FUCKED UP Human History - Cannibals, Tribes, Torture & Dictators | Abhijit Iyer Mitra On TRS

As a species, we're one of the nastiest species around.

That is the reality of human nature.

Would you say cannibalism intertwined with the human story?

People don't realize how brutal those times were.

Resource scarcity, starvation.

You kill what's around and eat it.

There's very clear evidence that they were eating human beings.

Who is Shaka Zulu?

Just a Zulu leader.

Killed his own mother.

In fact, when his mother died, he ordered all mothers to be killed.

Everybody should know the pain of losing a mother.

So he was genocidally prone.

In the American world, for the rain god, it was child sacrifice to make them cry more.

Their fingernails would be plucked out and things like that.

Why?

Because the more the child cries, the more rain you'll have the next day.

Papua New Guinea.

That's the scariest goddamn trip I've ever been on.

They want you to marry daughter or wife, and if you say no, they're ready to kill you in an instant.

It was all friend or enemy, eat or be eaten.

Everything that is good about mankind, Human rights, women's liberation, technology— it has all come out of war.

It is our worst instincts that have led to our best instincts.

The greater the war, the greater the balance of good has been.

Wow,

very brutal history episode is presented to you after a long time on TRS.

Spoken about cannibals, human sacrifices, but moreover, we've kind of shed light upon the darkest aspects of the last 1,000 years.

World history is a topic that's very close to my heart.

I'm trying to present it in an entertaining way to the rest of the world.

I hope you enjoy this very violent, very brutal, very insightful history special on TRS.

Enjoy the episode.

For those of you who enjoy some twisted podcasts, this one will genuinely bend your mind.

It's our special with Abhijit Iyer Mitra on the brutal history of the last 1,000 years.

Abhijita, welcome to another history special, uh, evergreen episode, uh, going to be one of the most brutal and violent conversations that we've ever produced on this channel.

Uh, I won't be engaging in a fight with you, but the conversation is going to enter some dark places for sure.

Yeah, I think this is the kind of history that both me and you enjoy the most.

Yeah, uh, because the human story has been an extremely violent one.

Yeah.

Why are we not taught about the degrees of violence in history books?

I actually think that educating yourself on the truths about human violence teaches you a lot more about the human species than just by-hearting dates.

Yeah.

You know, I think history is not taught in the way that it should be taught in schools and colleges.

I agree.

And you know, the—

it's probably the most interesting subject there is, and somehow they found a way of making it the most impossibly boring subject that there is, right?

It's sad because they don't want you to focus on how violent and psychotic our history actually is.

You know, have you noticed people don't like bad news.

They want to hear how great they are, how special and unique they are, how peaceful they are, how their particular religion or civilization taught the world everything about peace and

whatever.

It doesn't matter who we are, you know.

Muslims believe this, Hindus believe this, Christians believe this.

Everybody believes this about themselves.

And the reality is we're really, really horrible people.

Overall, as, as a species, we're one of the nastiest species around, where,

you know, we want to— our collective consciousness wants to see ourselves as some Mother Teresa or Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, when in fact every one of us is actually an Idi Amin or

a Mao Zedong or a Stalin or a Hitler inside.

Um,

it's how do you tell a kid—

and should you tell a kid that you're part of a psychotic species that can turn psycho at any given point of time?

And the simplest example are things like the Holocaust, or Stalin's purges, or Mao Zedong's slaughters, where very ordinary people, good human beings, uh, that we think are good human

beings, great fathers, great mothers,

would land up to work, round up people,

decide to torture them, kill them in some fashion.

And in the case of the Holocaust, they did it even when there were no consequences.

At least Mao Zedong and Stalin, you can say, if I did not do that, my family would have been killed and I would have been killed.

You know, in Germany, there is not one single example, not one, of a German refusing to carry out the killing of Jews or gypsies and being punished for it?

Sure, you'd get toilet duty, but really, you would rather not do toilet duty and kill a human being?

No.

So that is the reality of human nature.

I think, you know, this need to shield kids from it plays a big role in that, which is why we'd rather make it boring and

try to push as many people away from it

than push people into it, and they realize how nasty we actually are.

At least on behalf of young boys, I feel like this is why boys get into wrestling and video games, because it's there in their DNA.

They just don't know how to channelize it, and you're not taught about this in school.

Do you know how many girls I know who are into video games?

Oh yeah, yeah.

In fact, most of the gamers I know are in fact ladies and girls, right?

So it's actually there in women as well.

If you go to the pre-Columbian Americas, for example, and immediate contact, Colombian contact America, you'll find that with tribes like the Comanche and things like that who were

in what is today the North Mexico-US border, Arizona,

Colorado, New Mexico, parts of Texas.

The men used to bring home the captives, and it was the women doing all the torturing and the killing.

Really?

And they were far worse than the men when it came to torturing and killing, by the way.

Right.

So it's there.

It is actually a very gender-neutral thing.

The psychogene runs in all of us.

And it is a genuine psychogene.

Hmm.

You know, I don't even know where to begin this conversation.

I want to open up this tangent about Native America.

I want to open up the tangent about human sacrifice that we spoke about outside.

Uh, but maybe the right place to begin this is something hyper-relatable, which is the nature of war when it comes to civilians.

Yeah, we— other than people in Ukraine and, uh, the Levant.

I don't think too many global populations have seen real hot war up close.

But say hypothetically tomorrow, let's just take the case of India and Indian metros.

If a large-scale war is to break out in our geographical region, what happens to the people in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore?

You will be raped.

You will be tortured.

Uh, you will be systematically killed.

Your children will be burnt alive.

Um,

there is no depth to which humans will not sink, and at that point, all the morality fostered in you by religion and things like that stops.

Uh, you saw what happened with the massacres at the initial stages of the Ukraine war, right?

