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Transcript

Episode 68 - I See Sea People · Normal Men

• 0:02
  George: All the smoke is bouncing off the 49th parallel and heading back north.
• 0:05
  Bret Devereaux: Right.
• 0:06
  George: Exactly.
• 0:07
  Bret Devereaux: Exactly. I have to remind myself, I'm here to, I'm, I'm here to talk about the Odyssey. I'm not here to complain about the administration or the Iran war.
• 0:15
  Ed: We administration in the Iran episode all of the time.
• 0:18
  Bret Devereaux: Yeah.
• 0:19
  Propter: You can walk and shoot them.
• 0:20
  Ed: Yes. This is a show where we very specifically have bleep rules around the word you're fine. Okay.
• 0:36
  George: This is Normal Men, a podcast from four men who are clinging desperately to normalcy in an era when that's asking a bit too much.
• 0:42
  Propter: I'm George In Charlotte, in D.C. i'm
• 0:45
  George: Proctor Malone in Outer Florida. I'm Low tax speedrun enjoyer.
• 0:49
  Ed: And I'm Ed in Boston.
• 0:56
  Bret Devereaux: I guess I, I guess I should, should ask at the outset. Can I swear?
• 1:01
  Ed: Of course I do.
• 1:04
  Bret Devereaux: Great.
• 1:05
  George: Yeah.
• 1:05
  Bret Devereaux: And we bleep something. Do I need, do I need to care about spoilers for elements in which Christopher Nolan is deviated from the poem, or can I assume everybody's. Who's seen the movie? Who's gonna see the movie?
• 1:19
  Propter: Yes. If you are listening to the show. If you are listening to the show right now, you have not seen the Odyssey and you would like to not be spoiled, do not listen to the rest of the show until after you have seen the movie. We will also make, make this explicit in the chapter markings where spoilers exist and where spoilers do not exist.
• 1:36
  George: Out for almost a month now. So, like, get your ass to the.
• 1:39
  Bret Devereaux: Yeah, I know.
• 1:40
  Ed: Yeah, it's great. Go see it.
• 1:42
  Bret Devereaux: Yeah, I, I, I actually really, like, I'm the rare classicist. I liked it, presumably because I'm not a Homerist, and so I'm not sitting there like, carefully cataloging every. Obviously, I've read the Iliad in the Odyssey and the Aeneid. Weirdly, he pulls from the Aeneid a fair bit. We get a whole character from the Indian. Right. Sinon's not in the, in the elite Odyssey sign on's in the idiot.
• 2:08
  Ed: Yep.
• 2:09
  Bret Devereaux: Because the, you know, Trojan horse is barely in the Iliad. In the Odyssey, it know we get that full narrative in the Aeneid where Odysseus is the bad guy. Anyway, I've read all those things, but I'm not, I'm not, I'm not a specialist Homerist, so I'm not, you know, deeply offended that adaptations adapt.
• 2:34
  George: But I mean, that's what I don't understand, because some of the classicist criticisms I've seen and they haven't been universal from classicists and from Homerists. Like they're very much taken on the terms of I would have adapted this differently as opposed to, this is an adaptation trying to do something specific and how do we get it on that curve? And it's weird to me, like that's just a failure of art criticism as opposed to like any sort of deep knowledge of the underlying text, which obviously the scholars in question have a much deeper understanding of the text than either myself or Christopher Nolan. But neither myself nor Christopher Nolan would argue that his interpretation of the text is the only interpretation or the correct interpretation, let alone like the way that he revises it to adapt for screenplay like that there's no sort of acknowledgement that there are limitations to the format that he's engaging in and that you therefore have to make editorial choices that are obviously going to make use your final product untrue to the text. And that's fine. That's not.
• 3:32
  Bret Devereaux: No, I mean I. Absolutely. And the thing is, people have been doing remixes of Homer since Homer. I mean the oral poet whose work is being written down, that survives to us is itself clearly remixing the poem. There are some pretty clear sort of allusions to this. I mean the fact that the most famous episode in the poem is of course the Cyclops and Homer gives this guy the name Polyphemus much spoken about like, it's an open nod to like. And here's the bit, you know, also as a side note, I get a kick if you read the Odyssey, the number of times that this is several places in the text whenever a poet shows up. And like Homer has these moments like, and you know, the real heroes are the poets. And like at multiple points you just imagine him passing the hat.
