Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2058 - Elliott West
Uploaded: 2023-11-07T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2058 - Elliott West' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-11-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2058 - Elliott West' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-11-07. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2058 - Elliott West

Joe Rogan podcast check it out the Joe Rogan experience trained by day Joe Rogan
podcast by
night all day oh sir hello thanks for doing this really appreciate it you're
quite welcome I really
enjoyed you on the meat-eater podcast and that's why I reached out and I
started reading your the
book on the Nez purse and then I picked this up as well continental reckoning
that is that's
a hell of a book that's a big book that's a big book how long did it take you
to write this the
writing probably eight to ten years the research and so forth more than more
than 20 years yeah
wow yeah a long time so this is a lifetime of work continental reckoning the
American West in the age
of expansion one of the most fascinating subjects I think in the history of the
human race I mean it
is just such it's such an amazing story and such a tragic story and such a
crazy story of the amount
of change that took place over a relatively short period of time yeah 30 years
yeah and how little
most people really understand about the actual history of the Native Americans
and and that one
of the things that was most fascinating about the mediator podcast was that at
the time that Lewis and Clark
had come to America a hundred years before that there had been Native Americans
that had traveled to France
that's right and met with the king that's right yep yep yep that's right 18 or
1720s there was a group
of Native people from Kansas Missouri area and they had been accorded by the
French because the French
wanted to expand their fur trade into into that area up the Missouri River so
they and the Spanish had
recently suffered a terrible military defeat there in sort of what's today
Eastern Eastern Nebraska so so
the French sent this guy named Etienne Bourgmont to make contact and he already
had contact there in fact
he had a son by one of the women in the Missouri tribe made contact made some
friends made some allies
courted them and then to sort of seal the deal he took back a delegation of
about six Indians now this is from Eastern Nebraska
which tribe was this there were several tribes a Missouri tribe the Illinois
tribe I think some Osage
and they were and they were and he then took them back from there down the
Mississippi down to New Orleans
and then over across the Atlantic to the Havre and then they went by coach from
there to Paris and they spent
several months there in Paris being fitted by King Louie the 15th visiting the
Paris Opera which they said was a great place full of sorcerers
why did they describe it as sorcerers I think they figured these people were
just sort of transformed for their eyes you know they
just became somebody else a great actress of course I think that was it they
saw this
thing but puppet show on a pont neuf bridge and they said it was a this place
was inhabited by small dwarfs
and they loved it they were taken to the Court of Fontainebleau they showed
their expertise at hunting by riding bareback
in the Bois de Belon you know the royal woods naked and bareback shooting pheasants
had a great time one of them a woman
who was in fact the the woman who had born Bergmann's child she married a sergeant
in Notre Dame
they had a they had a wonderful time and the the men liked just about
everything except except the men
other men the French men they said they were sort of effeminate and sissy and
they said they said they smelled like alligators
alligators interesting yeah but this was a you know this 1720s
so that's uh that's what 80 years or something before before Lewis and Clark
even made it out to that
area that is so fascinating
that's fascinating now what was the language barrier how did they communicate
well uh there were
Bourgmont himself uh had uh lived for years uh among the indians and was an
expert on the missouri river
so he was a he was a frenchman who came over uh enlisted in the army deserted
uh sort of went native
uh became a uh you know courier de bois a french mountain man uh took up with
the indians uh had
this child by this woman so he knew he knew the languages quite well uh and
there were other
remember these these indians as you can tell in this story uh were very cosmopolitan
you know very
sophisticated they knew english or some some of them did uh so i think the
point to remember is that this
long before our image of americans you know coming into this area there was all
sorts of contact
between native peoples and europeans all sorts of exchanges
it was a really a mixed world a world that was far more complex uh former
interesting in my opinion uh
than the than the usual way that we that we remember it to put it into
perspective it's it's hard to
it's hard for us in 2023 to look back at this time period and and really have a
context for it
but to put it into perspective so first europeans arrive here essentially in
the 1400s
right oh yes the very very first very first late very late 1400s so this is
200 plus years after that that's right so we're essentially talking about
us thinking about the 1820s yeah right that's right so there was hundreds of
years of europeans
slowly making their way across the continental united states that's right spanish
coming up from the
south of cabesa de vaca cabesa de vaca uh 1520s uh the french coming in quite
early up to the what's
today the northeast uh eastern canada uh that had been going on across a long
time uh before the english
began their very slow and timid expansion into the uh beyond the appalachians
so it's interesting because
if you ask the general public about the expansion they they seem to put it into
the time period of the 1800s
that's right but there's so much more going on hundreds of years of that which
is hard for us to
imagine again it's like us thinking that the 1800s like 1823 was just yesterday
