#2521 - Aravind Srinivas

**Joe Rogan** (0:01)
Joe Rogan Podcast, checking out The Joe Rogan Experience.

**Joe Rogan** (0:06)
Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Joe Rogan** (0:14)
Good to see you.

**Aravind Srinivas** (0:14)
You too. Thanks for having me.

**Joe Rogan** (0:16)
My pleasure.

**Aravind Srinivas** (0:17)
Yeah.

**Joe Rogan** (0:17)
How many podcasts have you done?

**Aravind Srinivas** (0:19)
I don't know. I don't know the count, but maybe tens.

**Joe Rogan** (0:23)
Well, when we were talking, we were talking in the lobby, I was like, this dude would be a good guest, because we were talking about ancient Hindu scriptures where you were talking to me about something that sounds like a nuclear bomb.

**Aravind Srinivas** (0:33)
Yeah. And I was like, oh, the Brahmastra.

**Joe Rogan** (0:35)
I need to know more about this.

**Aravind Srinivas** (0:37)
Yeah. So the Brahmastra is part of the Mahabharata.
You've talked about Mahabharata.

**Joe Rogan** (0:44)
Yeah, the Brahmanas and yeah.

**Aravind Srinivas** (0:45)
Yeah. So the Mahabharata is one of the two Hindu epics. The other one is Ramayan. But Mahabharata is more interesting. It's more complicated. It's like a lot of different stories interleaved together.
And the Brahmastra is the equivalent of the hydrogen bomb.

**Joe Rogan** (1:03)
And how is it described?

**Aravind Srinivas** (1:05)
It's described as a weapon of like mass destruction. You're going to annihilate like human population. Should not be used at any cost. There's like a moral contract. Like you clearly have to be like, you know, violating so many things at a deeply moral level to even like wield it. And it's not actually accessible to most warriors. There's probably like two warriors in the world in that era who were allowed to use it.
And it has to be passed through special access. Like a teacher has to like pass it on to you, the secret, to use it. Almost like a new, think of it as like the equivalent of the nuclear code, right? And Arjuna had it, this particular character in Mahabharata called Arjuna. He was allowed to use it. And then this other person was this, basically Arjuna had a teacher named Drona.
And Drona had a son named Ashwathama. And Ashwathama was always jealous of Arjuna. Arjuna was not Drona's son, but he was his model disciple. And so Drona passed on the secret of the Brahmastra to him. And Drona's son also wanted it, but because it was his son, he also passed on the secret to his son, even though the son wasn't as good as Arjuna. And during the war, Arjuna and Drona fought on the opposite sides.
It's just circumstances.
And his dad died, Ashwathama's dad, the teacher died in the war. And so the son got mad and unleashed the Brahmastra. And Lord Krishna had to come and save the planet to not get that destruction force.

**Joe Rogan** (2:52)
How old is the Mahabharata?

**Aravind Srinivas** (2:56)
Again, there's a lot of different opinions on this, so I don't actually know for sure. My understanding is at least 1,500 to 2,500 years old. Like 1,500 years ago is the minimum. 2,500 years ago is the maximum. So it happened in some period, in that 1,000 year time frame between that.
And it's still unclear if a lot of it has just been mythologized. And what actually happened was just a war between kins. There were 2 groups of people, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. And each side thought they were fighting for their own rights and justice. But at the end of the day, you can crudely understand it as like essentially fight for the kingdom.
Basically there were like, there was a previous generation and 2 brothers and both the brothers had a bunch of kids. And those kids were warring to get the next in line. And that ended up being like a massive war and a bunch of other allies fought on each sides. And so many amazing weapons were used as part of the war. And a lot of these weapons are like extremely like describe an extreme level of detail that is pretty incredible like there's a lot of detail around like targeted weapons. So you could precisely identify a target and just shoot at that.
And then a lot of...

**Joe Rogan** (4:25)
Does it explain like what the weapon is?

**Aravind Srinivas** (4:27)
Yeah. So there's one weapon called the divyastra where you can just specifically target any particular person or a group and it would just automatically direct itself and do it almost like a semi-autonomous weapon. And then Lord Krishna had this weapon called the Sudarshan Chakra. It's basically a discus. And then you can just release it and it will go and specifically identify somebody and chop off their head and come back to you.