"the following is a conversation with dan carlin host of hardcore history and common sense podcasts to me hardcore history is one of if not the greatest podcast ever made dan and joe rogan are probably..."

"before the apocalypse if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube review 5 stars nappa podcast follow on spotify support it on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman and now finally he..."

"that's a slippery one but i think there's some way in which your existence your presence in the world leads to pain and suffering and destruction for many others in the rest of the world so you you st..."

"people yeah that's one of the dark things about i've spoken and read the work of stephen codkin i'm not sure if you're familiar with the historian and he's basically a stalin a joseph stalin scholar a..."

"well i'm fascinated with the concept so fascinated by it that the very first hardcore history show we ever did which was a full 15 or 16 minutes um was called alexander versus hitler and the entire qu..."

"alexander a worse person than hitler because hitler thought he was doing good whereas alexander if you believe the interpretation was simply trying to exalt alexander so the the motivations of the peo..."

"i think that and i think that there's historical figures that that that one could point and but that gets to the deeper question of are these people saying uh do they have something wrong with them ar..."

"and i there's going to be some ground where if those two things are not the same and i don't know that maybe they are where there's certainly some crossover and the re i think force you know you're an..."

"the conclusion myself uh if there is a distinction to be made between force and violence i mean is is um is a non-violent force enough or is violence when done for the cause of good a different thing ..."

"i'm sure that the listeners all hate it but take take germany during uh the 1920s early 1930s before the nazis came to power and they were always involved in some level of force you know beating up in..."

"uh are something we should think of as a permanent constitution forever um but how is one nation state supposed to prevent another nation state from acting in ways that it would see as either detrimen..."

"from but to sort of uh die fighting is uh it's an honorable way to die it feels like that i've always had a problem with this because as a person interested in military history the distinction is impo..."

"going to war and i make a distinction between those warriors and the entities either in the system that they're part of the military or the people that control the military at the highest political le..."

"if you're going to send my son and i don't have a son i have daughters but if you're going to send my son into harm's way i'm going to demand that you really need to be sending him into harm's way and..."

"sure give me example what you mean so you did a program of four episodes of ghosts of the us front yeah so i was born in the soviet union i was raised in moscow my dad was born and raised in kiev my g..."

"in the red army in the red army yeah and they through uh like the the statement was that there's i don't know if it's obvious or not but the rule was there's no surrender so you you better die so you ..."

"i don't know he was a hero to me like i always i grew up thinking that he was the one that sort of defeated the nazis right and but the reality that there could be another perspective which is all of ..."

"for people i'm not sure and i carry it still with me but when i think about the right way to think about that war i'm not sure if that's the correct narrative let me suggest something there's a line t..."

"job right the other thing that the people in the one in the 100 yards of the front line do that the people in the rear medical unit really don't is you kill and you kill a lot right you don't just oh ..."

"or you're saving this town right behind you and you know if they get through your machine gun they're gonna burn these villages they're going to throw these people out in the middle of winter these fa..."

"even with my sort of being younger the love of the soviet union now was it the soviet union this requires a distinction or was it mother russia what it really was was the communist party okay so it wa..."

"all the years of indoctrination into the superiority of your system i mean listen in the soviet union marxism one way or another was part of every classroom's you know you could be studying geometry a..."

"have for your government to believe in the nation to let go of yourself and your rights and your freedoms to believe in something bigger than yourself that's actually uh that's a kind of freedom that'..."

"right that you can make a case and again i don't believe this this runs against my own personal views but that you could make a case that the collective well-being of a very large group of people outw..."

"understanding see our the the traditional american viewpoint is that if a place like china does not allow their people individual human rights then they're being denied something they're being denied ..."

"if it collapses now the from the like gary kasparov has been loud on this you know a lot of people from the western perspective say well if it has to collapse let it collapse you know that's easier sa..."

"mean like one of the things i i still have to do you know i've been focusing on securing the conversation right so i i've been i haven't gone through a dark place yet because i feel like i can't do th..."

"it was a puppet right yeah yes but it was but like still the story was being told i think he believed it early on i think he i believe he still believes it but i think he's deeply suspicious of the co..."

"and the proper policy what you know the steps that we need to take to make a greater nation no they they're unfairly take stuff out of context they uh they're critical in ways that's like shallow and ..."

"longer exist under like some people believe that the green bay packers is the best uh football team and some people can think the patriots and they deeply believe it to where they call the other group..."

"and i mean you go to the revolutionary period in american history and it looks every bit as bad as today right um that's a hopeful message actually so things may not be as bad as they look well let's ..."

