Eat Like Your Ancestors with Raw Egg Nationalist

Raw Egg Nationalist aka Charles Cornish-Dale joined me for a special Jive Talk. We discuss the dietary impact of the Neolithic agricultural revolution, the proliferation of lactose tolerance with Yamnaya DNA, and the changing diets of Medieval Europe. Follow REN here: https://lnk.bio/RAWEGGNATIONALIST Please support Survive the Jive: https://linktr.ee/SurvivetheJive

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:12):
How can we benefit from learning about the diet of
our ancient anthesis? What lessons does history hold for our health?
Today I met with someone who has the answers.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Hello, Welcome to drive Talk today. I've got a special guest,
the recently doxed and exposed health influencer, author, the man
behind Men's World magazine and the book The Egg Benedict Option.

(00:48):
It's the raw egg Nationalist.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
Thank you or till I call you Charles yet, Charles
Ren whatever, egg.

Speaker 4 (00:56):
I don't mind, because.

Speaker 5 (00:59):
I haven't got mind. We're going to have to pass
this back and forth, so bear with us.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
But I'd like to talk about something my followers are
interested in, which is the way that diets have changed
over time. And you've been an active voice online talking
about how these historical curiosities of the changing diets of
our ancestors are relevant to how to our health today

(01:23):
and that we should consider their diets we're making decisions
about how we should eat. So could you tell me
first a bit about how the changing diets and the
shift from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic affected people's health.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Yeah, of course, not can be my pleasure. So I
mean the shift from Paleolithic to Neolithic diets is the
central focus of my book, The Eightsponetic Doctrine. So it's
about the transition from and to gatherer lifestyles to what
we would recognize agricultural lifestyles and the birth of civilization.

(02:03):
And basically I tell the story. I tell a different
story of the transition to agriculture. So we have this
triumphless narrative transition to agriculture. You know, it's the birth
of civilization. Everything good came from it, commerce, education, cities,

(02:24):
urban culture, etc. Technology, and we tend to think that
it was a boon for human health. That's a central
part of the narrative. Life is a hunter gatherer was
extremely difficult. Food was scarce, you know, you had to
go up and actively fine food. And so of course
hunter gatherers wanted to become agriculturists. That's central to this

(02:49):
sort of trumpless art that we have of the agricultural revolution.
And in actual fact, the evidence suggests when we actually look,
the evidence suggests something quite different. So I rely very
heavily on the work of an anthropologist political scientist called
James C. Scott.

Speaker 4 (03:06):
Now he actually died recently, sadly, but.

Speaker 3 (03:08):
He wrote this great book called Against the Grain, which
is which is a retelling of the agricultural the events
of the agricultural revolution, and in particular he focuses on
why it happened and how it happened, and rather than
proposing that it was a sort of voluntary thing that

(03:29):
you know, our hunter gatherer ancestors wanted to do. They
wanted to become agriculturists because it was an improvement on
their life. In actual fact, it looks like the majority
of agriculturists basically had a gun pointed to their head.
They didn't want to do it because life as an
early agriculturist was extremely unpleasant in his early agricultural settlements,

(03:52):
mainly in the.

Speaker 4 (03:53):
Near East, in this area.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
That's known as the Southern Alluvium, which is the sort
of watershed between the Tigris and Euphrates. Reals, life actually
wasn't very good. And one of the one of the
principal reasons life wasn't wasn't good was the actual nutritional
content of the diet. So it's very obvious if you
look at the skeletal evidence. For example, if you compare

(04:17):
the skeletons of our under gallery ancestors to early agriculturists,
that the early agriculturalists were much less robust. They displayed
all sorts of signs of malnutrition that simply aren't simply
aren't there in the skeletal record for hunder Galles. And
that's because of the transition basically from from a very

(04:37):
a varied diet that sort of took in a number
of different food webs. So you're talking mammals, birds and fowl, fish, nuts,
all sorts of harvested and forage things, berries, nuts, et cetera.
You go from that from a very sort of diverse,

(04:58):
very diverse diet to her and narrow diet is based
principally in grains and perhaps in some animal products from
you know, taken from a small number of domesticated animals.
So the agricultural revolution was about the domestication of grains,
but it was also about the domestication of animals as well,
but a much smaller number of animals than hunter gatherers

(05:20):
would have relied on. So what I'm basically trying to
say when I'm looking at.

Speaker 4 (05:26):
The agricultural revolution.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
Is that it was not necessarily what we what we're
told to believe it is. And one of the principal
reasons it's different is because actually it was. It was
a step down in nutritional terms, and you know, there's
a lot of interest in paleolithic diets today, and I
think that's right. I mean, I think I was thinking
fundamentally behind trying to eat in the manner of our

(05:52):
paleolithic ancestors is correct, because you know, we've been modern
humans for two hundred thousand years.

Speaker 4 (05:58):
Maybe that's the sort of general estimate. Let's say that's
a reasonable.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
Estimate, and for you know, one hundred and ten thousand years,
we've been agriculturists. Only some of us as well, it's
important to six thousand Britain. Yeah, yeah, exactly, So it's
actually we're talking less than ten thousand years out of
two hundred thousand years our ancestors have been agriculturists. So

(06:22):
it stands to reason, of course that actually we are
more adapted to Paleolithic conditions as organisms than we are
to agricultural conditions. So if we can find out how
our ancestors that for the longest period of history, then
we actually might have a better chance of being healthy
than eating agricultural diets, the kind of sort of grainslop

(06:48):
diets that we've been eating for the ten thousand years
since or less than ten thousand years, depending on where
we're where we're from. I mean, one of the problems,
the principal problems I think with the sort of Paleolithic
diet movement is that people people think there's a single
Paleolithic diet, and so it's very obvious actually if you
look at ancient sides, you know, at sites in Anatolia

(07:11):
and the Near East and South African places like that,
you actually see that there's a massive variage in diets.
You know, they were eating what was to hand, and
so you know, if you're if you're a paleolithic hunter
gatherer in Britain, you're going to have access to very
different resources to a palelific hunter gatherer in you know,
what's modern day Israel. But but the fundamental idea behind it,

(07:34):
the idea that we should try to eat like our ancestors,
is I think totally sound, and that influence is really
everything that I that I say about nutrition and the
arguments that I make in the book as well.

Speaker 2 (07:51):
Well what you say about the the benefits of the
previous diet might be go somewhere to explaining some recent
findings about in Europe. The previous narrative of you know,
eight thousand years ago agricultures from Anatolia the Neares come
into Europe and replaced it the old way of life
a hunding gathering has been challenged by more recent findings
where it's determined that some pockets of hunter gatherers continued

(08:15):
to live as hunting gatherers long after the arrival of
farming in the region and live side by side with
them even on the up until the eve of the
Bronze Age. And sometimes these hunter gatherers had admixture from
the farmers, so the farmer people from from a farming
background were moving into a hundre gatherer background. So it's

(08:35):
not just a progress from one life to another as
in the marketing view.

Speaker 5 (08:39):
Of history, although also meant the reverse is also true.

Speaker 2 (08:42):
Many hunting gatherers got sucked into the sett intrigue.