Ordinary people being killed left, right, and center.

The Ukrainians, in fact, doing a lot of crap to their own people.

Like, some of the massacres we know the Russians carried out, right?

But there were Ukrainians, uh, taking out their own people, uh, just because they spoke wrong or they were Russian ethnically or whatever, and killing them nasty ways.

We've seen what happened in, um, uh, on October 7th where Gazans came in and even killed Israeli Muslims and Arabs and Bedouins and things like that, right?

In very, very nasty ways.

You saw the way they killed the Thai worker.

What did Thailand have to do with that conflict?

They took a spade and went on smashing his skull while he was alive, took a spike and went on poking it into his genitals.

And

I mean, I'm not gonna regurgitate that video, but they were doing this to everybody.

10 Indians died that day.

Uh, we don't talk about it.

What is happening in Congo today, uh, you know, where the Rwandans are essentially doing to Congo what Russia is doing to Ukraine, invading it massively.

And they're literally chopping up albinos and pygmies and eating them

today.

Eating them?

Yeah, today, 2025.

Yeah, 2025.

What's the context?

Uh, the context here is albinos in Africa are seen as witches.

Uh, they are demons who need to be killed and they need to be stewed and eaten.

Uh, same with pygmies.

It's meant to bring you powers and things like that.

It's happening.

We know there are documented cases of it.

So if this happens in India, you know, all this thing that we're a peaceful religion, no, shanti shanti.

Listen, why in the Vedas are there so many calls to shanti?

See, You're saying peace, peace, peace.

You don't ask for peace if there's peace all around, right?

You only ask for peace when it's a very war-like,

violent situation.

To be fair, in this day and age, surprisingly, we're a lot less violent than we were once upon a time.

But the older— the further back in time you go,

the systemic, low-level systematic violence which actually kills more people than sporadic high-level violence

is insane.

And the level of cruelty and brutality tends to be much more the earlier you go

and, um,

the more primitive you are.

So, you know, there was this concept of Voltaire and Rousseau and people like that, the noble savage, you know, before modern times, people were very kind to each other.

It was a place of love.

You know, there was that particularly ridiculous sequence in Joe Rogan and that Graham Hancock where they were talking about, you know, how this pre-Columbian America was this kumbaya

land, you know, where everybody held hands and kissed and hugged and everybody was high on weed and it was one lovely weed rave party.

I don't know, weed, ecstasy, MDMA, whatever.

Bro, it was horrible.

If we get into what pre-Columbian America was in terms of life, trust me, it was a hellhole.

You would not be— you would not want to live there.

Let's open up this chapter by explaining what you mean by pre-Columbian in the first place.

Okay, sorry.

And take it as far back as you can.

Okay, in terms of when did the Americas geographically even get populated and what developed in that ecosystem over thousands of years, right?

So depending on the theory you choose, um, somewhere between 15,000 to 22,000 years back is when the Bering Sea, so the Russian Far East, people who are Mongoloid they could have been

Inuits, or the ancestors of the Chinese, maybe a common ancestor to all of them.

Inuits are Eskimos.

Eskimos is a very, um, racial, racial term, so you don't use it, but Indians don't know that.

So anyways, um,

they crossed the land bridge over the Bering Straits, rocked up in extreme North Canada, and within about 3,000 years, they'd gone to the extreme south of

the Americas.

You know, essentially you can do it very easily if you're walking a kilometer a day, which is nothing realistically.

Uh, you can in a thousand or so years be all the way from the North of America to the South of America continent.

Now they rock up there, the bridge breaks, and the Bering Sea gets created.

Uh, the end of the dry ice, I guess.

Uh, as in water levels change?

Water levels change very significantly.

Uh, a lot of areas that had land bridges are, uh, decimated.

It becomes warmer, so the ice also melts.

So ice bridges, as was the case in the Bering Sea, also melt, and it becomes isolated.

You're talking about the Americas?

Yeah, where Alaska was very close to Russia right now on the modern map.

The water levels were lower all over the Earth.

Yes.

And at one point the water levels suddenly increased, perhaps because of a cataclysmic event.

Well, warming mostly, because then the polar ice caps tend to melt and the water levels rise and, you know, currents change and things like that because the salinity changes because

it's fresh water freezing.

And then anyway, so

The Americas are actually an exact, almost exact time capsule

of what we were 15,000 years back.

Uh, if we think that we were peaceful or whatever at that time, you just need to look at the Americas and see there was nothing peaceful about us.

Far from it.

You know, here in the modern age, we say Somehow it's okay to kill men, but you know, how can you do this to the women and children?

Why, men don't have human rights, is it?

But you know, it's fine to kill the men but spare the women and the children.

Um,

but anyway, in Native American warfare, uh, at least in the north, the targets used to be women and children for killing.

Talk about inter-tribal warfare.

Inter-tribal war.

It was all inter-tribal warfare because even at its biggest empires and things like that.

It was a very tribal war in nature.

Why?

Because they always remained a Stone Age society.

They knew how to melt and use gold, silver, and copper, but it was isolated copper up way up north.

Uh, it, uh, they never discovered how to mix.

They didn't have tin, so they didn't know how to mix tin and copper to get bronze.

So they never graduated to the Bronze Age.

So, you know, for a long time we thought that civilization came about because of bronze and became stronger because of iron.

We now know— and, and literacy mostly— we now know that it is possible to be completely illiterate, to still remain in the Stone Age, and still build enormous empires like the Inca

Empire, which was massive.

The Aztecs, which were not massive but still powerful.

Um, this place called Teotihuacan, which is outside Mexico City, uh, totally illiterate but a superpower that was able to project power 1,300 kilometers away into the Yucatan Peninsula,

right?

I'll just have to pause you a little bit.

