that the Indo-European idea was that, look, you have all these different kings who are the leaders of their kin.
01:41:54.700But you can't have a people, you know, a nation, unless all these kin leaders can get along.
01:42:02.780And in order to have that happen, you need to have a Rex, who is the, he's basically a power broker among powerful constituencies.
01:42:13.200And that's why you get all the stories you talked about.
01:43:14.200But also, like, no, I'm also going to make this, like, an epic battle like Caesar or the Romans had.
01:43:23.140So, like, the numbers of La Morta Arthur, like, a battle varies from, like, 10 guys facing off against 10 guys, like, to, like, 8,000 against 30,000.
01:44:47.300He was a king that eventually earned the respect of enough of the magnates that they made him an overking, a high king, whatever you want to call it.
01:44:59.220But basically, king of kings, I don't like that word.
01:45:02.000But basically, someone who could broker agreements among, like, kings, 10 leaders.
01:45:10.240Yeah, and several of the historic King Arthurs that they try to attribute it to.
01:45:15.480Like, none of the King Arthurs are actually King Arthur.
01:45:18.100Like, none of them have all the traits.
01:45:20.640But there's one that was a Roman general, and there's one that was, like, a latter, like, Celtic general
01:45:27.880that I think might be the origin of the name Arthur,
01:45:31.360but, like, several of them were, like,
01:45:33.120very explicitly not of noble blood then.
01:45:35.160They were, like, successful war band leaders
01:55:39.660european because they did come from anatolia um so and anyway they found you know they found these
01:55:45.340it it just looked like kind of where you know any of the rituals any of the spiritual life
01:55:55.040was seemed very oppressive um and and for indo-europeans used to wide open spaces right
01:56:02.400especially after that they clicked in the mind where taking risks is a good thing and even if
01:56:08.400you don't survive you'll be remembered in story and you know you're used to wide open spaces you're
01:56:14.160used to being able to make decisions on on the fly using your instinct this is again going right
01:56:19.260back to what you said everything is you know of the early european farmer it's it's the antithesis
01:56:26.020of what they believed in yes and uh we you see in a lot like uh various mythologies uh
01:56:37.080uh examples of like the the indo-europeans the step people reacting to like the hero peoples
01:56:51.300reacting to uh this the the uh longhouse culture so uh famously uh the uh perseus slanning the
01:57:03.600Medusa is often interpreted as a tale of these heroic growth people slaying the all-seeing
01:57:17.100mother figure, like this surveillance state of gossip that the Indo-Europeans live under.
01:57:24.600But you also see, like, echoes of it down the line. So, like, the Mycenaeans and the, like, centralized states, states of the pre-sea people.
01:58:08.440uh uh out out matching the minotaur absolutely um in fact dan davis who some of your uh audience
01:58:17.720might know um because he speaks a lot about these issues he has some great videos out there
01:58:23.220on youtube um and he has written some books but i think the first book he wrote
01:58:28.980um and actually it's funny because when i started looking at writing these books i thought okay well
01:58:33.080let me just make sure that no one else has written the book that i want to write and
01:58:35.940nothing's been written in this time period save for one book uh and it's a it's a novella actually
01:58:42.060by dan davis i think it's called godborn and i i did read it um it was quite good and basically
01:58:47.460it's basically a historical story of theseus hercules i'm not sure going and killing um medusa
01:58:56.460um and it's and it's told yes so it was it was basically a historical perseus and he's
01:59:05.840basically coming from an indo-european setting um again it's a novella it doesn't it doesn't
01:59:11.840really go into a lot of the themes and stuff i go to and one of the themes though that that i'm
01:59:18.720bringing up is that you know okay so you have this winter settling you have these you know
01:59:24.060whether you whether you call them neanderthals or whatever they're coming back you know they're
01:59:28.220going to do whatever they do but you also have this is why it's called the toll of fortune because
01:59:36.220there's this idea that you know you're an indo-european you take a big risk you could
01:59:41.740get a big reward but it all depends on what fortune says it all depends on the
01:59:45.580the toll the price you have to pay for fortune and um this is really and this is why i'm
01:59:54.060I'm covered by a big serpent, right? And the notion that, you know, fortune is this fickle monster, this almost supra-god-like monster that's been there since the beginning of time in the Greek tradition or proto-Greek.
02:00:15.640and you have this idea that out of chaos you still have opportunity very likely you die but
02:00:25.260but you might not if you do things right you need a little fortune and i'll see your instincts and
02:00:32.780so on experience but you you might actually succeed and the idea of this primordial snake
02:00:40.820as a, if not an originator of the universe,
02:00:45.700certainly a companion to the origin of the universe,
02:01:03.760I guess I'll go off on a tangent and explain what I mean there.