Speaker 5 (08:46):
Way of life.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
But it seems that the one ecotype or ecological niche
a hunting gatherers persisted is in wetlands because partly maybe
that might be because farmers weren't going there, but I
think it's also to do with the fact that wetlands
and coastal areas provide a much richer and more reliable
resource where there's waterfowl and swamps and cute mollusks and

(09:09):
easily acquired protein that are low risk and high yield,
so that you can collect oysters and they're not going
to kill you. I mean, less it's a bad one,
but I mean you're not going to get skewed on
the horn of an oyster or something like that, like
if you were hunting or rocks or mammith or something
like that. So I think that might be explain why
in some swampya regions of northern Europe you have persistent

(09:32):
hunting gatherers, And.

Speaker 5 (09:35):
Maybe they just wanted to retain their own way of.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
Life and avoid the diseases associated with the new way
of life. Maybe they just didn't want to eat the slop,
the porridgy grain slot that the farmer people were eating.

Speaker 5 (09:53):
There's certainly.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
Some Skeletallevens understand that some people think the hunter gatherers
were cooler than that coming farmers.

Speaker 5 (10:00):
I'm not sure that's actually true.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
That some contested ideas of the height of the western
hunder gatherers in Europe because it's based on femal length,
and actually different races and groups of people of different
femal length relative to the size of their body, so
it's not always possible to actually gage heighth from a
disarticulated skeleton. But it is true that they were. They
had much better, healthier teeth, they had more robust jaws

(10:27):
and generally more robust skeletons, even if they weren't taller.
But who want people who certainly were taller were the
people who disrupted and the Neolithic way of life, the
eve of the Bronze Age, Eastern Europeans coming in to
Western Europe with a new ecological niche that they've developed

(10:48):
on the step of a diet that was not like
that at the Neolithic farmers or like the hunder gatherers,
but like the hunder gathered diet, it had more proteins,
but these were from domesticated dairying and so dairy products,
and these people also had a higher resistance to various

(11:09):
kinds of pathogens, so they were very healthy.

Speaker 5 (11:11):
They were healthier than the Neolithic people who in parts
of northern Europe were.

Speaker 2 (11:14):
Placed Can you talk a bit about how the pastoralist
in the European diets might have been beneficial for the
health of Europeans.

Speaker 3 (11:25):
Yeah, of course, but actually it will be quite interesting
just to return to what you said about gene flows
between hundicaverers and early early farmers, because a central argument
actually in this book by James Scott Against the Grain
is that for the longest period of time basically until
maybe the seventeenth eighteenth century, and he calls it the

(11:48):
golden age of barbarians basically, and he says, look that
there were still spaces that you could go to to
be a barbarian if you didn't want to be a farmer,
if you didn't want to be a peasant, you could
run away, you could go and live a different kind
of lifestyle. And actually there's plentiful evidence that a lot
of cultivators peasants actually ended up doing that. And he

(12:09):
talks about the fact, for instance, that the walls in
the ancient world actually really were built to keep people
in as much to keep people out. It's about the
uses the Great Wall of China as an example, and says,
you know, this was as much about keeping step pastoralists
out as it was keeping peasant cultivators in and preventing
them from going off to the grasslands and new like.

(12:32):
Then you lose the tax revenue, et cetera. So there's this.
I mean, I think the dialectic between settled agriculture and
pastoralism is a very important dialectic for civilization, for Eurasian civilization,
in various different ways.

Speaker 2 (12:49):
You know, it's in the Bible evens, yeah, yes, yes, exactly, yeah,
and you see it in the you see it in.

Speaker 3 (12:56):
The Cain and Abel, and you know, obviously the vision
of the garden of Eden, Well, that's that's an agriculturist's
vision of paradise writer. I mean the Bible, the biblical
Garden of Eden. Well, I mean, if a pastoralist had
written that book, then it probably wouldn't be a garden,
would it. It would be the open step and you'd have
an endless herd of sheep.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
Well, the Indo European heaven is a meadow there was
conceived of as a grassland.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
So there, yeah, exactly exactly. But I mean the Amnia thing,
the proto Indo European the step hunt what are they
called the step Western step heard Western stephaders, that's it.
So the Western stepheader thing, that's interesting. So there was
a paper that was published a couple of years ago
that was I think it was titled something like dairying

(13:46):
enabled massive Bronze age expansions or something like that, and
it was about using proteomic analysis to show that the
expansion of the Proto Indo europ Appeans out of generally
sort of identified as their homeland on the Caspian Quontic
step took place at the same time as they started

(14:11):
utilizing dairy as a food source basically, and and it
makes sense, it makes sense, you know. So they they
were they were using horses and are domesticated other animals
as well, cattle, et cetera. And then all of a sudden,
there's just this huge explosion, this this massive, massive migration

(14:34):
of the step herders to the Outie Mountains in the
east and Scandinavia in the west. It takes place in
a in a short period of time historically, I mean
it's okay, it might be hundreds of years or even
thousands of years, but that's that's a short period of
time for such a such a huge explosion of flower
and such a great population movement. And coincided with the

(14:56):
peers to go inside with the discovery or even the
readers gavery, we don't know of dairy and you know dairy.
This is where this is where again we have to
deal with modern prejudices about animal foods, because of course
it shouldn't be a surprise that dairy is a dairy

(15:16):
is a food of conquest, you know, I mean, there
shouldn't be a surprise that dairy is a superfood. Dairy
is an incredible source of protein, fat and micronutrients, enzymes
and fat solible vitamins. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know,
a calf becomes an eight hundred thousand pound cow simply,

(15:37):
you know, on the basis drinkings mother's milk. It is
a food for growth. It's a food for proliferation. But
of course we're told to avoid animal products now and
to avoid fats in particular saturated fats, et cetera. But no,
dairy is a superfood, and it makes perfect sense that
actually the discovery of dairy, the ability to produce milk

(16:03):
basically to order and also to preserve it in forms
like cheese and yogurt and kummis fermented fermented milk that
that would actually be an incredible technological advantage for people
to have over its neighbors. And in this skalital evidence
suggests that the East Western step thirders were far more

(16:23):
robust than their agriculturistamers. Like you said, they're resistant to diseases,
and I think they brought diseases as well, didn't they.
I think they brought your Sydney abestos play to Europe. Possibly,
well it did arrive. Sorry they did, they did.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
There's some dispute about this, but yeah, the Ladys Evans
shows that there was a plague hitting Western Europe prior
to their rather than in the Europeans.

Speaker 5 (16:47):
But what's believed.

Speaker 2 (16:48):
Is that part of the reason because of their way
of life, they didn't have large settlements and so the
plague did not impact them culturally the way it devastated
Europe and the Western Europe. Because even if it killed
you know, a third of Indo Europeans and a third
of Old Europeans, the Old Europeans would have complex systems

(17:09):
with different social positions which would have fallen to pieces.
And then you see a result huge decrease in serial
production in places like Scotland and Ireland, for example around
five thousand years ago. But whereas you know, if a
third of the Indo Europeans died, just provides an opportunity
for their brothers to take their land and then continue
the same exact lifestyle. So their lifestyle wasn't impacted by

(17:30):
the plague. But it doesn't necessarily mean they were resistant
to it. It's just they were culturally resistant. But yeah,
they did have there is evidence in a necessary that
they were They had some resistants to other kinds of
pathogens because of the very close relationship they have with animals.
They have a very strong selection pressure to zoomnotic diseases
accord that come from animals. But yeah, this tension between

(17:55):
the pastoralists and the and the agriculture settled agriculturist seems
to if it began with that period of the of
the if pursuit, you know, the Indo Europeans who pioneered
pastoralism of that's kind with the use of wheel vehicles
and horses for herding.