it wasn't right a long
time ago so there's hundreds of years before that yeah that's right and that
had been going on slowly
sort of a slow simmer of these two of these cultures the cultures coming
together you know uh and so um
uh in many ways in you know which the indians were far more sophisticated and
well traveled far traveled
uh than the and the americans who were who were coming in there and we think
you know our our national
myth has it that when lewis and clark this is in you know 184 186 lewis and clark
make their way up
the missouri river into the west that that's sort of the start of the history
of the west before that right
uh lewis's famous quote as they left the mandan villages in 185 says we're
heading up he compared
himself to columbus they said we're heading into this place where the the foot
of civilized man has
never trodden not true not true no well to the best of their knowledge well
which is interesting also
right the amount of information that was available back then it was so
difficult to find out what was
going on well sure maybe just like today you know information is power right
and you don't want to
let your imperial rivals know what's out there you don't want them to know what
you know right so
it's just right these sort of state secrets yeah so have you read uh the uh
cabeza debacle book uh a
strange new land yes i have a land so strange a land so strange andres rescindes
which is a fascinating book
because they essentially document the spread of disease without meaning to do
it because that that
is really where it all started from a lot of it did yeah it's a wonderful book
yeah it's an amazing book
and you know they talk about culture they like they talk about the mayas and
you know there's always
been this confusion as to what happened to the mayas but it's probably the same
exact thing that happened to
90 plus percent of the native americans that contacted smallpox maybe uh the
mayas declined
a good bit before that but but who knows it's very hard to say but certainly
disease uh was a very
important factor uh and the conquest of native peoples and the in the uh
conquest by europeans of north
america and south america yeah is it clearly established that cabeza debacle
was one of the first europeans to
make it to the to the continental united states or was was it possible that
others had made it before
that but we we don't have record of it he was the first movement to encounter
what we know today as
southwest uh he was part of a shipwrecked expedition on the texas coast uh and
he and a few others
including a black uh slave african slave esteban stephen uh they were the ones
who made their way first
enslaved by the indians uh and then they gradually made their way across the
southwest up to into what
is today arizona like the zunis and then made their way southward into mexico
fabulous journey what a
story it's an insane story and if you look at the history of the human race
across the country across
the the planet rather it's one of the most transformative stories in such a
short amount of time where
everything changed so rapidly because it it coincides with the industrial
revolution and all these things
happen and and then you have massive cities appearing in these places where
there was nothing before
yeah that's a bit later yeah but it's all over this period of a few hundred
years which is such a
transformative time period that's right if you think of it as sort of a i think
of it as kind of a curve
of change or a graph right now we've got to remember all kinds of changes up
and down up and down before
long before the europeans came you know the rise and fall of civilizations
fantastic stories about that
yeah so there's that but then the europeans come to come into this area and
that that line just goes
goes straight up very and it keeps and it keeps accelerating it keeps
accelerating so uh it's important to
remember that uh change has been going on for 15 000 years in what's today in
the united states uh interesting
changes that i think people don't recognize nearly enough and they ought to
they ought to uh but the
pace of that change uh accelerates at this uh really astonishing astonishing
degree well they keep pushing back the
date of modern humans in north america as well yeah you know it used to be clovis
first and then the
discovery these 22 000 year old footprints and white sands yeah yeah now they
don't even know i mean maybe
there's some stuff that we haven't found that predates that considerably i
suspect there is that's one of
the that's one of these questions that we thought we had answered right but as
usual we hadn't and that
question's been uh very vigorously argued yeah recently um all sorts of new uh
new discoveries
in places that we didn't know there were people before until fairly recently
like the amazon so all
of a sudden we are defining these sites in the amazon we have no idea who these
people were they don't
seem to be culturally related to others in south america where they come from
right when did they get
there yeah i've discussed this many times with graham hancock and uh one of the
things that he has brought
up recently is the use of lidar and through this use of lidar they found these
grids and what appears
to be irrigation systems and streets and structures and foundations and all of
it unexplained yeah and
all of it was essentially covered by vast rainforest right yep until until
fairly recently it's really on the
couple last uh two or three generations that we've begun to even poke our way
into that place right to
begin to feel this out theodore roosevelt's granddaughter incidentally was one
of the uh key figures in
investigating this yeah really an anthropologist yeah she was really
interesting um do you think that
with the amazon that we're looking at disease there as well that's probably
european settlers came and
or you mean to explain the yeah i doubt that these these go away those ruins
seem to go way way way
back i mean thousands of years before the europeans show up so there's no
explanation for the decline
like maybe some other diseases or something like that we don't know just we don't
know a whole lot
about what diseases were