Now you're saying that basically human beings migrated from Asia into the Americas Yeah, and perhaps very quickly spread all over America.

And this is pre-10,000 BC.

Yeah, all this happened way before.

Yeah, way before.

We don't even know how far back it was.

Could be 50,000 BC.

It could be, but yeah.

Uh, then the water levels rise, that Bering Land Bridge gets cut off, it gets flooded.

So it's very difficult now to cross over to America.

Therefore, that whole set of people that occupies America gets kind of isolated from Asia, Africa, and Europe, which is another landmass now.

Exactly.

But in Asia, Africa, and Europe, because they're connected by land, uh, they kind of simultaneously develop as a human species.

Exactly.

Uh, can you just take us through that timeline as well?

How did

the human species in that geographical part of the world go from Stone Age to Bronze Age, etc.?

So, you know, very surprisingly, this happens when everybody is at the same latitude, but not on the same longitude.

Okay, so if you are a vertically oriented continent like North and South America, they are much

longer than they are broad,

uh, north— they are more north-south oriented than they are east-west oriented.

You have these climate zones which become impossible to cross.

So the crossing of technology, knowledge, and everything becomes a lot tougher.

Whereas, you know, if you take Eurasia and North Africa, it's got very similar— there is snow in the temperate area, a huge green belt and desert belt in between, and then a cold belt

up north, right?

So technology, because it's moving east to west from similar climate zones or adjustable climate zones, it happens much easier.

I have a tiny movie recommendation here because this will add a lot of context.

I think every listener who's enjoying this conversation should watch a movie called Kingdom of Heaven.

Not very accurate, but it's not historically— terribly inaccurate.

The Balian of Ibelin family were really nasty characters, by the way.

They've no hero.

But the way they've shown that movie, they're really trying to, uh, create a time capsule from that phase in history.

Yeah, I'm sure they've taken actually 300 years and crunched it down to one human being's life.

But the way they've shown European migration to the Middle East, the Crusades, uh, you know, inter-religious warfare, uh, very nice time capsule from that phase of human history.

Uh, and it's a great example of what you're saying about east to west migration, east to west migration of knowledge, people.

Uh, it's, it's very, very common, right?

On the other hand, why does it move up to North Africa but it never moves under the Sahara because the Sahara represents a huge break in a geographical break which becomes impossible

to overcome, which is why the southern half of Africa takes very, very long to catch up.

In fact, till the last century, they don't really catch up with the rest of

Eurasia, North Africa.

You want to talk briefly about Shaka Zulu?

Sure, man.

Just, just as trivia.

Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Classic Idi Amin-esque genocidal whack job, right?

And like, timeline, uh, literally the 1800s.

Literally the 1800s.

I mean, this is when,

you know, the Metro would have probably come online in London, uh, late 1800s.

Uh, we had discovered steam engines and things by the mid-1800s.

But because the Sahara Desert cut off civilizational education, yeah, therefore whatever's sub-Saharan was cut off to a large degree, to almost completely, in a way that it probably

should not.

Because, you know, we know there was maritime trade happening.

We know that Indian sailors from the Chola dynasty, so around 900 to 1200 AD, we're going crossing the Cape of Good Hope and going all the way to Namibia and places like that, right?

They definitely crossed the Cape of Good Hope.

And yet there was no absorption.

And in most cases it was,

it remained extraordinarily brutal and primitive.

Shaka Zulu being a classic example of this.

This.

Who is Shaka Zulu?

So just a Zulu leader.

Now, you know, he's talked up so much, you think he had this huge empire, right?

When you actually look at it on the map, it's not very big.

It's actually quite small.

This is in South Africa.

This is in modern-day South Africa, uh, what was still not created as South Africa by then.

Um, and it was very interesting that way because

this was documented.

Europeans went and saw what was happening and documented what was done.

There are African accounts of Shaka Zulu which are not complimentary at all.

He killed his own people in large numbers.

In fact, when his mother died, he ordered all nursing mothers and nursing cows to be killed

out of sadness.

Yeah, because he's like, every— everybody should know the pain of losing a mother and crap like that.

So he was genocidal, bro.

Like, uh, the, uh, the process— I forget what it's called— the Mfokane or something like that.

What's the bubblegum version of Shaka Zulu?

The bubblegum version comes because of the South African Broadcasting Corporation's, uh, 1970s or '80s TV show about this, where they want you to think he was this major military thing.

He was not.

He was extremely primitive.

That he was this wise, just ruler.

He was not.

He was a psycho.

He was militarily superior to the tribes that surrounded him, and that was all that there was.

Okay, he took on the British.

No, he never took on the British.

He never took on the British.

It was his successor, Dingaan.

Uh, he was killed by his own people.

Yeah, because Shaka Zulu had gone mad, especially after his mother Nandi died.

Uh, they decided enough is enough, and his own family killed him.

One of his killers was his nephew Dingaan, who became his

one-plus successor.

He was the one that came into conflict with the Boers and the, uh, British.

And I think the Boers, like locals versus Europeans— Europeans.

That's, that's what I thought Shaka Zulu was.

No, Shaka was never anti-European, never ever.

Uh, he adopted some firearms from the Europeans, but he never attacked the Europeans.

He, he was entirely black-on-black massacres,

uh, much like what's happening in Congo today, uh, right?

Uh, nobody wants to talk about the Congo Civil War.

We all talk about the Rwandan genocide.

But the Rwandan genocide is kind of very similar to what Shaka Zulu was doing to his own people.

So you have to turn back and ask,

Shaka Zulu killed more Zulus than the white man ever did.

So why do the Zulus then consider him a hero?

Why does Black American culture

treat a man who killed more of his own people as a hero?

He was very nasty in the way he went around killing people.

There was human sacrifice and things involved out there.