02:01:07.400they both have a they both have a story of a servant obviously in the Semitic tradition it
02:01:17.360comes out as the devil who tempts Adam and Eve and what have you but that's a very that's actually
02:01:24.900what I think a conflation of two different stories that got by the time that story really got
02:01:30.700uh written down it's it's so far down down the line if you look at the real stories of the
02:01:37.780serpent um you do you go from the babylonians back to the ancient sumerians and it probably
02:01:43.060goes back further um and it goes back this is my reconstruction um before i'm going to call it
02:01:51.5805600 bc so again now we're going back 2 000 years before my book but the black what we know as the
02:01:58.800black sea was actually a mostly freshwater inland sea and it was all connected to the
02:02:04.860mediterranean which was several hundred feet above it um and there was a waterfall kind of
02:02:11.860that was probably not maybe even around where um well yeah it probably yeah it was somewhere in
02:02:23.100the bosphorus street um and basically what happened is there was maybe a combination of
02:02:30.980sea level rise and you know an earthquake and it caused those cataracts to buckle and then of
02:02:38.000course the mediterranean sea just burst through that can into the black sea creating a saltwater
02:02:46.280sea and causing the sea level to rise several hundred feet and this obviously the you know
02:02:53.680you recognize the great flood um myth here which is that is not a christian semitic thing that goes
02:03:00.240back to ancient sumer and it's funny because if you look at the sumerian legends there was tiamat
02:03:08.460and there was adzu or apsu and in fact you'll notice that the first poem in my book is called
02:03:15.980tiamat and it's because they mythologized these events the following way it was father and tiamat
02:03:25.560was the mother and adzu was the god of fresh water and surprise surprise tiamat was the god of salt
02:03:32.500water and guess what happened the god of salt water came crashing into the god of fresh water
02:03:39.300obviously you know they didn't probably sometime in the mid-6 millennium bc that's
02:03:44.980one possibility and you know and and so the god of salt water then tiamat was viewed as this you
02:03:53.920know fickle destroyer and was recognized as a serpent now you can imagine though that this would
02:04:01.060have inundated destroyed civilizations on the southern coast um uh you know like a pontic
02:04:08.060anatolia pontus was the ancient word for the uh or was an ancient word for for the black sea
02:04:13.900and it also would have done the same on the northern coast as well well the southern coast
02:04:19.100they eventually became the sumerians and then the akkadians babylans who asked in semitics
02:04:24.960and on the northern coast they eventually became you know the the endo europeans and so that's why
02:04:30.160You have this same concept of a serpent mythologized as a fickle creator of chaos because of this actual catastrophe that happened.
02:04:47.020And so you see the serpent on the cover of my book because it's a reference to that.
02:04:51.880Now, the Indo-Europeans went with the myth in one way, because to them, chaos and all this destruction could create opportunity, and then it took a totally different direction on the southern coast.
02:05:08.920So, you know, I went off on a bit of tangent there, but it's worth noting because the way that they conceive of chaos, and we often associate chaos with evil, right?
02:05:25.140And so the way that, you know, the ideas of evil and then henceforth after the devil, those came out of this idea of, you know, the serpent and chaos, and they went off in two totally different directions.
02:05:36.940And that's why the two world views, these two metacultural views, the Semitic and the Indo-European, are very contradictory in so many ways.
02:05:46.460yes uh the you can see this even into like modern gaming systems that the alignment system
02:05:59.060of dungeons and dragons depending on the depending on the game you play either there
02:06:06.240there's a uh political compass meme of like oh there's chaotic good and lawful good and there's
02:06:13.940chaotic evil and lawful evil or in other like myth like game systems and mythologies no there's
02:06:21.280only chaos and law or there's only good and evil uh that that uh you can see this uh percolating
02:06:30.700even into, like, modern mythical world
02:24:19.880You know, although, you know, they're expanding across the steps, so there isn't that or whatever.
02:24:28.260But what happens is, you know, they have these groups of boys that they send out to be, you know, like, you know, a ritual entrance into adulthood, if you call it that.
02:47:13.200they created by this like back migration to the east.