Speaker 5 (18:12):
It continued for thousands of years.

Speaker 2 (18:14):
I believe that the Iron Age hill forts in Britain
that the Celts built are centered reflects some kind of
tension between these two different the pastoralists way of life
that happened in the countryside and the other people who
wanted to have grain, because the central authority of the

(18:37):
hill forts kings is thought to a center around their
grain silos. Yet at the same time British people undergo
a massive genetic bottle or not genetic pressure to increase
in latose tolerance, so they're obviously used depending on milk
a lot more, such that the jam Nay who pioneered
like Darying around five thousand, five hundred years ago, were

(19:00):
only about twenty percent of them were lactose tolerant. So
they were probably still drinking milk from horse milk more
than cow milk, but horse milk.

Speaker 5 (19:08):
Sheep milk and cow milk.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
But I think they were probably eating a lot of
cheese and butter and yogurt and kumis or whatever something
some dairy products would processed dairy products, because few of
them would have been able to get the maximum benefit
from drinking raw milk. But yeah, by the iron age,
Celtic Britons are fifty percent lactose tolerant, and that does
up and up and up, and actually this pastoralism, this

(19:34):
kind of transhuman's pastoralism occurred in its still in the
eighteen hundreds. In seventeen hundred, sorry, in Britain, there were
people driving cattle to summer winter pastures. And we're more
lactose tolerant now than any we've ever burned. We're still
we're now more capable of taking benefiting from dairy products,

(19:56):
and we've other ancestors if it were so it's the
worst possible time and just trying to tell people not
to enjoy dirty. But there was a time when it
seems that we started to regress.

Speaker 5 (20:08):
Having gotten more powerful.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
And strong in the Bronze Age, with the introduction of
this step past for us DNA and the medieval times,
it seems like we start to get shorter. So we
met a Viking today, we'd probably looking eye to eye,
but if we met our ancestors in the High.

Speaker 5 (20:22):
Middle Ages, we're probably looking down on them.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
There was significantly shorter and I'm sure you're aware of
anyone who's visited rural England. Some of the old cottages
you do have to duck to walk into some of
the old churches even as well, and have quite low,
low doors.

Speaker 5 (20:35):
And things like that. Old monasteries. So perhaps you'd like
to talk about what happened in medieval times.

Speaker 3 (20:43):
Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, so I am a medievalist,
I should I should make that I should issue that
caveat so idea. I did a PhD in medieval history, site.
I mean I looked at the Reformation, so I didn't
look at diets in the Middle Ages particularly, but I
mean I I certainly know that. Yeah, I mean, it
does seem that there was a widespread regression in health

(21:05):
and that that was as a result of diets. I mean,
we probably see what we saw in the transition to agriculture,
which is back in the Neolithic ten thousand years ago.
We probably see just a neototal reliance on grains, and
we know that that is not a healthyware to it

(21:28):
that it leads to all sorts of deficiencies across the
Middle East. For example, the use of unleavened bread. Even today,
it's stunting on a massive scale because you have these
anti nutrients, fight apes and things like that, substances within
the within the grains when they're not fermented, that bind
to minerals, prevent the uptake of things like iron, for example,

(21:51):
so they have widespread anemia. The protein quality of grains
and of all plant foods is far less than far
less than animal or food. So what you get as
well is you get protein deficiencies. So a diet that's
built firmly on wheat, even ancient varieties of wheat, which
are superior to modern varieties of wheat in various different ways,

(22:13):
not least of all digestibility, because you know, modern varieties
wheat have been bred to contain more gluten of a
variety that is even less digestible than gluten normally is.
And that's because it's this is why dout the tolerance
is increasing. It's yeah, it's part of it's part of
the reason why gluten intolerance is increasing because yes, grain

(22:35):
products like wheat that flour contain more less digestible gluten,
but it's also because of things like dry for sake
for example, the use prest science, et cetera, and disruption
of the gut microbiome and all that kind of stuff.
But yeah, a grain based diet is not a good thing,
and it does, and it does seem that actually what
we get for for the majority of populations, we get

(22:58):
a downgrade in their kind of source. It's less diversity,
less reliance on animal products. Obviously, you could talk about
the elites, and it's one thing, you know, to be
a pleasant in the Middle Ages, and another thing to
be member of an elite and to be able to
hunt and you have access to high quality animal proteins.
Months seem to have reading well too, a lot of

(23:21):
cheese and things like that. And I think actually the
only evidence for diseases like coronary heart disease in the
Middle Ages, certainly in the early Middle Ages, is from months,
you know, because they're actually they're actually able to eat
the kind of foods and again and actually to get
quite corpulent. But but yes, and I think by the

(23:43):
end of the Middle Ages, certainly in Britain, then things
were looking up and you actually get I can remember
when I was studying the Reformation. I can remember looking
at a letter from a Swiss theologian, Haldgingly, who came
over during the rain web of the sick. He came
over to Cambridge and I think it was the reach
of professor of Greek or something, and he sent a

(24:08):
letter back to his family or friends in Switzerland and
he said, all the rich people eat his meat is
should meat upon meat upon meat, And then yeah, there
does seem to have been a period of quite high prosperity,
actually widespread prosperity in sort of late Middle Ages early
Modern period again, where people were eating a lot of

(24:30):
animal products. You know, if you were if you were
a reasonably prosperous peasant, for example, or a townsman or whatever,
then you would actually eat quite a lot.

Speaker 2 (24:39):
Was that caused by Was that caused by the plague
reducing the population and thereby allowing more people to get
quality meat. I also remember reading something, I think the
fifteen hundred where there was a stereotype of British people
eating a lot of cabbage.

Speaker 5 (24:55):
But I mean, maybe cabbage is not as bad.

Speaker 3 (24:57):
As great so I think, I mean, I'm sure, I'm
sure the plague had something to do with it. I
mean that the plague unleashed all thoughts of you know,
widespread economic and social effects because they killed off a
third of the population. I mean, it was in many respects,
it was a kind of engine of social change. But yeah,

(25:21):
I don't I haven't heard that that stereotype about the cabbage,
But that's I mean, I wouldn't I wouldn't be surprised
if peasant, the real kind of low peasant diets remained
pretty bad.