• 4:38
  George: This bears no resemblance whatsoever to our modern day media. And I'm totally lost. Right. Like there's nothing to read through.
• 4:43
  Bret Devereaux: No. Right, exactly. And now for an ad break.
• 4:47
  Ed: Oh God, don't give Homer a substack.
• 4:52
  George: I really though, like Homer was the sub stacker and or prestige print journalist of his day. Right. I mean it's not a one for one analog, but it's the closest thing that the Greeks had to what we conceive of as journalism today. Like by a lot. And yeah, they're doing the same thing, man. There was class solidarity among the scribe, among the poets back then. Like even though it was oral tradition and for performance as opposed to here's the news. And it's not hard to imagine Homer doing a poem at some point that is basically Jeff newsroom like that.
• 5:24
  Bret Devereaux: That totally fits. Of course, the other thing, before we
• 5:28
  Ed: get too far in pror. Do you want to do introductions? Because we kind of.
• 5:34
  Propter: No. So let me, Let me preface this by saying that we are. We are. We are down one normal man and up one man who appears to be normal this week.
• 5:44
  Ed: Provisionally. Status.
• 5:45
  Propter: Provisionally.
• 5:45
  Bret Devereaux: I don't know. I don't know about that.
• 5:47
  Propter: Might. Might circle around a bit later.
• 5:50
  Ed: Look, they let me on.
• 5:51
  Propter: But, but, but provisionally, we are here with Blue Sky's favorite historian.
• 5:59
  Ed: Favorite.
• 6:00
  Propter: Favorite historian.
• 6:01
  Bret Devereaux: Oh, gosh, I don't know about that.
• 6:03
  Propter: Who, who has agreed to. To come on to talk to us mostly about the Odyssey, but then we'll kind of see where things go from there since we've been.
• 6:13
  Ed: Look, I'm. I'm comfortable saying it's the Internet, because, I mean, like, how many podcasts have I heard you on, sir?
• 6:18
  Bret Devereaux: No, that's true.
• 6:19
  Ed: That's true.
• 6:21
  Bret Devereaux: That's. That's fair. It's quite a lot
• 6:25
  Ed: I've. I have made Paradox game buying decisions based off of your podcast, sir.
• 6:30
  Bret Devereaux: Okay, Please tell Paradox that I might get another trip out to Stockholm.
• 6:36
  Ed: Yeah, no, they send them this episode.
• 6:39
  Bret Devereaux: Yeah, no, they. They flew me out a few years back to give the keynote at their last con in 2022. So, so there's.
• 6:48
  Propter: Yeah, that's fantastic.
• 6:50
  Ed: Sounds like they. Again, it was great.
• 6:52
  Bret Devereaux: I got a paid for vacation in, in Stockholm, which is a lovely city. I encourage people to, to, to check it out and I would love, I would love to go back. So if, you know, if the pay masters at Paradox are listening, you know, looking for, looking for any excuse
• 7:12
  Ed: make with the keynotes, guys, but we should probably actually get to the actual topic of this episode or back to.
• 7:20
  Bret Devereaux: I kind of, to be fair, digressions and frame stories are in keeping with the actual topic.
• 7:27
  Ed: This is true.
• 7:29
  George: My favorite was that dumbass right wing put. I think it was Matt Walsh or someone being like, oh, they. This non. Linear storytelling Nolan's doing has completely ruined this classic script. It's just like, okay, so read it and you will.
• 7:44
  Bret Devereaux: So many people who very clearly have not read the poem in any translation at all, who just suddenly have very strong opinions. It's just really, really remarkable. But yeah, no, there's some non, non linear storytelling and also like man Telemachus seems like kind of a whiny non entity. And I'm like, you don't say.
• 8:09
  Propter: It's just. It is. It is endlessly remarkable to me that we have a prestigious adaptation of Homer and the white marble statue Avatar gang has somehow managed to wind up on the wrong side of the culture war on this one. That this seems like such a layup for people who at least view themselves as the protectors of classical Western values. And somehow they've managed to be wrong footed by what casting decisions? Is that the whole of it? Is it just that this is, I
• 8:45
  George: think an honest engagement with what Nolan made though would require them to realize that, oops, we were the baddies.