We know much more about that from, say, Benin and Togo, where you had these rituals which involved the sacrifice of thousands of human beings, literally.

Capital of voodoo.

Uh, yeah, original voodoo.

Yeah, before it— I mean, voodoo becomes popular these days because of Haiti, but that's where the original voodoo started.

Um, so this is very common, you know, this thing of

anti-colonialism.

They want you to think that European colonialism was something unique and unprecedented in history.

Slaving was mostly black-on-black slaving.

The Europeans were just the last.

They were all around the coast.

They never penetrated the interior of Africa.

They were just doing the transatlantic transport.

And you know, America got very few slaves compared to most of the other countries— Haiti, Jamaica, uh, Brazil in fact was the most.

There was something like about 8 million slaves who ultimately went— 8 million, I think, yeah, 8 million who ultimately went to Brazil, even though the Portuguese Empire had banned

slavery.

It was never followed in practice.

So it, it was Blacks on Black violence, which nobody wants to talk about.

You're meant to believe it was the white man that did all of this.

And in fact, it was the end of slavery and industrialization that actually brought about African colonization, because then

slaves became bad.

Once, you know, you can do away with free labor

and Industrialization requires quality.

Quality is a function of labor.

Uh, you don't need slaves anymore.

You can be very moral about these things.

But it was more than morality.

They want— the Europeans also want you to believe that it was deeply moral of Britain to go around sinking slave ships because they were so morally appalled by slavery.

Bullshit.

What it was was Britain had a competitive advantage in industry It needed resources.

Others who had not industrialized as quickly as Britain had

were becoming a threat to Britain.

So how do you squelch their economies?

They are so dependent on slaves, you get rid of the slave trade.

So you use lawfare.

I have an advantage, you don't have that advantage.

I use the law to declare that what you are doing, which I was doing till 20 years back, is now illegal, and I'm going to wage war on you.

To end this.

And colonization— they want you to believe they went in and started colonizing the deep interior of Africa out of the goodness of their hearts because they did not want slavery.

No,

that was the excuse.

They wanted resources because industrialization requires industrial quantities of minerals— gold, diamonds,

whatever, uranium of late, but not in those days, uh, metals and minerals which Africa was very rich in.

and that's what they went in for.

So isn't it surprising peak colonization in Africa, in India,

actually starts at the end of the slave trade?

Let's dial it back to east to west migration versus north and south.

That's where we began.

Yeah.

And you said that the Sahara Desert cuts off, uh, the spread of information, basically.

Uh, but Asia, Europe, they're all able to learn from each other.

So we go from being Stone Age humans to, to Bronze Age humans to Iron Age humans very rapidly,

from it starting in one side of the continent, right?

So for example, the moment the Bronze Age starts in the Middle East, in Iraq and what's the Fertile Crescent?

So Syria and Israel.

It very, very rapidly spreads to Egypt, to India, to China within a few hundred years, not even thousand.

Within a few hundred years it spreads.

It spreads north to Germany.

What timeline are we talking about?

So we're talking about 5,000 BC, well, 5,000 years back.

So 3,000 BC-ish.

You can go back to about 7,000 in some cases, but that's more Chalcolithic.

So that is copper without tin.

Now what happens is the unique innovation that happens is copper is very abundant throughout, tin is extremely rare.

And you know, you can't even figure out—

copper mining leaves archaeological traces, tin mining does not leave archaeological traces.

But we know tin was rare And so a whole trade network developed around it.

So, you know, in Egypt they were literally getting tin 5,000 years back from Britain.

Hmm.

And you know, Britain became a major supply route.

So they had to cross around Spain, come and supply it to places like Greece, Cyprus, and places like that.

Greece had a direct supply route of tin from the north Sea.

So Germany, Denmark, apparently, think they certainly had amber trade from the North Sea to Greece and Egypt and places like that.

One of the apparently major suppliers of tin, till it was discovered in Cyprus, apparently was the Harappan civilization.

So one of the reasons of the wealth— so tin in those days was like petroleum in the last 50, 60 years.

Wow.

Yeah.

So Harappa was probably the Saudi Arabia of its times.

Because it had access to tin.

Yeah.

Wow.

And this is what was the precursor to India being Sone ki Chidiya or the Golden Sparrow.

Exactly.

This is what fueled the money.

This is what fueled the money.

Wow.

Yeah.

Damn.

And on the basis of tin,

uh,

the Indus Valley Civilization started trading a lot of luxury items.

One was this red stone called carnelian, which is actually very common in— so, you know, if you look at the Egyptian Treasures of Tutankhamun and things like that, you don't see rubies

and diamonds and emeralds and sapphires.

It's turquoise, lapis lazuli, and carnelian.

And I have all of them on this shelf behind me, right?

It's crazy to think that this was treasure once upon a time.

Yeah, it was treasure, but on what basis?

Because it was rare, very rare.

Lapis lazuli is still fairly rare, uh, it's become semi-precious now.

What's it used for?

Like beauty.

That's it.

That's it.

In the same way that we value diamonds today.

Yeah.

And technically diamonds should be semi-precious.

De Beers is artificially controlling the supply of diamonds and making it a precious stone.

At one point of time, after stones became common, the most expensive stone was amethyst.

It's a bunch of amethyst behind.

Okay, great.

But today it's a semi-precious stone

because they found huge amounts of it.

Diamonds, again, we know there are huge amounts of it.

It is going to become a semi-precious stone at some point.

But De Beers did a very good thing by, you know, cartelizing it and controlling it.

So it's going to remain precious for a while.

Right.

So carnelian, turquoise, and lapis lazuli.

Lapis lazuli, we knew, came from Afghanistan, which was part of the Indus Valley continuum.

Carnelian came from the Indus Valley proper.

They had very special ways.