Speaker 5 (25:30):
But then the cabbage stew would be fine by me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:35):
It's better than it's best than the bowl of slot rule.
But I mean, in fact, there are there's some interesting
evidence actually that you get from armshouses of diets. You know,
because you have books, you have armshouse rules, you have
these books that describe, you know, exactly what went on
in armshouses and the amounts of food that were given

(25:57):
out to be to the inmates or the residents of armedhouses,
et cetera. And actually, if you look at it, I
did a Twitter post about this. Actually, if you look
at sort of armedhouse books from the from the seventeenth
eighteenth century, then even people who were so or they
ended up in an armshouse or a workhouse were eating

(26:18):
things like beef shinned stew every day, and you know,
they would be nice y, Yeah, they'd be eating cheaper
cuts of meat. Of course, it wouldn't have been eating
the kind of fair that you would find on the
lord's table, but they were still eating a diet built
around nutrient dense animal foods. And that's the principal difference

(26:41):
I think between not only between these sort of Neolithic
slot diets that kind of persist, but also when we're
talking about the modern kind of plant based agenda as well.
I mean, this is the difference is the absence of
nutrient dense animal foods. It's not the our ancestors in
the Paleolithic didn't eat plants, because they did, and you know,

(27:04):
even with the gab Nia, who we know from proteomic
analysis it's so much dairy. They caught wildfish and trout too.
They were also consuming vegetables, foraged fruits, medicinal herbs as well,
all that kind of stuff. You know, there's plenty of
evidence for that. It's not that our ancestors didn't eat

(27:24):
plant fruits and we shouldn't. It's just that, if you want,
if you look at the actually healthiest examples of humanity,
our ancestors in their prime, if you will, you know,
when they developed to their physical to their kind of
physical maximum, then they were building their diets around nutrin
dense animal foods. And so whenever we see a movement

(27:45):
away from that, and there are multiple movements away from
that throughout recent histories, about the last ten thousand years,
including within the last century, and today with the kind
of plant based agenda, then we see the same kinds
of ill effects manifesting themselves. And that's that's again, that's
a central part of the argument of the book, The Expendedtach,

(28:06):
you know, is that in many respects, the plant based
agenda today, this this move to get everybody to abandon
animal foods and eat soy and lagoons and alternative proteins,
called alternative proteins, that's in a respect that's actually like.

Speaker 4 (28:24):
A rerun of the agricultural revolution.

Speaker 3 (28:26):
It's like we're repeating history. And I don't think it
would be unreasonable to expect that actually it might have
the same kinds of effects. I mean, populations do shrink.
I mean if we if we had a global plant
based diet, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that actually
populations in the West certainly might shrink.

Speaker 4 (28:47):
Again, you know, you get these you get.

Speaker 3 (28:52):
These absurd people associated with organizations like the World Economic
Forum who talk about, well, actually that would be a
good thing, because that would you know, we need to
be shrinked, because actually that would reduce their carbon footprint.
So there's a lot to be said about about diet
and about the sort of recurrence of this, that this

(29:14):
dialectic between agricultural and hunt together and pastoralist lifestyles.

Speaker 2 (29:19):
Yeah, it's interesting how that dialect does seem to repeat itself.
And I think one of the reasons why the Neolithic
package was popular and useful for human beings despite the
health problems and the inferior diet and less freedom, is
that it allowed people to live in what not initially cities,

(29:41):
but what would become the city's larger settlements. The first
city is probably emerged in Kubotanni, Trapilia and Romania even
earlier than in the in the Middle East. But in
both cases there's relied on agriculture because then you can
have a concentrated population in one air and then as
a result of that, you can develop complicated social systems.

(30:04):
But the sacrifice is that you you lose something of
what human beings were previously to become a new type
of human being, the urban dwelling human being. And I
suppose that's still the same thing that the world, the
World Economic Form and others are promoting, which is like
a movement away from what man was when he emerged

(30:26):
initially and towards something else, with something resembling slightly more a.

Speaker 5 (30:31):
Termite or an ant than the than the.

Speaker 2 (30:34):
Free free man of the of the step or the
forest or what have you.

Speaker 5 (30:40):
I'm quite interested. I don't think you've talked about elsewhere.

Speaker 2 (30:43):
What is that got you interested in medieval history and
why you studied that, and how that's influenced your journey
as the raw egg nationalist and your sort of intellectual travietory.

Speaker 5 (30:57):
You're talking about that, please?

Speaker 3 (30:58):
Yeah, of course, of course. So yeah, So I was
an undergraduate of Exeter and I studied, Yeah, just I
studied straight history and not the sexuality.

Speaker 4 (31:10):
I mean, you know, history.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
And I started off really in my first year I
did quite a wide variety of stuff, some of which
was medieval. So I did a module on early medieval Empires,
That's what it was called, and that looked at the
Fall of Rome and the Carol Engines and the Anglo
Saxons because I just found it very interesting. And then

(31:33):
in my second year I ended up focusing my Anglo
Saxon history and medieval history. And then in my third
year for my dissertation, I ended up doing an Anglo
Saxon subject. I ended up looking at the reign of
King Canute and the settlement of King Canute's Danish followers

(31:55):
in England in the southwest in particular because or the
historical area of Wessex. Rather, I should say because actually
you know, that was the area of England that had
had the least historical Viking settlement during the Viking Age,
and so I wanted to try and understand maybe how

(32:17):
or weather King Canoe had settled his personal followers fellow
Danes in Wessex deliberately in order to help him strengthen
his control of the region. So so that was yeah,
So that was I mean, that was my undergrad So
I ended up as kind of an Anglo Saxonist basically,
and I was writing about the reign of King Canoe,
which was which was great and I really enjoyed. I

(32:38):
went on to directly from Exeter to Anglo Saxon Northern
Celtic Kingbridge, and that was that was such a bizarre place.
I left very quick to Actually, I was like, was
that the place or the course? I was a bit
it was a bit of both. So I had this,
I had the super bicycle Simon Kaan, so I don't
think crime Kanes, but he was He's a direct descendant

(33:03):
to Darwin and he was born in the master's large
at Trinity and nephew of John A. R. Knes and
all this kind of stuff like that, real like old
Cambridge family. Uh kind of died in the wall and.

Speaker 4 (33:17):
We just didn't get he was my supervisor. We just
didn't get on. And I thought like, I'm gonna.

Speaker 3 (33:21):
I'm gonna spend I'm gonna spend a year.

Speaker 4 (33:22):
Doing this and it's just going to be a dishaster,
So walk away from that.

Speaker 3 (33:26):
So I walked away from that. I went back to
Cambridge then and actually did social anthropology because I was
interested in anthropology. When I was studying the Middle Ages
as an undergrad, I did a module on a special
subject module on medieval magic up to the sort of
witch trials, and anthropology was a big part of that.

(33:48):
Evans bridgeard witchcraft, miracles, magic among is andy, that kind
of stuff, and I thought, oh, I'm anthropology sounds like
like a really interesting things, So I did. I did
anthropology in Cambridge for two years and then and then
I went to a sord did a PhD in medieval history,
writing about the Reformation, I mean, it doesn't. It doesn't

(34:10):
seem to bear any obvious relation to to what I'm
doing now, which is quite funny, and in fact, that
is something that Hope not Hate said in their in
their expose about me, was you know, we can't detect
any any obvious continuity between his man's work as a
you know, as an academic or whatever and what he's
doing now. But I mean, I think there is. I

(34:32):
think there is a broad continuity in the sense I've
always been interested in history. I've always you know, tried
to use the past to inform my understanding of the present,
and that is definitely what I'm doing, you know, with
this diet stuff. I mean I'm bringing I would say, actually,
in a way, I'm bringing quite a lot more of
an anthropology to bear. Maybe maybe not as obviously, but

(34:53):
I sort of I do use anthropology quite a lot,
and I do sort of use my anthropological training, but
I mean there are times when I do actually explicitly
reference medieval stuff that I've looked at. So I wrote
an essay called The Village and the war Band about
this dialectic between settled.

Speaker 4 (35:15):
Life and the kind of roving life of the.

