Introducing: Badass of the Week

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
I want to tell you a story. In two thousand
and four, Ben was just some scrawny nobody rotting away
in a cubicle farm. It was a dark, pre memes
era of history. The Internet consisted primarily of live journals
and jankass midi files. An an an animated gift of a
dancing hamster blew everyone's minds so hard that they covered

(00:21):
it on CNN. Ben was a big time history nerd,
which hadn't exactly provided him with any lucrative career opportunities.
But one day he came up with an idea. What
if you could take the stories of epic historical heroes,
both famous and obscure, and give their tales the action
movie treatment they deserve. The idea hit him like a
bolt of lightning from the spear tip of a blood

(00:43):
raging valkyrie, and he immediately began hacking away on his
half broken keyboard, blasting out stories of skull crushing historical
figures the way you'd describe your favorite action movie. After
pounding a six pack and chasing it with a big
gulp of red bull, dodging suspicious glances from his bosses
low behind his monitor, Ben started pumping out tales of guts, glory,

(01:04):
heroism in Mayhem told in plain English, and just to
Can Do the Good parts seven hundred website articles and
thirteen books later. Here we are, cool story, Ben, But
how many of those are pure reviewed? Well? Currently at zero? Okay,
zero's a number. Let me introduce my co host for

(01:24):
the show. This is Dr Pat Larish. I have a
PhD in classical philology from the University of California, Berkeley.
I've taught at the college level, but the thing is
telling stories is really the best part. Pat and I
used to work together and you came in after giving
this talk at some kind of like black tie gala

(01:46):
event kind of thing, and I remember being like, how
did it go? And you said, well, I talked for
an hour about Roman Rota, and I think I just
kind of blew everybody's minds. Okay, we have to manage
our listeners expectations. Not every episode is going to be
about Roman erotic, yes, but I do write a lot
of dick jokes into my stories. Okay, Cool, So Ben,
I've been reading the website Badass of the Weight for

(02:07):
years now and thinking, Gee, isn't it nice to be
able to let your hair down and just tell stories.
In this podcast, we're going to talk about some well
known badasses, like Glad the Impaler in Genghis Khan, and
we're also going to talk about some less well known ones.
But I might bring up last Carina Boobollina. She's an
eighteenth century Greek naval commander and freedom fighter. Yeah, we're
going to talk about some fictional characters, some mythology stuff.

(02:29):
How about Hercules, the semi divine Greek strongman who had
brains to go with the braun? So what makes somebody badass?
These people were going up against sinningly impossible odds and
they just broke through every wall in front of them
until they accomplished whatever it was they were trying to accomplish.
There's also something really inspiring to be able to step
out of our current day, time and place and just

(02:51):
sort of remember that we're part of something bigger than ourselves.
That what makes us human goes back centuries, it goes
back millennia. So that's what this podcast is all about,
showing what human beings are capable of, what we've been
able to do in the past, and what will continue
to be able to do in the future. This is
Badass of the Week, the new podcast from iHeartRadio and
High five Content. Listen to Badass of the Week on

(03:11):
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.