They would take long stones and they had this expert thing where they could put a hole right in the middle of a long stone so you could make a really lovely necklace out of it and things

like that.

So it started off supplying the petroleum of the Bronze Age, which was tin, and it became a luxury trade.

So it was called palace economies because only the very rich could afford it.

So the palaces of Greece, which was then Mycenae, used to trade with the palaces of Crete, of Cyprus, of Turkey, of the Egyptian pharaohs, of Mesopotamia, what's Iraq today, and things

like that.

And the Chinese formed a completely independent economy of their own without trade because they had put tin and

copper in great quantities out there.

So that kind of forms an isolated separate unit.

The western unit, west of the Himalayas, was a completely integrated trade system.

Very risky, very dangerous.

And that is why the dockyard at Lothal on the Gujarat coast is such a huge dockyard, because the number of ships coming out here— it's almost 1,000 feet, you know, for those days that's

massive— internal flooding dockyard where you come in completely shielded from the elements and things like that.

Advanced technology.

For that trade going to Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Let's go back to history because we're talking about, uh, how thin was the petroleum of that time, of the Bronze Age.

This is what I love about history, that when people 200 years from now will look back at our times of the 2000s and they realize how rich the Gulf became, and then they tie that to

oil money.

Yeah.

But oil money is a reflection of our times because the Earth needed oil in order to build infrastructure at the stage of the human story that we were at.

Exactly.

Uh, and you're saying that tin was the requirement at that point in the human story?

Exactly.

Which perhaps tells me that there'll be something that people are not even thinking about right now which will become the requirement in the future, which probably seems to be lithium

right now.

Possibly.

It's possibly going to be the rare earths.

Possibly.

By the way, you know, rare earths aren't all that rare.

What are rare earths?

Rare earths are these new-age minerals that you need for microprocessors and chips and things like that.

So

lithium amongst other— I mean, there's lots of these new-age materials.

I've lost count of them now, but lithium is one important thing.

They are not rare.

It's just that China has done a cartel.

They've done a De Beers trick on rare earths where any, anytime anybody else tries to mine rare earths,

which are actually very plentiful, what China ends up doing is they undercut their pricing,

and they can afford to because they don't operate to market principles.

So those companies go bankrupt, and then China has market monopoly.

This is why it's important to study history.

This is exactly why it's important to study history.

If you want to make money in the future, if you want to understand human nature better, please deep dive into history.

Exactly.

Uh, because, you know, as Mark Twain said, history does not repeat, it rhymes.

Wow, what is this?

Uh, so, you know, people say history repeats itself.

Mark Twain says it doesn't repeat, it rhymes like a poem.

So it's not the exact same, but it's similar.

The skill lies in seeing what patterns— what, what is the variation on the pattern repeating?

Because it'll never be the exact pattern that repeats.

It'll be a variation in the pattern that repeats.

So it's

in the Bronze Age, they knew— we know for a fact that they knew how to smelt and work iron.

There's very clear evidence of it.

Uh, most famous is Tutankhamun's meteorite dagger.

It's a gold handle, but the, uh,

blade is made of metal melted from a meteorite, iron melted from a meteorite.

In those days, the iron would have been more expensive than the gold, hmm,

because the kind of extraordinarily high temperature for those times required to melt that gold was a secret.

It required huge amounts of wood and coal and whatnot to burn in very specialized chambers,

which then means that you have to expend a lot of money, effort, and expertise into melting that gold, which made it more— into melting that iron and shaping that iron, which made it

more expensive than the gold.

But you know what happens when in 1177— that's the approximate, that's the exact date of the Bronze Age collapse all these trade systems are overstressed.

There's a full system of systems collapse, possibly climate change driven.

The trade systems break down.

Now imagine a world that is so dependent on tin.

When the trade systems— today, if petroleum stopped tomorrow, hmm,

what do you think is going to happen?

We're going to shift towards hydrogen cars or battery cars very, very quickly.

Before anything else.

And the shift that happened was to iron.

And they discovered that iron was actually much more democratic and egalitarian than bronze was.

Why?

Because tin was rare and had to be transported from India or Britain.

Long, arduous, very expensive journeys, which made the metal so expensive.

With iron, It is abundant across the Earth's surface without exception.

And all it really required was trees and coal.

As in, you just need to chop down enough wood and have enough coal.

So the innovation was coming up with new furnaces.

Okay.

So it was actually apparently the introduction of air bellows and things like that that they discovered which meant that they used less wood and less coal than they did during the Bronze

Age to smelt the same amount of iron.

Okay, just to get this clear, I'm going to ask you some rookie questions.

Okay, so when we're talking about this progression of stone to copper to bronze to iron, you're primarily talking about making harder materials, right?

Stronger, more durable, harder materials.

Uh, and all these materials were used for weaponry as well as infrastructure.

Yes, that's why these phases of history are called X Age and Y Age and Z Age.

Yeah, correct.

Exactly.

Understanding?

Exactly right.

Uh, and this is what determined all of the world's trade networks as well.

Uh, why do you say that 1177 was the date?

Well, there's a famous book by Eric Cline called, uh, 1177: When the world collapsed or whatever.

It's, it's an arbitrary date, but it's a fairly accurate date.

You look at it, all the civilizations collapse simultaneously around, uh,

30, 40 years before, or 30, 40 years within a 30, 40-year range of that exact date.

This is AD, uh, BC.

This is BC.

1177.

Bronze Age collapse.

Yeah.

So after this, Egypt is a Bronze Age phenomenon.

After the Bronze Age, Egypt is nothing.

Egypt never enters the world stage ever again.

It was the preeminent power of the Bronze Age.

It was also ran in the Iron Age.

So by 1000 BC, for example, Egypt is nothing.

700 BC, they try some stunts, but they get hammered very badly by the Assyrians and sent right back.

So, uh, You see all the empires, the Mycenaean Empire with the ones that who went and sacked Troy.