Speaker 3 (35:18):
Pastoral list, and I focused on a manual, the Roy
Ladie's book Montayou, which is this very famous nineteen seventies
social history of a village in the French Pyrenees that's
full of cathars, where it was full of cathars and heretics,
and it fell under the under the watchful eye of

(35:39):
the local bishop and the inquisitors, and they were looking
for heretics basically, and it's this really really incredibly rich
portrayal of life in a small mountain village in France.
And it's so rich because you have all of these
records of interrogation. So the bishop was the bishop's office
was regularly intelligating people from the village and they were

(36:01):
having to talk about what they did on a daily basis.
So these were people who lived up in the mountains
and they were agriculturalists, but there were also pastoralists. There
were also shepherds, young men who would go off into
the high mountain pastures with their sheep and live with
them basically for months on end, and then they were
bringing back down to the village and live in the
village for a certain amount of time, and they would

(36:23):
just sort of repeat this cycle where they were coming
and going. But what emerges from this what emerges from
this book, or what was the most saying me really
was the contrast between the life of these young male
shepherds who go off they sort of form almost like warbacks,
almost likely sort of, I mean, they're not going to war,
but they are nevertheless these sort of male brotherhoods, and

(36:47):
they go off and endure hardship together and take the
take the sheep off into the mountain passes. And they
lived this kind of free.

Speaker 4 (36:53):
Life in the high, in the high, you know, sort.

Speaker 3 (36:55):
Of mountain air. And then you have this this village
that's that's kind of horribly incestuous and there's no privacy,
and it's it's a long house basically, it's what it is,
same diapostomy, and so it's a yeah, it was kind
of about the tension between these these two different things
and the persistence of in particular the persistence of this

(37:18):
kind of war band way of life that you see
in Tacitus in the Jermaine, which is actually a book
that I tried. I trans I translated that before to
Hortsword and did a sort of Latin. Yeah, I haven't
I haven't. I haven't been practicing it for a little while,
but yeah, I was. I was good. I mean, my
main sources and my PhD were in Latin, you know,
Church Latin and Churchwarden's accounts, wills and letters and things

(37:43):
like that. So yeah, and my Latin was very good.
It's probably a bit rusty now, but but yeah, I mean,
you know, in Tacitus and he talks about these it
says when German, when the ancient Germans, when their societies
are a numbed by peace, then the young men become
rest less and they go off and look for places
where they can have a fight. Basically, they go look

(38:05):
for places where there are wars and battles, and yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly.
So but yeah, it's interesting. So that's what really kind
of that's the continuity. I think it's thinking about the
persistence of particular historical ways of being, and you know

(38:26):
that we don't tend to think about, you know, we
don't tend to think about the fact that actually Indo Europeans,
even through the Middle Ages, which we consider to be
you know, that was the golden age of agriculture, let's say,
in Europe, when they're present, actually they weren't. And actually
at the you know, within medieval society there were these
very interesting tensions that actually you can you can actually

(38:50):
follow back into a much much more ancient time intertext
like the Germania and you know, for a long time
then Tacitus, certainly in recent decades and we've been told
that actually, you know, our Tactus isn't a reliable on
the rata and there's no you know, we shouldn't believe
everything that he said about the Germans. And what he
was actually trying to do was he was trying to

(39:11):
provide a mirror for Roman society and you know, say,
look at these virtuous people who are the opposite of us,
and that kind of stuff, and you know, there were
some facts both can be true, I think can be
exactly exactly.

Speaker 5 (39:25):
I mean.

Speaker 3 (39:25):
Part of the problem, of course, is that you know
that socialists, Kimro in particular, had a real thing about
Tactus and the Germanium. So it's it's a forbidden text
in many respects, and you know, it's being called it
his mom's and called it the most dangerous book in
the world, which is which is a funny thing to

(39:46):
say about, you know, an ethnography of an ancient and
ancient people. But that's the kind of that's where we're at,
and that's where we've been for decades. But so I mean,
I mean, I'm interested in, you know, the way that
actually you can draw these broad historical continuities through the
Middle Ages back to back to an earlier period, back
to the classical pre classical Bronze Age period. And that's

(40:09):
also what I think interests me so much about this
this revolutionary DNA analysis. That's that's the real the David
Reich stuff in particular, although he's of course spent the
last nine years walking back actually a lot of his
early kind of claims the early evidence that he turned
up about the about the Amni and other groups like that,

(40:31):
because I think, you know, the political implications are still
very live of this kind of stuff, but it's building up,
they're building up such a body of evidence now that
it's just going to be impossible, I think too too
not to face it. And yeah, you've got archaeologists and
fighting this kind of desperate rearguard action to prevent the

(40:53):
uptake of this of this revolutionary material that shows that
actually all the pots, not people's stuff, there were no
there were no mass migrations, there were no violent invasions.
It was all cultural trade and diffusion. I mean, it's
it's obviously bunk, but it's been allowed to it's been
allowed to hold sway mainly for political reasons. It's been

(41:15):
encouraged for political reasons. But now we have this hard
science and what's it one. I think what's so funny
about it as well, is that so many historians, archaeologists,
people in the humanities, just because they don't understand the science.
Then it's even worse because they can't actually even they
can't actually even reinterpret it themselves. They can't say, look, actually,

(41:38):
you know, you're interpreting the data wrong. They just have
to say this is racist, this is wrong, it's bad.
We shouldn't be talking about genetics. We shouldn't be inducing
people to their genes.

Speaker 5 (41:50):
You know.

Speaker 3 (41:50):
And I was talking with somebody about this hilarious thing
that an archaeologist said about a paper. There was a
paper that was based on the ancient DNA of one skeleton,
and this archaeologist said, oh, but it's one skeleton, it
doesn't mean anything. Well, actually, if you understand what genetics is,
then you understand that it tells you something about every

(42:12):
single one of that person's ancestors. Ever, so you're actually
talking about, you know, untold them to people. It's okay,
one skeleton, but it's actually you know, it's right back
to its right back to the beginning. So there's a yeah,
I mean I think it's there is a broad continuity
definitely in my work, and it's being informed by this
new stuff as well.

Speaker 2 (42:32):
It sounds as though you're you're very like academic past
has been useful for you to transition into new areas.
It's similar to myself as my first degree is communications
and then my second was medieval, my master's with medieval history, angler,
sax and stuff, and then since then my non academic
studies have just gone all over the place. And you know,

(42:54):
genomics have become very interested in like you, for all
kinds of reasons. I mean, you know, engining of tagatas
is the sort of thing that can be now proven
like Herodotus was always said, oh he was talking nonsense,
and now DNA is showing a lot of things like
oh yeah, Scuffian's really did use human skin for their
arrow cases, just like he said, and they really did

(43:16):
use cannabis because they can use genetics to find that
the cannabis traces on their own ceramics. And of course
Bead was challenged to the Anglo Saxon invasion couldn't have happened.
But now we know that his narrative of the invasion
is actually very accurate. Not only did Germanic people come,
regretting colleagues paid from twenty twenty two shows that the

(43:36):
majority of them came from the regions where the Saxons
and the Angles lived, not from not very many from
southern Sweden or Frisia as or. It's majority Angle and Saxon.
So it's exactly as Bead described it. So yeah, I
think it's useful to be able to transition to completely

(43:57):
new fields because like a Renaissance man or that's what academics,
popular academics used to be all about, Thomas Carlisle or
someone like that. So maybe that's helped you to be
you know, the figure you are today.

Speaker 5 (44:12):
But medieval I guess medieval history is.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
Still extremely problematic for many people, and it's been controlled
a lot of Anglo Saxons, particularly as you know, as
they're trying to ban it in many many places. I
did an interview last week, and it's prompted and academics
in New Zealand to say that you'd.

