Joe Rogan - Stories of Native American History

So are you digging doing this podcast? Are you kidding me? History on fire? Oh man, I'm loving it. Well, let's put it away. I love doing it. It's a royal pain in the ass, the research. Your podcast, much like Dan Carlins, is very different. I always feel ashamed calling my podcast a podcast because you sit down and talk, but yours is like, it's an audio lesson on history, an in-depth audio lesson on very extreme aspects of history. Yeah, it gets ... And that part I enjoy because the storytelling part is awesome. You got to spin a story, make it exciting, connect it with pop culture, do something that's fun. That's the part that I love is the month prior to that of just brutal research just combing through boring historical book after boring historical book to find those little nuggets that are amazing and then spin it into a narrative. That's the part that gets a little old sometime where you're like, man, do I really need to read 200 hours of stuff for this one thing? It's like, that's a lot. Yeah, I can only imagine. Now, when you do that, when you're going over, combing over all these different history books and all these different papers written on various times, are you extracting chunks and putting them in Microsoft Word and then going over it? Do you form it ... My question is, do you form it as a script or how much of it ... So everything is completely written out? No, not exactly because otherwise then it sounds like you're a guy reading a thing and it's boring and it doesn't sound right. I just take super extensive notes, kind of like if you are to give a lecture that you've never given, you're not going to sit down and read it, but you have something to keep you on track to make sure it's like, oh, where am I going next? Okay, great. So it's as detailed as possible without turning it into a dry guy reading his page type of stuff? Yeah, I mean, history is such a fucking awesome subject because people are crazy and throughout history people have done so many crazy things that it's just ... It's such a great thing to know. If you only had today, like if we only had our current era and we're looking around at how fucking maniacal people are and how crazy the world is, we'd be like, God, how'd this happen? How did we get here? And then you just listen to your podcast and you go, oh, this shit's been going on forever. Yeah, seriously. This is the good times. Exactly. This is ... In case you are wrong, there are these good times. And yes, there's much to complain about. And yes, there's much we can do better. Not a doubt, ladies and gentlemen, but this is as fucking good as it's ever been by far. Yeah, the human psyche is a very weird place because there's so much amazing stuff that human beings do. There's just so much. And then there's the amount of horror that can be unleashed throughout history, that has been unleashed throughout history by people against other people. It's just insane. Yeah. What is like when you go back and you go over history, what is the most confusing or disturbing era? To me, it's not so much a particular period because the same patterns emerge a lot of the times at different point in time. It's more those moments when mob mentality takes over. Because the reality is the average person is not ... I don't have the world view where I think the average person is evil. I don't think that. I think the average person is weak, which means that when in a conditions where everybody's pushing in one direction, it's very easy to jump on the bandwagon. And in some cases, then a very ordinary human being can do horrible actions. You meet them for dinner and you think, a pleasant person, good enough, but you put them in the wrong context and everything turns to shit. I just did ... I just finished right now this two-part series. That's probably the most disturbing. Now I want to do a podcast about flowers and puppies because this one was heavy, man. I did this series on kind of comparing contrast on the Sankrik massacre of the Cheyenne in Colorado in the 1860s and then Mila in Vietnam in 1968. Actually, I split it because I did the Sankrik and I had this guy, Darryl Cooper, who was the Martyr Maid podcast. He's an amazing podcast and he covered Mila. And then in the third episode, we're going to sit down and kind of chat about what does this all mean about the human nature? Why do ... The reason why that particular story, those two stories interest me is because it's a brutal massacre of civilians, but in both cases, there are soldiers who refuse to participate or actually try to stop it. They are not the majority, they are a minority, but they are there and they try. So it's not just a story of people doing ugly stuff. It's like, what is that make one guy when order, hey, go shoot that three-year-old. One guy goes, yes, sir, and does it. And the next guy goes, no, that's not who we are. Screw you, I'm not doing that. That's what interests me, is the individual element of what make people in the exact same circumstances, one person go down a really dark path and somebody else instead having the balls to say, no, that's not who I am, that's not what we do. With the Native American massacre, how many people were the ones that refused? Because you never hear about that. All you hear about is the horrific actions of the soldiers. Yeah, which was the majority, but there was also ... There was this one guy, what's the guy named Silas Soul. He was talk about a guy with balls of iron, because the guy, he and a couple of other officers refused to let the men under them because they were divided in different companies. So their companies, they said, no, we're not participating in this. This is just straight up slaughter. These guys are not even a real target. These are a bunch of civilians. So they refused and then Silas Soul testified against his commander at the inquiry and then he was promptly murdered shortly after that. So it's a crazy story, but still to this day, there are people from the Cheyenne tribe who every year they have a ceremony for Silas Soul because they say, I did not been for him, a lot more of us would have died on that day and he did a really brave thing and paid a price for it. So if you're looking for heroism, you can do a lot worse than look at this guy's story because that guy was seriously ... Stand up for his conviction under the most extreme circumstances. So can't help but I admire that. Yeah, it had to be incredibly difficult to just imagine what those people were doing. When you hear some of the accounts of the slaughters of Native Americans, it's just terrifying that people can just look at someone and just decide that's not a person or that's not us. This is the other. They've got to be eliminated. So we're just going to kill all these kids, going to kill all these women. And it happened all over the country. There's two things that happened to Native Americans. One, the