I mean, the Trojan War is based on them, they collapse.

Um, the, uh, all the Phoenician city-states, so what is Israel and Syria, they collapse.

The Hittite Empire in Turkey collapses.

Mesopotamia at this time, uh, not Sumeria at this point, it's Mesopotamia, uh, they collapse.

Um, it's

And there are two Bronze Age collapses.

There's an early Bronze Age collapse, which is where Harappa, Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley collapse.

That's around 3,900 years back.

And there is the later Bronze Age collapse, which is 3,100 years back.

As in, it's replaced by another civilization?

Well, it's the Dark Ages for a while because literacy goes down.

Why?

Because literacy was concentrated in palaces.

It's the palace economy we're talking about, right?

In order to get wood, you just literally need to walk 20 meters outside your house and there's a tree out there.

In order to get iron, maybe you have to walk about 2-3 kilometers outside your house and you'll get the iron in some rock deposit or something like that.

But to get tin, it comes from a minimum of 5,000 kilometers away.

Mm.

It has to be prospected.

It's rare, so you need to know where it is.

The person around it needs to know what it is,

learn how to extract it, transport it all the way to a coast, then a long 5,000-kilometer journey.

Super duper expensive.

So metal bronze was not commonly accessible to the people in those days.

It was very expensive.

Iron was only expensive because they didn't know how to smelt it and the amount of energy it took.

Suddenly, because of technological innovation— why?

Because tin is no longer available, petrol is no longer available today—

they put a huge amount of brainpower into seeing how less wood or coal they can use

to smelt iron, and suddenly it becomes available to everybody.

Everywhere.

It's like, you know how computers— where once I— you're much— you're half my age—

when the first computer I saw was when my mom took me to her office in the Tamil Nadu government.

The computer was the size of a whole room.

It didn't even have a keyboard.

Each alphabet and digit and comma and full stop had to be punched on a machine individually and fed to it.

By the time I got into school, it had— you had a keyboard.

Today, you know, this one phone,

it has more processing power and communication power than the President of America had in 1980 at his disposal.

Uh,

and even then, what the President of America had to do the same things in 1980 would take about 3 to 4 jumbo jets, Boeing 747s.

Today I'm literally holding it in my hand.

It's worth $1,500 or something like that.

It's affordable.

So this is the democratization of technology.

It's exactly what happened with iron, is exactly that.

Everybody could then use a metal that was harder than bronze, much cheaper than bronze, available to everyone.

Right, which means

it is not just the big players who can monopolize

empires.

Everybody can create empires.

So more war, more war, more war, more tribal invasions and things like that.

Uh, and this is when the steppes start becoming really, really really important.

Uh, remember, our own so-called Aryan invasions happened somewhere in the Middle Bronze Age.

And I don't agree with a lot of Western Indology.

I think it's a whole load of misread bullshit.

But if you accept this theory, that

the theory we were taught in school was that the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilization was conquered by

invading invaders from Central Asia who wielded iron weapons.

So iron proves that crucial tilt factor.

Uh, it equalizes everybody.

Uh, empires start popping up everywhere, but literacy also then starts spreading.

Right, because empires require literacy.

Like, in the Americas they don't, but here they do.

And all this while, the Americas are cut off from the rest of the world completely.

For 15,000 years, they're cut off.

They've not even reached the Bronze Age.

They have not even reached the Bronze Age.

So if there were a world war to happen at that time, Asia, Africa, Europe would probably

destroy the Americas?

Oh yeah, yeah.

First of all, we would have destroyed them through diseases,

uh, because remember this notion that the white man went and conquered America through the force of arms.

90% of the native population had died because of Old World diseases.

So we were essentially conquering— I, I talk as if I'm white, but I'm not, but let's just say us Old World types um,

conquered America after 90% of them were already dead.

It's effectively like the Earth had two different stories going on parallelly.

Yeah, it was literally that.

It was literally that.

The Americas were a time capsule where cannibalism, human sacrifice continued right up to 500 years back, bro.

And you know, there were two instances of contact of Europe.

The first was 1,000 years back when the Vikings made contact with, uh, Northern America, but whoever they met were so hostile and so poor that they didn't see the value of trade with

them, and the hostility wasn't worth the effort.

And then there's Columbus

in what, 1492,

uh, who discovers the Americas.

And at that point, it's worthwhile.

It's worthwhile because he's after gold.

He wants the gold.

He thinks there's a— he thinks he's come to India, which is why they're— the Native Americans are called Indians.

What happened after the— so in the Iron Age itself, uh, so in the Iron Age, you see that there's a huge sophistication of language that suddenly develops.

Religious ideas become much, much more sophisticated.

Sophisticated.

So it's called the First Axial Age, right, where you have people like Zoroaster, the Buddha, uh, possibly the Jains, the Tanka, and things like that.

The early

Greek religious codification and things to happen.

The Bible is formed, is created around 700 BC, right?

And we know the Bible had nothing to do with 1000 BC or Moses and things like that.

These are all stories collected around 700 BC by a king called Hezekiah.

We know exactly who wrote the Bible.

It's a king called Hezekiah, uh, in about 700 BC-ish.

This is— you're talking about the Old Testament of the Bible?

A lot of people who are not familiar with the Bible assume that the Bible starts with the story of Jesus Christ, but that's the new— that's the New Testament.

The Old Testament, which is the Torah, which is what the Jews believe in.

They don't touch the New Testament.

I think even Islam believes in it.

Yes, the Islam believes in the Quran plus— so Jews believe only in the Torah, which is the Old Testament.

Uh, Christians believe in the Torah plus the New Testament, which is the story of Jesus.

Muslims believe in the Torah plus the New Testament plus the Quran.