Speaker 5 (44:31):
Ban it there as well, as I was complaining about
the ban.

Speaker 2 (44:34):
But yeah, I think the genetics is really gonna put
those people on the back foot a lot. They're going
to only be able to argue for social reasons and
not for historical reasons anymore. And David Raig, as you said,
he's had to I mean, he's had to be careful
because even though he's a liberal man, he said in

(44:54):
his book, like a lot of racial stereotypes are going
to turn out to be based on genetic realities. He's
openly saying that. And that was a few years ago.
And now this laser's paper from Harvard from his lad
has come out and it's showing it's not just about
population genomics. It's showing like the genomics, behavioral genomics and
selection pressures that distinguished wester Eurasians, the Europeans and Near

(45:18):
Easterners from other peoples in the.

Speaker 5 (45:20):
Last ten thousand years.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
That the idea presented by humanists and many people that
like that, and you know, Huva Harrari others that like
the early modern human evolved two hundred thousand years ago
in Africa and was essentially the same, but he just
didn't have the cultural networks to allow him to be civilized.
That he would be civilized raised among us now just

(45:44):
aren't true.

Speaker 5 (45:45):
The selection pressures on.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
West Eurasians have made us, according to the Lasers study,
more intelligent.

Speaker 5 (45:52):
We've reduced with strong selection.

Speaker 2 (45:55):
Pressures against things like schizophrenia and other mental disorders to
make us more mentally balance as well as more intelligent.
But also, and interesting to your work, there have been
very very strong selectric pressures, not only in the last
ten thousand years, but actually since the Paleolithic, ongoing selectric
pressures against storing fat and against genes associated with type

(46:18):
two diabetes, which have been a result of increasing availability
of nutrient dense foods, sugar wets foods and things. But yeah,
we're the selectric pressures against them are completely changings, and
especially strong pressures for Europeans, which can go some way
to explain the the terrible health of some non European

(46:42):
people living on Western diets. Would you like to elaborate
on that, Yeah, of course, so yes, I mean, yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (46:50):
Did see, I did see some posts about that, that
right paper that looks really controversial in trouble. Yeah, well,
I mean he's called in because they hate him in
India as well, because he he obviously you know, showing
a step origin for the.

Speaker 4 (47:06):
You know, for the you know, the Aryans who invaded
into Europeans.

Speaker 3 (47:12):
Whatever you want to call them. Whereas you know, you
have all these sort of Indian nationalists who want to
believe that the Indo European homeland is India and they
spent out from India, so they believe.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
There's civilization is millions and billions of years old or something,
and everyone else.

Speaker 3 (47:25):
Comes from India because they call him David third Reich,
don't they think? But but yeah, that looks like a
great paper. But yes, I mean there's there's abundant evidence
that as you'd expect. I mean, what's what's what's funny
is is the way that you know, Darwin's dangerous ideas
Daniel Danney calls it, you know, is accepted as as

(47:47):
a document now in we took Whenever we talk about animals,
we talk about evolution and evolutionary pressures and et cetera.
But then we get to humans and it's just no Sorry, no,
it's well they stopped, they stopped stopped at some point
in the distance. Yeah, but actually, you know, I mean
there's every reason to believe that selection pressures are ongoing,

(48:09):
but also that certainly in you know, since we became
modern humans, that they've been taking place too. And yeah,
there's there's evidence from the global burden of disease or
the burden of chronic diseases. Is it's very interesting when
you actually look at you know, who are the fattest
people in the world. They're not Americans, No, they're people

(48:32):
in the South Pacific, and you know they were previously
people who were in fantastic health but then very powerful,
the poly the strong, wilky people. Well in Western prices book,
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Where he goes around the world
was within in the nineteen thirties. It was a dentist
from Cleveland, Ohio. He went around the world looking for

(48:54):
examples of small scale societies, tribal peoples who were in
perfect health. And he wanted to find that basically why
looking at their diet and yeah, I mean he went
to the South Seat, to the South the Islands and
Fiji in New Zealand and you know, I mean he
encountered these Maoris who are in an amazing physical condition
at six four sixteen stone. You know, no steroids, nothing

(49:19):
like that. You know, they're just eateing. They're just genetically
like that. And they're eating a nutrient dease animal diet,
lots of shellfish, for example, and pineapples, and yeah, yeah, exactly, great,
great stuff. But actually no, so now you look at
Southea Islanders and because they're not adapted to grain diets,
but that's what they're eating. They're eating Western processed food

(49:42):
and huge quantities, and they're massively fat. And yeah, I mean,
Indians I think have the highest rate of type two
diabetes in the world, and that's genetic too, and they've
shn all sorts of other things about i think carbohydrate
digestion and and processing in West Africans, and which perhaps

(50:04):
explains why, you know, Black Americans have higher levels of
obesity and certain other forms of insulin resistance diabetes, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
It was a presumably diabetes time do you buy diabetes
was selected for due to food scarcity. It's advantageous in
scar SCINDI yeah, exactly, so, yes, I mean this is again,
this is another reason why it's interesting to look at
our aliolithic ancestors and to think think with them in
mind when we try to understand modern conditions, because actually,

(50:37):
you know, I mean this is something that Jared Diamond
talks about.

Speaker 4 (50:42):
You know, we.

Speaker 3 (50:45):
Those conditions, those conditions shaped us, and you know, the
conditions of scarcity for example, that kind of stuff, and
that that's all gone now, but we're left with the
genetic We're left with the genetic programming. And so what happens, Well,
you end up with a you know, massive exposure of diabetes, obesity,

(51:05):
all sorts of other all these chronic diseases that we
see today. So so yeah, I mean, this, this this
genetics stuff is is very very very interesting. And I'm
sure that Reich is going to continue producing controversial material.
But but yeah, I mean, however, I think however much
he tries to walk it back, nevertheless he can't. And

(51:26):
I think he kind of realizes that. But yeah, he's
walking at he's walking at a kind of type ride.
But I think there's probably going to come a point
actually where the dam just bursts. And you know, I mean,
I think I think that funding is a key issue
actually and I've talked about this privately with people, you know,

(51:47):
but the fact that actually what's going to happen is
that you're just going to get the old style of
like archaeological research et cetera, just isn't going to get
funding anymore because actually, now we've got hard side. We've
got people scientists pointing to genetics and other stuff like that,
and it's, you know, hard science has this place in society,

(52:11):
It has this prestige with society and so and people
are conditioned to, you know, to want hard science. And
so actually the kind of the pot stop people stuff
and you know, the kind of area fairy stuff is
actually going to fall by the wayside.

Speaker 4 (52:25):
I think has this.

Speaker 3 (52:27):
As this stuff starts to get more funding and starts
to become more established. But but yeah, it's an exciting time.
I think it's an exciting time. And to go back
to what you were saying right at the beginning, one
of the nice things about not being in the academy
or actually is that I can write about whatever I want.
It's it's it's such a it's such a liberation, so nice,

(52:52):
you know. I mean, if I was still, if I
was still at Oxford, if I were doing a had
a junior research fellowship, you know, as I met egal historian,
and I would be I would be writing about some
minute aspect of the Reformation. I'd be carrying on from
my pH d, which was interesting, which you know, which
I really enjoyed. I loved doing it. It was great.
Research was fascinating. But I didn't want to spend my

(53:16):
entire career writing about the Reformation and medieval history, and
so I left and took a little bit of time
to find my feet. But I've done it, and I
think it's it's nice, it's inspiring to see people like
you and you know, others who can Actually there are

(53:37):
different ways of doing research, and there are different ways
of presenting your findings. You can do videos, you can
you can have a bodcas because you can write stuff
as well, but you don't actually you don't actually just
have to publish academic articles and play that game because
it's a very narrowly constrained game. And you being who

(53:58):
you are, me who I am, then we are subject
to to.