• 8:51
  Bret Devereaux: Because that was the win of the movie in some ways. I mean, this is sort of my fundamental take on it. If you want to talk like, boil down the themes of what Nolan is doing. In some ways, Nolan is using the Odyssey as a way to. Because Nolan is fundamentally, I think, a conservative filmmaker, right. Go back and watch the Batman films. This is a guy who is actually kind of comfortable with the global war on terror in some ways, uncomfortable in other ways. Whatever. There's like, there's a conservative vibe to it, a kind of old fashioned Burkean kind of conservatism to it. He's using the Odyssey to inhabit the Western tradition, to then critique something about contemporary Western society. And in many ways, yeah, the vision of particularly of masculinity that he is critiquing is the chud vision of masculinity. He's putting these guys on blast. And ironically, he's basically inhabiting a marble statue to do it. And in, in that sense, the whole
• 9:47
  George: movie is one giant ode to virtue. And it's funny because the actual virtue that Odysseus is, you know, pursuing and being pushed into and climbing into is not a virtue that I think either of the four of us would necessarily agree is like the paragon of virtue, but it's one version of virtue. And the message of the movie isn't this version of virtue is correct. It's that virtue as a general concept is correct and you should push for it. And it's blindingly obvious that the movie is being made in the context of one of the least virtuous periods of American history. Like it is deeply in conversation and specifically.
• 10:28
  Bret Devereaux: Right, like the converse, right, that the, the breaching of norms, the violations of standards of conduct, which is the display of vice, is the thing that is destroying their. Their civilization. I think it's interesting that at the end of the narrative, right, Odysseus is taking responsibility for the collapse of civilization when he's speaking to Penelope. But if you think about the overall story, I think the audience can actually adopt a somewhat broader view and like, yeah, Odysseus has played a role here. His men aren't as innocent as he thinks they are. A point that gets made to him. But Agamemnon here is the one committing the original sin. And the movie is not shy about. About doing that. And then suddenly, as an aside, because everybody asked me about, like, arms and armor and like, it's all fantasy nonsense, and that's fine. You're allowed to do that. The decision to put Agamemnon in the garb that he's in, where he's basically faceless, basically voiceless. He's. He's is a Darth Vader that doesn't speak. There's only a handful, I think he only speaks in the underworld. We don't see him speak at any other point. Right. He is the kind of cosmic force of evil that has motivated the breach in society. And we get that early conver. The early flashback conversation between Odysseus and Penelope where he's like, agamemnon's calling this war and I've got to go. And she's like, could you get out of it this way? Could you get out of it that way? Could you get out of it this way? And he's like, no, Agamemnon will not let me get out of this thing. He's going to make this happen. And then we see it, of course, then you. You sort of. Because Nolan is a more of a visual filmmaker than a dialogue guy, which, admittedly, I think that is. That shows. Is the one real weakness of the film is that some of the dialogue's a little wooden. A little. A little wooden.
• 12:23
  Ed: We'll get into that horse.
• 12:28
  Bret Devereaux: But Odysseus's boats were crafted out of the dialogue, is what I'm saying. But when we. When we get to the final, like the sack of Troy, right, We have that scene where the gate opens, and for a moment it is just Agamemnon standing there, which is this sort of visual assignment of responsibility. There's an army behind him. But he is fundamentally the architect of this moment. And of course, the film is set up like this moment is the fundamental breach. This is why their civilization is collapsing. It is.
• 12:59
  George: Did we notice that the Trojan armor was white and all the Trojan soldiers were clad in white?
• 13:04
  Propter: Yeah.
• 13:04
  Ed: Wait. Was not subtle.
• 13:06
  George: Not subtle at all.
• 13:08
  Ed: I mean, like, I. I think. I think that is as much why, like, it would be impossible for these statue avatars to like this. Because, like, Odysseus is. Is basically like Tim Pool. Like, like, he isn't really that important here. He's just a guy like, and obviously like in the, in the actual poem, in, in the elite, he is substantially more. More than that. But like in this, he is kind of just the viewpoint character in a guy. Like, he is not running the show. Agamemnon. Agamemnon is clearly like the motive force behind all of this stuff. But it's like, oh, I have to take responsibility for things. Why would a statue. Avatar, Right? Like, like these guys, These guys are like, yes, that's them. Yeah, that's specifically.