And, and their holy days are Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

For the Muslim, it's Friday.

For the Jew, the original one was the Saturday, the Shabbat.

And for the Christians, they wanted Sunday to be the holiday, so it became Sunday.

And that is why in Italian, Sunday is called sabato.

It's like Shabbat.

Yeah, which is the Jewish.

Yeah.

Wow, they also originated in the same geographical region.

Yeah.

I want to talk a little bit about the Old Testament because I was obsessed with the Old Testament as a kid.

Yeah, uh, I don't know that— I feel like there's magic in those stories.

It really enters your heart as a kid.

And when I look at it from an adult lens, you're saying that they were stories that were accumulated by King Hezekiah.

Hezekiah.

And I believe that the God that they refer to in the Old Testament Uh, is the same God that's referred to in Christianity, uh, is the Almighty referred to in Islam, and is the Almighty

referred to in Judaism?

Yes, it was called Yahweh.

Yeah, but the— so a true Jew will never say Yahweh because the words are considered too sacred.

They refer to him as God, Elahi, from where the Muslims get Allah.

Right now, remember, till Hezekiah's time, the Jews are polytheists,

multiple gods.

Yes, Jehovah had a wife, she was worshiped.

Uh, we know she had a wife.

I mean, there's lots of archaeological evidence of this.

Uh, and there was this general set of Levantine gods who the Phoenicians, the Israelis and all of them worshiped.

Uh, in fact, if you take this timeline of Solomon and David, 1000 BC, to be true, they were 100%, I can guarantee, they were not monotheists.

They were polytheists worshiping many, many, many, many gods.

Hezekiah decides all of a sudden, and he is not the first monotheist— the first monotheist experiment actually happens 700 years prior to Hezekiah in Egypt by this guy called Akhenaten,

whose wife is Nefertiti, the very beautiful bust in the Berlin Museum.

Now

what happens under Akhenaten was Egypt, as we know, was polytheist.

There was Ra, there was Osiris, there was Isis, and all these people.

He initially, under the co-regency with his father, turns it henotheist.

Henotheist is We worship all the gods, but there is one major god above all others,

and that becomes, uh, Aten, which is the disc of the sun.

When his father dies, he makes it monotheist.

He bans the worship of all the other gods.

It's punishable by death,

and you can only worship this one god called Aten, which is the disc of the sun.

So the memory of that experiment already existed.

Judaism was not the first experiment.

It was the first successful experiment of monotheism, but it is historically attested that 700 years prior to this, there was an experiment in Egypt which may or may not have influenced

the, uh, the Israeli experiment.

So, uh, it's Abraham— where Abraham comes from.

Abraham is the father of all the, uh,

Judeo-Christian Arabic tribes.

Abraham is referred as coming from Ur of the Chaldees, Ur-Kaldu.

1000 BC, there were no Chaldees.

We know the Chaldees ruled Ur only about 700 BC.

So, you know, there are such obvious pointers to when the Bible was written.

Who it was written by, what the political implications of

writing the Bible were, and why it was done.

And you can also trace very clearly

the pork taboo from there.

It's a very similar process to the Indian beef taboo, right?

Now,

the beef taboo in India develops sometime around 400 AD.

It's not a BC thing, it's very much an AD thing.

Why?

Because there's de-urbanization happening, uh, you know, the late— the de-urbanization of late antiquity, which starts around 400 AD depending on Rome or where you are.

Some places like China never de-urbanized, but India did, Rome did, the Middle East did, the Byzantines did not.

But you see de-urbanization happen and feudalism coming What is de-urbanization?

Cities stop making economic sense.

They're extracting so much.

Cities are very creative, productive centers, but they extract huge amounts of resources from the neighborhood— wheat, rice, uh, food, metals, fuel, everything.

At some point, when trade networks and things break down, the cost of maintaining a city becomes too much.

It doesn't justify its existence.

And so people start going back into the countryside.

Cities— Rome went from a city of 1 million people to a city of about 30,000 people within the space of a few hundred years.

The same thing happens across North India.

The Gupta Empire, cities stop, cease to exist.

I mean, few cities exist here and there.

They will always exist, but mostly it then becomes a country of villages.

Deurbanization, what ends up happening is the cow's value goes up immensely.

You don't have different people who are able to supply you with milk, butter,

yogurt,

and you know, in India, the cow dung was extremely important as a fuel.

It's much more ecologically friendly.

It's also a very useful building material.

Now, building material, if you remember how bricks were made, was Straw had to be chopped, it had to be crushed with your feet, and then it had to be mixed into mud because it creates

that sort of fiber net like modern composites are.

These fibers mesh together to give it strength.

That is how bricks are made.

Now the cow has already done that for you.

It's picked up grass and leaves, it's chewed it, and so you— its dung already is fiber.

So it's already— so you mix it into mud,

you've saved a huge amount of human labor.

The cow is also providing labor in your fields.

It's your source of protein, it's your source of— through milk and, well, fermented milk, yogurt and paneer.

Uh, it is your source of fat through butter and, uh, ghee that you distill from it.

Butter gets rancid very fast, ghee can last for years, extremely valuable.

It has so many uses.

In a de-urbanized society where you're not getting different things from different places, and so you can afford to kill a cow, you can no longer afford to kill the cow.

You live in a village, you are your own supplier of oil, you are your own supplier of protein, you are your own supplier of building material, you are your own supplier of, uh, fuel.

And you know, if you dry cow dung, it becomes an automatic fuel pellet right there.

The cow becomes so valuable, you just can't kill it.

It becomes sacred for you.

It becomes that expensive.

Purely a phenomenon of de-urbanization.

The pork taboo starts sometime during the early Iron Ages, in the— prior to the 700s.