Speaker 4 (54:05):
Into discrimination.

Speaker 3 (54:06):
But you know, like there's there are certain within the
academy that you just like, there are certain things that
you just can't do and you're less likely to get
funding or that kind of the game is rigged, really,
I think in favor of people, certainly in the humanities,
who are doing research into modish topics, and so, yeah,
the exciting stuff. Actually there's exciting.

Speaker 4 (54:27):
Stuff happening in the academy of course, right, et.

Speaker 3 (54:29):
Cetera, that kind of stuff, but there's also very exciting
stuff happening outside the academy. And it's a great time
with platform like cameras and KDP, you can publish your
own books. I mean, you want to write a book
and just publish a book, and actually it can sell
really well, you can sell tens thousands of copies.

Speaker 5 (54:46):
And the new information revolution. Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
I mean I had a similar situation where I was
offered a pH d position, a paid pod position in
k Bridge Andiovuskin and I turned it down and they said,
no one's ever turned down and paid. But I just
didn't want to become stuck. And I've seen a lot
of academic I think some of the behavior of academics
on the Internet where people are shocked at how sort

(55:15):
of resentful and they're hateful. They can be and they
presume that, you know, these intellectual people would be a
bit above that.

Speaker 5 (55:22):
But probably there's some bitterness that.

Speaker 2 (55:25):
Just having gotten themselves stuck in a position they can't
get out of. They're stuck in the not necessarily well
paying job and studying a thing that they've got on
board of, and we have this freedom that they probably envy,
the jealous of it. But yeah, I mean that style
of like broad knowledge is just not really found anymore,

(55:45):
and everything's about specialism and the people over and the
problem with having specialist knowledge is that when you talk
outside of your subject is that you don't really know
what you're talking about. And that's what a lot of
public academics are like today. But yeah, I mean it
also results in some very peculiar things that I hope,
as you say, will will be phased out.

Speaker 5 (56:06):
Well.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
I remember in twenty eleven, even in doing my Anglo
Saxon studies being presented with I asked to read a
paper about queering the whole of hair art and like,
how like that bear wolf can be seen in the
homoerotic blah blah blah blah.

Speaker 5 (56:23):
I was thinking, this is so redundant, this is absolutely doesn't.

Speaker 2 (56:26):
It does not provide you with any insights into the
culture of Anglo Saxon England at all.

Speaker 5 (56:31):
It's just it's so useless.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
But now things like you know, population genomics arechaodenomics. This
is really providing these very useful information about who these
people were, where they came from, what they hate, all
kinds of things. Did you I mean, so I'm hoping
that this seems going to get phased out, like no
one's going to get funding for queering the whole of

(56:55):
Herodt anymore. But what about when you in your time,
when you were doing medieval studies and early modern sort
of the Reformation and stuff, did you encounter this sort
of thing back then as well? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (57:09):
Yeah, absolutely, yeah, absolutely so. I mean when I was
at Camige, when I was doing anthropology and anthropology social
anthropology is about that's queer discipliney. I mean, it's I
met some basically insane people.

Speaker 4 (57:26):
They're actually you know, people who genuinely had.

Speaker 3 (57:30):
They were operating on socially different frequency, the kind of
stuff that they were talking about and the kind of
things that they were studying, And it was an openly
activist discipline as well. It's openly activists. There are no
conservative social anthropologists and no right wing social anthropologists, it's all.
And they were all talking about by the Wall Street

(57:52):
at the time, Succotti Park or whatever it was, Getty
Parking is embold and all this kind of stuff and
the kissed anthropology David Gray.

Speaker 4 (58:01):
But people like that, And.

Speaker 3 (58:04):
Uh so, I mean when I went away from Cambridge,
when i went away from social antipology, I thought, I'm
going back to a firmly non pulsed discipline, medieval anthropology,
medieval history. There's no none of that.

Speaker 4 (58:19):
There's none aba of that.

Speaker 3 (58:20):
It's just going to be pure empiricism. And we're is
going to be dealing with dusty old records talking about
what's in the records, and you know it's not there's
going to be no Brunet la tour or Fukah or
anything like that.

Speaker 4 (58:33):
Why is very very wrong initially? And uh it was.

Speaker 3 (58:38):
Yeah, it was just as just almost as post as
social antopology. I mean, there were still people still very
very eminent scholars at Oxford, and there were very smart
people doing PhDs upon really interesting subjects, but there was
also a lot of guff. And all of the guff

(58:59):
was fun as well, which was you know, which was
the I mean, I was I was funded to do
my of course scholarship for my pH d. But it's
kind of disheartening you see that actually the stuff that's
really getting the funding that people are really talking about
is actually is not you know, some really well grounded

(59:21):
study of ordinary people in the Reformation.

Speaker 4 (59:24):
Which is what I was doing.

Speaker 3 (59:25):
Basically church Water's account wills, you know, just hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of pages of medieval sourcesity. I didn't
apply any theory to as such, and ary prior theory
when I was sort of looking at them, just trying
to extract information from them. And there was a lot
of statistical stuff as well. Actually that was kind of

(59:45):
totting up bequests over time, comparing trends and all that
sort of stuff in in the church walls accounts which
were reference which were about records of payments and an
income for the for the nave of parish church basically,
so it's like it's like popular participation in local religion.

Speaker 5 (01:00:07):
So I was.

Speaker 3 (01:00:07):
Charting, you know, how much money was left to the
church each year over a period of two and forty years.

Speaker 2 (01:00:13):
Doing the hard work that is to be done, has
to understand the flust exactly exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
So there was that kind of stuff, But actually it
was more the kind of like, oh, nobody's applied, nobody's applied,
and you're talking to to you know, medieval medieval nunneries,
you know, And so that was the that was the
kind of stuff that was that was really sort of
that was really sort of were just getting the funding

(01:00:41):
and it was obvious that you know, I come, I mean,
as somebody said to me, like, your your research is great,
but it was cutting edge forty years ago. So you're
probably you're not going to get funding if you for
a GRF or a you know, or a college position
or whatever, if you if you dickle on, you know,
if you keep doing that kind of research. But it

(01:01:03):
was the research that I wanted to do. It's the
research that I was interested in in this novelistic in
certain respects because I could sort of build up this
idea of sense of what orders experience of religion was, like,
how they related to their parish church and to the
profound religious changes that took place across the Reformation as

(01:01:27):
things really did change.

Speaker 2 (01:01:30):
Was that related can you relate the changes that happened
that time to the aforementioned dichotomies that we're talking about before,
because I sort of thought that the the emergence of
the yeomanry, the prominence of the yeomanry within England, like
this is land owning peasants, who they weren't really peasants,

(01:01:50):
and they weren't they didn't have any noble blood. You
have this special class of people who are above the
peasants but below the nobles. They own land, sometimes as
much land as a nobleman, but they don't have the
same social status.