"khan sure by the way is it genghis khan or genghis khan it's not genghis khan it's either genghis khan or chingas khan so let's go with the genghis khan the only thing i'll be able to say with any cer..."

"humans as i often say i'm not a historian which is why what i try to bring to the hardcore history podcasts are these sub themes so each show has and they're not i try to kind of soft pedal them so th..."

"and and society can then move forward and there's a lot of these periods where the historians of the past will portray these figures who come in and do horrific things as creating an almost service fo..."

"trouble but what i always like to point out is yes but the khan could still come in with his representatives to your town decide your daughter was a beautiful woman that they wanted in the khan's conc..."

"it wasn't some ideology like with hitler and stalin with hitler the there was an ideology that didn't have anything to do with with war underneath it it was more about conquering it feels like the mon..."

"trade-offs of empire and they'll say well look at the trade that they facilitated and look at you know the religion all those kinds of things but they come at the cost of all those peoples that they c..."

"but when you start talking about who the mongols were i try to to make a distinction they're not some really super special people they're just the latest confederacy in an area that saw nomadic confed..."

"never the equals of the nomads because those people were literally raised in the saddle they compared them to centaurs the comanches great example considered to be the best horse riding warriors in no..."

"i enjoy reading actually about uh when that military advantage ended so 17th and 18th century when the chinese on one flank and the russians on the other are beginning to use firearms and stuff to bre..."

"their settled neighbors that normally i mean chinese byzantine and persian approaches to the steppe people were always the same they would pick out tribes to be friendly with they would give them mone..."

"let's take alexander the great as an example because alexander fascinated the world of his time fascinated ever since people have been fascinated with the guy but alexander was a hereditary monarch ri..."

"between them genghis khan is tough because there's two traditions the tradition that we grew up with here in the united states and that i grew up learning was that he was a self-made man but there is ..."

"to me the interesting thing about hitler is what the hell happened to a non-descript person who didn't really impress anybody with his skills and then in in the 1920s it's all of a sudden as you said ..."

"okay i've uh i've recently almost done with the rise in the fall of the third reich it's one of the historical descriptions of hitler's rise to power nazis rise to power there's a few philosophical th..."

"so when we talk and we had talked earlier about sort of the human spirit and all that kind of thing there are people in the german military who opposed and worked against hitler for example but to me ..."

"comes from seeing people who appear to be more morally profound than you are yourself um so when i look at this i look at that that kind of thing and i just say wow and the funny thing is if you'd hav..."

"suffering economically or suffering because of the betrayal of world war one in terms of the love of country and how they felt they were being treated and a charismatic leader that inspired love and u..."

"better so you have three options if you're an average german person you can go with the discredited government put in power by your enemies that wasn't working anyway you could go with the nazis who s..."

"right um the reparations right so if you say okay well we're going to get back on our feet the reparations were crushing these things prevented the idea of love or brotherhood and all these things fro..."

"i don't think so somewhere along the line and really not at the beginning this guy became absolutely obsessed with this with a conspiracy theory and jews and and and he surrounded himself uh with peop..."

"that's true it's fascinating to think as you've talked so the seeds of his own destruction right the tragic flaw and my hope is this is a discussion i have with my dad as a physicist is that evil inhe..."

"that the destructive people in this world are by their world view incompetent in creating the ultimate destruction i don't agree with that oh boy i straight up don't agree with that so why are we stil..."

"to other people he's not what osama bin laden did and the people that worked with him we would call evil genius the idea of hijacking planes and flying them into the buildings like that and that he co..."

"region but it's not destructive to the entirety of human civilization so the i believe that the the charismatic leaders when time is needed that do good for the world in uh the broader sense of good a..."

"does that make sense yeah totally but i mean i've looked at ayn rand and objectivism and kind of really thought like how bad or good can things go when everybody's acting selfishly but i think we're j..."

"and those leaders will always emerge to save us from the hitlers of the world that want to kind of burn the thing down with a flamethrower that's the intuition but let's talk about you you brought up ..."

"maybe against that in other words i think i would be pleasantly surprised if we could pull that off does that make sense totally i don't mean to be like the i'm the i'm the scripting doom it's fun tha..."

"the stars it's weird to ask you this i don't know what your opinions are but do you think humans will be a multi-planetary species in the arc long arc of history do you think elon will be successful i..."

"away from one of the main causes of damage i mean one of the things this pandemic and the shutdown around the world has done is show us how amazingly quickly the earth can actually rejuvenate we're se..."