02:47:16.120um they lived in the southern urals they did a lot of mining um also note that bronze which
02:47:25.140came along a lot later there's only two bronze is copper and tin there's only two real really
02:47:33.220good sources of tin and that's one is in afghanistan and one is in wales like great britain
02:47:40.380so that tells you a lot i mean so you have this in faster around 2200
02:47:46.300in the southern urals well they're not there for no reason because the
02:47:51.620developed the chariot also the other source in wales for tin that kind of tells it what did i
02:47:59.060tell you about wiping out all the people and well all the men in in great britain at least the
02:48:03.880the farmers right it wasn't a gold rush it was a tin rush um and then the back out east you know
02:48:10.740the Tastra then became um the like Indo-Aryans and they came to the Indo-Iranians and and then
02:48:16.720obviously the Indo-Aryans kept going all the way to India so there's a huge of um a huge volume of
02:48:27.120stories and folklore and mythology that can be pieced together and so a book like M.L. West's
02:48:32.860indo-european poetry and myth um it's not too long it does a pretty good job bringing that
02:48:37.540together um i have some others on there too uh you know you can peruse i think it's more like
02:48:45.620you take a look and you see because some of them are more academic some of them
02:48:49.960are more survey level and gloss over things but i wouldn't say there's any one book that
02:48:56.880poverty that we need to know like it just hasn't been written yet this is a we haven't really
02:49:04.460talked about this but this is a field that two problems with it one it's a combination of
02:49:11.760linguistics archaeology which you know rocks and pottery shards don't speak and and now genetics
02:49:21.040which so now we have that third piece of the puzzle so we can put things together but academics
02:49:26.580hate working together because each one thinks that they're the fucking smartest one in the room
02:49:30.980and um and then on top of that no one dared to conclude that the indo-europeans had done
02:49:39.660everything that i've described i believe they've described um for a very long time because of a
02:49:46.780certain austrian painter and um as a result they kept saying oh no no you know farmers moved out
02:49:54.460of anatolia and it was all peaceful and everything you know it's all you know
02:49:57.820you know kissing moon maidens just you know
02:50:02.860well potter is not people that that has several meanings though i mean like
02:50:14.020you can twist that to basically mean whichever meaning you want like yeah but there there are
02:50:22.280all these theater work if you know academia you know what i mean by like uh by like scare
02:50:30.000word like like cash thoughts and money all these things that that would be said to undergrads and
02:50:36.520master students to like quietly let you know that uh that you should shut the hell up if you want to
02:50:43.960have a career oh well yeah i mean i got out of academia as that was happening i mean like i said
02:50:51.700I spent 11 years in academia, so, but no, absolutely, these little shibboleths where, you know, they know what they're saying, but what happened was there was this Lithuanian archaeologist in the 60s, Maria Gimbutas, and she questioned the whole, you know, kumbaya, it's all just, you know, cultural dissemination by farmers moving across Europe, and she said, no, there, you know, it was the Indo-European Institute of Europe.
02:51:20.740However, in order to say this and not be blacklisted by, you know, Marxist academics, she had to couch it in the language of 60s feminism.
02:51:31.900So it had to be that, well, they were all matriarchal and feminist and egalitarian.
02:51:38.300And then these evil, patriarchal, you know, mean Indo-Europeans came along and destroyed it all.
02:51:46.300You destroyed the Garden of Eden, which was, of course, not even an Indo-European story.
02:51:50.740at all um and it had to be i'm not saying maria gave a test said it like that or even thought that
02:51:58.080um she probably didn't but it had to be couched in that kind of language um or it wouldn't have
02:52:03.260been you know considered acceptable but of course you know these are academics all about the truth
02:52:06.780all about the truth you know we're all scientific men but anyway um so then she had two grad students
02:52:12.900um one by the name of james mallory the other david anthony who who wrote the main book i
02:52:18.160recommend and they basically continued her work you know continued the idea that it was the
02:52:22.900indo-europeans who you know who basically conquered everything it's called it's called
02:52:28.620demic diffusion as opposed to cultural diffusion you know the most being you know the people so
02:52:34.760the people the indian people actually took over everything wasn't just cultural diffusion among
02:52:40.020you know farmers and um and now it's i mean it's it's all but been um honestly proven it's it's
02:52:50.020you know the the evidence so so strongly supports that and like it's not just the genetic evidence
02:52:55.680but when you look at the the archaeological and keep in mind david anthony's writing this book in
02:52:59.9602007 long before any of this uh or 95 percent of the students had even been they didn't figure out
02:53:07.660how to do this and he did it all with archaeology and linguistics and he took a lot of flack for it
02:53:12.320because they were basically like you're an archaeologist you have no business doing
02:53:15.580linguistics and of course the other people said the other thing back so i mean once you get around
02:53:20.880the academic bullshit but this is why there is no um you know single book that tells you everything
02:53:27.580you need to know but if you go to my website you'll see you'll see a bunch of options there
02:53:31.960yes this is this is why to learn the ancient history of your people you need to read the
02:53:40.040told fortune uh available in the show notes dearest dearest and i will link your website
02:53:48.240with all the book lists and i'll keep showing your book until then we'll talk again the only
02:53:58.800other thing i want to say is um you know so like i said at the beginning feel free to pick it up on
02:54:04.220amazon um but you know if it's not available there and you feel like you need it right away
02:54:08.320um the link to my printer is there too and you can get it just as easily um you do need it right
02:54:16.400away let's know you need to get it immediately this second while you're listening i guess
02:54:21.980Yeah, exactly. But get the paper version because I think you'll appreciate it. It is literature. I mean, I've taken a bit of flack. I don't want to call it flack, but one good friend of ours, you know, certainly noted that there is some challenging language in it.
02:54:44.560um you know i i don't i don't hold back i i firmly believe that the the purpose of an author
02:54:51.140who's creating literature is to challenge the vocabulary not gratuitously because i said
02:54:56.560there's nothing gratuitous in this everything is there for a reason and it's i mean this book is
02:55:04.680300 pages right i could have written some gigantic you know fucking george george um
02:55:14.560bloated kind of uh 600 page treatise and um no i thought no i'm gonna write 300 pages