Speaker 5 (01:02:02):
And suddenly, with the increase with.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
After the printing press is invented, and the increase of
literacy and this new attitude towards the Bible where with
Protestantism and this idea that any man can be saved
if he can just read, this social class suddenly was
empowered to seize more power and influence. And well, that's
how I interpret it. And in a way, these kind

(01:02:26):
of yeoman represent of well they're not like pastoralist cowboys
in Europeans or anything of the sort. They do represent
a different power, like a kind of a surviving rural
kind of class of people who didn't hadn't fit into
the prevailing power structure.

Speaker 3 (01:02:45):
Is that?

Speaker 5 (01:02:46):
Do you think I'm onto anything there?

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
Yeah, it's an interesting, interesting way thinking about that Reformation,
I mean the Reformation. I think the Reformation is probably
the most important defense in modern history in many respects
because of the kind of changes that it sets in
motion politically, economically.

Speaker 5 (01:03:09):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:03:11):
I mean I looked, I looked. I was looking fundamentally
at a sort of just religious change and changes in
religious behavior in particular. So what I wanted to look
at was whether there was a long Reformation. Basically, say,
we tend to date the Reformation in England to the
reign of Henry the eighth and his his his small matter,

(01:03:33):
the matter of his marriage to Catherine of Arragon, wanting
to annul the marriage so that he can marry Amberleyn.
But actually, you know, were the kind of changes that
Henry the eighth brought about in religion through the break
with Rome, were they actually sort of prefigured earlier than that?

(01:03:55):
So I mean I started, I started my PhD. This
is in fourteen oh three, which is when the first
records for the paraschats that died windwore minister in Blosso
the first church woman's records live from fourteen oh three.
So I was looking at religious behavior from then and
tried to see where the actually, you know, people were

(01:04:15):
people still as enthusiastic about the cult of the Saints,
for example, in the fifteenth century as they were they
enthusiastic about the cultural states right up to the Reformation,
to the traditionally dead Reformation or or was enthusiasm Wayne
for example, And there were some interesting things going on,

(01:04:35):
and it does actually look like.

Speaker 4 (01:04:37):
Enthusiasm or to Wayne, certainly in wimbore Minster.

Speaker 3 (01:04:41):
But I mean, yeah, I don't. I mean, one of
the things that's interesting about that period, not just the Reformation,
but the kind of late fifteenth century early seasteenth century
is the start of European colonial expansion overseas, and that
was that was also given in to spy. The Reformation especially,

(01:05:03):
you know, the break with the break with Rome made
Britain into a different kind of power, made England.

Speaker 4 (01:05:09):
Then and then Britain into.

Speaker 3 (01:05:10):
A different kind of power. It altered its relationship with
the continent. It became a much more adversarial relationship in
many respects changed our alliances, I think forced us to
look outwards in different ways maybe to look overseas further.
But you know, you have in fourteen ninety two, then
you have the end of the Reconquista, and then you

(01:05:32):
have the beginning of the Spanish colonial Empire. You have
the voyages of Columbus, and then you have Cortarez, Mexico,
et cetera, and then you have the Spanish Empire. There's
there's something of the kind of there's something of the

(01:05:52):
Indo European expansions, I think in those expansions that took
place as well the later European expansions Panclonias. And that's
something that you know, Bronz has talked about. He wade
an essay for Man's World called The Ancient Step of
the Sea where he talked about how that same kind
of the same kind of wayward spirit that animated the

(01:06:16):
Indo European and course the Indo European expansion was also
driving people like Cortels, which is an it's an interesting
way to think about it, I mean, and it's certainly.

Speaker 2 (01:06:27):
A long view of history, very very long. I think
academics don't it's don't ever entertain Yeah exactly, it's. Yeah,
it's a long view of history. And I think that
there's there's something to it, and I do and I
do think that the certainly the Reformation drove the kind
of social change that pushed English men and women abroad.

Speaker 5 (01:06:46):
And.

Speaker 3 (01:06:49):
Whether they had that wayward spirit still, you know, after
after maybe thousand years' seeing the European expansion, I don't know.
But it's definitely interesting to think about these things on
a longer term ski Ale. And like you say, it's
just that's just something that most academics don't do. And
so when I said that, I wanted to look at
the Reformation in a long dure you long durra, because

(01:07:12):
that's that's typical of the anal school, of the French
kind of French intellectual tradition. But it's actually not something
that Anglo American academics do so much. And yeah, it's
definitely interesting. It's it's provocative, and that's what I like.
That's what I like about not being in the academy
as well. It's actually you can you can spitball about

(01:07:33):
stuff in the way that you just you just you
just can't in an academic setting because you know, you
you you want to write a vaguely speculative paper let's
say have that published, and then you've got some you know,
second reviewer and third reviewer who just put the kywash
on it because they say, well, what are your sources? Oh,
this isn't grounded in blah blah blah, and that's the

(01:07:55):
end of it. So, I mean, it would be nice
actually to see ademics maybe self publishing stuff, maybe self
publishing more speculative stuff now that they can and and
you know, I mean the average academic book published by
Ratlage or whatever will probably sell a couple of hundred
copies maybe to libraries.

Speaker 5 (01:08:16):
No one will read, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:08:18):
And so but again I think I think they're probably
constraints on academics doing that because I think that kind
of way of operating is actually associated with the polinkiar
political stance. That's the problem, of course, so that it's
not it's not considered a neutral, neutral behavior. It's not
just academics. Academics just want to to to kind of

(01:08:41):
broaden their scope or whatever it would be. Are you
right wing? That that would be what they would say
is what's wrong with the academic.

Speaker 4 (01:08:48):
System of publishing? You know, why don't.

Speaker 3 (01:08:51):
You like having people with you know, with bloomping care
gain saying everything you want to publish.

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
Well, this has been a really fascinating conversation and I've
enjoy getting this insight into the background or your academic
background and where how you became the raw egg nationalist.

Speaker 5 (01:09:09):
Sorry, we didn't have time to talk about roy Eggs,
one of your.

Speaker 3 (01:09:12):
Favorite talk about it all the time.

Speaker 2 (01:09:14):
But before we say goodbye, I'd just like to give
you an opportunity to promote any things that you want
everyone to be aware of, and let everyone or my
followers know where they can find your work.

Speaker 3 (01:09:25):
Of course, thank you so yet follow me on Twitter
baby Gravy nine, It's my unfortunate handle. I have a
substack rowiggstack dot com. I've got a new book out
at the moment. Actually it's a collection of assorted essays
called Anonymously Yours that's available on Amazon. But Twitter, y

(01:09:48):
Twitter is the best place to go. That's where you
can find all my regular updates, tweets, post articles, all
that kind of stuff. Man's World Magazine. I am the
editor of Man's World magaz that's a sort of updated Playboy,
if you will, for the massively online Internet artists generation.

(01:10:09):
Man'sworldmag dot Online. We regularly post articles on the website,
and we also have a physical magazine which you can
order from Passage Press just Passage dot Press.

Speaker 5 (01:10:22):
Good, thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:10:24):
Very much for coming on Give Talk, Charles, and thank
you all very much for watching.

Speaker 5 (01:10:28):
Then we get to subscribe to this channel, give talk Hello.

Speaker 2 (01:10:31):
And also you're not subscribed already to my main channel,
so I have the givet subscribe to that too.

Speaker 5 (01:10:36):
See you next time.