"yeah totally and one other thing from my perspective because i'm now starting a company i think the interesting thing about elon is he serves as a beacon of hope like pragmatically speaking for people..."

"right you're you're you're not you can take somebody who doesn't even believe the environment's a problem but they want a tesla so they're inadvertently helping anyway i think that's the genius of the..."

"disillusioned people because of that i guess i didn't hear it as an endorsement i just heard it as a the similar flavor of conversation as you have in in hardcore history it's almost the speaking abou..."

"escalation yes and it go and it creates a momentum of its own which leads fundamentally if you follow the chain of events down there to some form of dictatorial government as the only way to create st..."

"we're almost three hours in and i from previous episodes i can tell you that about 300 000 people are still listening to the sound of our voice three hours in so usually 300 to 500 000 people listen a..."

"not avoid the singular events like you said of somebody starting a fire and so on but avoid the escalation of it the preparedness of the populace to escalate those events to yeah to to turn a singular..."

"that when i came to this country i just believed and i think i'm young but like you know i have a dream of creating a company that will do a lot of good for the world and i thought that america is the..."

"maturity but their life experiences you would easily classify those two people as being in the same generation now because of the speed of technological change there is a vast difference between my 18..."

"mean when you uh i was reading um meghan markle who i don't know a lot about because it's it's too much of the pop side of culture for me to pay but i read a story the other day where she was talking ..."

"them is to eliminate them because they're charismatic leaders who don't come around every day and if you eliminate them from the scene the odds are you're not going to get another one for a while i gu..."

"i would even if that's not true now i tend to believe that and by the way the the company that i'm working on is a competitor is exactly attacking this which is a competitor to twitter i think i can b..."

"uh and by power i mean the power to affect change which is different from government government and i don't mean to interrupt you but i'll forget my train of thought i'm getting old but i mean how do ..."

"dangerous there's several answers one first of all i don't actually to push back on something you said earlier i don't think love is as much of an enemy of the state as as one would think different st..."

"services and so on that means the the companies weren't eloquent whoever the companies are weren't actually good at infiltrating like i think isn't that a song like love is a battlefield i think it's ..."

"been one way so like i've been away now it's two way is to right now so like that's the beauty of podcasting you know i mean now just been fortunate enough with this particular podcast that i see in p..."

"absolutely didn't mean to interrupt you i apologize i guess one a question i have if you like look in the mirror but you also look at me what advice would you give to yourself and to me and to other p..."

"specific things like we were uh talking offline about monetization that's a fascinating one very difficult as an independent yeah and uh one of the things that joe is facing with um i don't know if yo..."

"but then i realized that maybe that these are vehicles for just reaching more people and actually respecting podcasters more and so on so that's what i mean by it's unclear what the journey is because..."

"and so when we started the podcast in 2005 and it was the political one not hardcore history um which was an outgrowth of the old radio show um we didn't have any financial um ideas we were simply try..."

"so i mean everybody's everybody's uh design is different right so it doesn't you know there's not one size fits all but i guess as a long time pirate podcaster um there are you know we've been looking..."

"or they appear to in part at least they understand enough to respect joe rogan and despite what i don't i don't know if you uh so there's the internet and there's people with opinions on the internet ..."

"able to enforce and find the the beauty and the power in the creations that you make even better than you like they don't interfere with the creations but they somehow it's a it's a branding thing pro..."

"done the research wow these are like words out of my mouth yeah you're right so but is there something like like shower thoughts on reddit uh is there some ideas that are like lingering in your head a..."

"so it's mostly you just bring the tools of knowledge to the table and then in large part improvise like the actual wording i always say we make it like they made things like spinal tap and some of tho..."

"so what i always tell new podcasters is they always say i read all these things it's very important you have a release schedule well it's not more important than putting out a good piece of work and t..."

"uh or not necessarily the facts but you know like making sure you painting the right full picture not perfectly right that's what i meant about the audience doesn't understand what a history podcast i..."

"in your very first podcast in the title the very first thing that anybody ever saw with hardcore history is that is the word alexander and because the show's entitled alexander versus hitler i have ta..."

"history sound like it rhymes you know and when you put the constant the human element and you mix it with systems that are similar so one of the reasons that the ancient roman republic is something th..."

"oh now you're into elon musk and i talked about this the simulation thing right nick bostrom's sure yeah the idea that there's some some kid and we're the equivalent of an alien's ant farm you know an..."

"very frustrated young uh uh teenage alien kid dan i can't say i've already complimented you way too much i'm a huge fan this has been an incredible conversation it's a huge gift i your your gift of hu..."