big one is disease and wasn't on purpose. There's this big myth that people put smallpox in blankets and that's all bullshit. It's pretty much been proven that they didn't really understand bacteria or diseases. There's one story that's possible, it's not a proven thing. Because initially nobody understood bacteria in disease or the first 10 or plus years completely unintentional. There's one tale about the French and Indian War where during a break the British are talking about it saying, one of the commanders saying, hey, maybe we should give them some blankets from the smallpox hospital. But while we do know that he suggested it, we have no proof whatsoever that it was actually done. So that's probably how the rumor got started, right? Probably. But in most cases what happened is just that the Europeans came over and just inadvertently introduced Native Americans diseases and 90% of them were wiped out. That's a crazy number if you really stop and think about it. It's considered probably the most dramatic demographic disaster in human history because never before you had a situation where a whole continent was not exposed to a series of diseases. And so of course there's no immunity. The first time they're exposed, you don't need to even have smallpox. You can sneeze on somebody and the next day half the village is dead. Yeah, that's crazy. It's amazing that if a group of people just has not come in contact with something that other people come in contact with all the time and just, God, we got a cold, you'd be fine, just have some chicken soup, take a nap. Meanwhile, these people are just dead. That's probably why aliens don't show up. It's like those motherfuckers are dirty. If they show up, they sneeze on us and our whole planet will die. Or maybe the opposite, they know they'll kill us. Maybe they have some super advanced diseases. That's the other possibility. I guess it's just an immune system thing, right? If your immune system is not prepared for it. That's how it is. There's a great book by a guy named Dan Flores. Well, he wrote two, but one of them actually, actually it was a paper that he wrote about the buffalo. And he's saying that it's really interesting because he compares the initial encounters that European settlers had and European travelers had before the Native Americans were wiped out and they talk about how many animals were on the plains and they make a direct account of it. And then after the Europeans had come and 90% of the Native Americans had been wiped out, that's when the buffalo population increase goes through the roof. And you're seeing these gigantic packs of, it wouldn't be packs, herds, I guess, of millions and millions of buffalo. And he said that's directly attributed to the lack of predators, which means lack of Native Americans. They were preying on these buffalo. Of course. Wasn't it interesting when they talked about, when he talked about all of the people that were kidnapped by Native Americans that chose to live with them. And then when they were taken back by the Americans, by the settlers, they were like, fuck this, I'm going back. I'm going back to the Native Americans. And they went and lived with them again. But no one went the other way. No, not at all, which is really crazy. See something not flattering about the Euro-American culture of the time. There's a great Benjamin Franklin quote. I'm going to butcher it because I only remember the beginning. Something about no European was tasted savage life and then basically gone to come back to live in our settlements or something like that. And I'm like, yeah, let's see something about- Because it's fun. The way they're living, they're camping, they're hunting and fishing every day. And you go back and these assholes are wearing powdered wigs and banging a wooden mallet on a table for everybody to pay attention. Fuck off. That's hilarious. Hear ye, hear ye. That's what I read about cultures. People sometimes will then romanticize native cultures as like, oh, they're all hag trees and talking with the furry creatures of the forest. And I'm like, well, yes and no. There are what you mentioned. If you were captured, especially in the East when French and Indian war or stuff like that were going on, if you were captured by Edwardian and native raid, one of two things happened. The good one is that they like you and they decide to adopt you. And then you end up replacing one of their dead family members. So like if they lost a brother or a father, then you become that person for- That's crazy. That's a weird thing that they did. It's very weird. But the thing is the adoption process was so thorough that they love you like you're the real deal and you end up feeling like you're part of this family and everything works out. Everything is great. If they don't like you, then they torture you to death over a three day period. So it's like, these are the same people, right? So they can be the sweetest, most awesome humans or really messed up. Same culture, same individuals. Do you think that's just because people have evolved dealing with tribal warfare and just we have to have that switch? I think it's because the thing that's interesting about natives is that it wasn't a racial thing. They adopted anybody, right? Doesn't matter what skin color you have. That they did not have a barrier to, but there is a big insider, outsider. If you're part of our tribe and you may become part of our tribe, race doesn't matter. You can become part of our tribe, but once you're part of our tribe, you're one of us. But if you're not part of our tribe, then the same rules do not apply to you. You are the other, you are an enemy, you are. And in that case, that's when it gets really brutal. Yeah. And that's when you're talking about other Native Americans. That's the thing that people need to really get in. Like we, especially people that only have a peripheral understanding of Native American culture, like the reason why Sioux are called Sioux is because that's a Native American word for enemy. Yep. They call themselves Lakota people. Right. Exactly. So all the other Indians were like, fuck these crazy assholes. Of course. They're taking over. They're the enemy. Yeah, totally. They were just dominating. Yeah. It's really fascinating when you consider that these people had these hunting grounds that they were trying to protect. And one of the things that they found is that there are areas where wildlife thrived and the wildlife thrived in these gray areas. Yep. Because this one area would be one Native American tribe and then their hunting grounds went to a specified distance. Yep. Obviously, always in conflict. But then past that was another Native American tribes. But in the middle, that's where you'd find all the fucking animals. Of course. Nobody hunts me. They are worried about killing each other in the danger zone. So no, I thought that's how it is. It's crazy that they figured that out.