In Israel because there is a difference between the plains where the Philistines live, what is today south of Tel Aviv, what's actually Gaza today, uh, Gaza and north, north of Gaza

to Tel Aviv, and the mountains where Jerusalem is,

where the modern-day predecessors of the Israelis live.

And what's the thing?

Cities have ceased to exist.

We can't afford afford to have pigs because pigs are a single-use commodity.

You can't drink pig's milk.

Pig's poop can't be used as fuel.

It can't be used as building material.

A pig is a single-use commodity.

It makes absolutely no— it is a waste of resources to grow pigs up in the Judean Hills after you've de-urbanized.

So they come up with story that it's dirty.

It's a dirty animal.

You shouldn't eat it.

Why?

Because it's taking up too much resources for just one product— food.

And that is how the pork taboo comes in.

I wonder how non-veg even evolved as a thing.

Look, we're naturally non-veg, huh?

Vegetarianism evolved out.

We have always— you look at our earliest ancestors, all the evidence, every single humanoid primate species that came before us, including every single early human, all the evidence

is of extraordinary levels of meat eating

all over the world, all over the world, without exception.

Vegetarianism is an intellectual evolution.

It is not natural for human beings,

but that's how it works.

Do you think that's where the world is going?

Do you think that's where humankind is going?

I can never become a vegetarian because I love my meat too much.

But do I think it is

a kinder, more sustainable, more human— not— we've established that humans aren't nice creatures.

It's, it's probably better to be an animal than it is to be a human being.

But let's just say it's a kinder thing to be a vegetarian.

I, I can't be a vegetarian, but I admire till the time they start shoving their beliefs down your throat.

But do I think it's a superior way of life?

Yes.

I think the moment lab-grown meats become— yeah, common— I think lab-grown meats are where we need to go because the sheer cruelty of

the animal slaughter process is probably something we need to avoid.

Yeah.

Because we're doing a historical conversation here, I'm assuming that when we were just hunter-gatherers, it was about eating all different kinds of food, mushrooms, fruits, vegetables,

anything you got because you didn't know where your next meal was coming from.

Now, the issue with a lot of fruits and mushrooms is they, especially mushrooms, tend to be poisonous.

So you need to know what you're eating.

As a rule, brightly colored anything was poison.

And obviously they hunted certain animals and eventually realized some of those wild animals can be domesticated.

Yes.

And bred for the sake of meat.

Yes.

That's how non-veg probably began in like a mainstream manner.

Well, I mean, non-veg was always mainstream because we were hunter-gatherers, but the domestication of cows, of generally of foodstuffs, chickens, goats, sheep, and cows and pigs, these

are the 5 big ones.

Which everybody domesticates, other than fish, which are still hunted technically, if you look at it.

Um,

and we're still hunter-gatherers in that sense, especially pescatarians.

Wow.

Yeah, it, it develops to satisfy the need to continue with the traditions of

your past, because we are made for hunting.

We have canines,

we have 3D vision, So ranging, which is only used for killing.

Had we been

vegetarians, we would have 270-degree vision like deer or cows so that they can see a wide field of view and see when a predator is coming to attack us.

Good point to talk about cannibalism as well.

Hell yeah, look, cannibalism is my thing.

Cannibalism intertwined with the human story.

Now think about it.

Our closest relatives are chimpanzees.

Have you seen the Jane Goodall documentaries?

I know they're from the 1980s, but have you seen them?

I think every— everybody should watch those initial Jane Goodall documentaries she made in Africa.

Chronic cannibalism,

uh, over territory with chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees, they will kill their

neighbor's child and eat them.

Over territory, over small disputes and things like that.

You look at human

species— Neanderthals, Australopithecus,

Ramapithecus— there is not one

human species where evidence of cannibalism hasn't been found.

Maybe the Denisovans, because they're a modern discovery.

Neanderthal proximate, there is not one single human species

where cannibalism hasn't been found.

And imagine a period where the total humans on Earth were just 100,000.

For 10 or 12 people to have been found, that's an extraordinarily high percentage of cannibalism happening.

I mean, look, you're stuck in a time where you can't catch a monkey or or a fish or a deer.

There's a human being who's easy to kill right there.

You're going to kill and eat if you have to survive.

People don't realize how brutal those times were.

Resource scarcity, starvation— you kill what's around and eat it.

It's been the most common thing about humans for the last million years of our existence.

Uh, second only to eating other animals,

but ahead of eating vegetables and fruits.

Wow.

Yeah.

But then what ends up happening is

we slowly— we develop the mind power to realize it's probably not very good for societies to be eating their own.

We slowly start outgrowing it.

We get to the point where it attains a mystical quality.

You're not meant to do it all the time, the moment you get hungry.

You're meant to do it only when it's

the gods call for it.

And that slowly transitions into human sacrifice.

This is the Stone Age we're talking about.

This is still very much the Stone Age.

A human sacrifice transition, I think we see quite clearly only in the Bronze Age.

As in, they stop doing human sacrifice?

No, they start doing human sacrifice.

It— in the Bronze Age, cannibalism goes down massively.

It almost disappears,

and the killing of a fellow human acquires a full-on mystical

religious symbolism, and it goes from cannibalism to human sacrifice.

And that's the Bronze Age transition.

It's fairly standard across every civilization.

If there was a Stone Age civilization, it is fairly safe to assume—

there'll be a lot of archaeologists and historians getting pissed off at me for saying this, uh, but because, you know, you don't assume unless you find proof off.

But then I'd say, why would you think somebody's peaceful?

Because you know those ages weren't peaceful.

It is safe to assume that all Stone Age people were cannibals.

The threshold for cannibalism varied, but they were all cannibals.

Avoid— if you see, if you come across a Stone Age population, if you're exploring somewhere in South America, in the Amazon somewhere, or you discover some lost civilization in Antarctica