• 13:57
  Bret Devereaux: No, and I think that's, I think that's right. And that's the sort of, that's kind of the critique. But it is hilarious that because they're all media illiterate, they couldn't engage on it on that level. So they've just got to be mad about casting choices and then suddenly desperately pretending that 2004 Troy was a good movie.
• 14:19
  Ed: Oh, good. I don't. That's a different episode.
• 14:23
  George: I kind of, I kind of. It's not like rosy, that movie. I was like, weren't you 12?
• 14:27
  Bret Devereaux: Yeah, it's not a terrible movie, but it's not a good movie. It is like many mediocre movies. You can make like a sizzle reel of like five to ten minutes of it that make it seem like it would be awesome. But then there's the rest of it,
• 14:44
  Propter: right?
• 14:44
  Ed: It, it has to be really confusing because like I, I used to date someone who had trouble telling the difference between Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. And like, and like now we're just, we're just taking the wrong way around.
• 15:00
  George: I, I gotta say, like, there is sort of a floor over how bad a movie that casts in his physical prime, Brad Pitt as Achilles can be. Like, that is just such a perfect casting choice that like, like everything else aside, they did, they kind of cooked there.
• 15:17
  Ed: And that, that was another one of those. They just, they just got everybody moving.
• 15:21
  Bret Devereaux: Everybody right.
• 15:22
  George: Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 15:24
  Ed: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 15:25
  George: But yeah.
• 15:27
  Ed: And that's the nicest thing I'll say about it.
• 15:29
  Bret Devereaux: Yeah. Which is, I mean, you know, one of those things that makes me kind of sad, I think, an effort to truly adapt the Iliad. Like everybody adapts like the Trojan War and they want to tell the whole story. But the Iliad is a single episode from relatively late in the Trojan War that is very self contained and an effort to really adapt. That would be interesting. And, and no one really, no one really tries.
• 15:57
  Ed: Wait a minute. Wasn't Sean Bean Odysseus and Troy So, yeah. Oh, God, I just watched the Lord of the Rings and now. Now that. Oh, no. For like 10 minutes.
• 16:14
  Bret Devereaux: But somehow he lives through the movie. I don't get it. I didn't know that was allowed.
• 16:21
  Propter: The virtue ethics. The virtue ethics of, of. Of the Iliad are, are different than the virtue ethics of very explicitly.
• 16:28
  Bret Devereaux: So.
• 16:28
  Propter: Right. Like there's.
• 16:29
  Bret Devereaux: Right. And I mean, this is a moment that actually, I think Nolan does translate right. Where Odysseus goes to, to the underworld. And in, in the Odyssey, in the poem, it' speaks to. Whereas Nolan is like, Achilles is sir, not appearing in this picture, which is fine. But in the poem, it's Achilles he speaks to and he's like, oh, hey, Achilles, you must be like super happy. You're. You wanted to be very famous and, and die young. And you've achieved both of those things. And Achilles is like, yeah, I made bad decisions. Achilles, Achilles line is literally, I would rather be a slave to a poor farmer with no land than king of the dead. And this is just sort of like, yeah. So the Odyssey looks at the virtue ethics of the Iliad and pretty explicitly calls bs and that's. And that's interesting. And of course, even within, I should note, even within the Iliad, the Iliad already has a complicated engagement with Achilles, especially post Patroclus death. Achilles kind of goes mad and he's superhuman in his ferocity, but he's also doing things you usually shouldn't do. He picks a fight with a God, the river God, Scamander, which he can't win. He has to be rescued from it. Scamander can't quite kill him, but it's also really hard to kill a river, at least without modern engineering tools. Right.
• 18:13
  Propter: Yeah.
• 18:13
  George: I was going to say, speak for yourself. I'm in the part of the world right now where the rivers may not have been killed, but they sure have been harnessed. So Scamanders, Scamanders owned on that one.
• 18:23
  Bret Devereaux: But it takes his meeting with Priam, right, in the Iliad to kind of bring him back to being human, to be humanized, to be. And to process his grief. And then, of course, moving in parallel with that, I think people often. It's easy to treat the Iliad as Achilles story because that's how it opens. But the Iliad is also Hector's story, and Hector's story is one of tragedy. Hector is one of the few people in the Trojan War on either side where you just point to and like that is just a good man. Here is a person who is what the Greeks thought a good man should be. He's fighting for his homeland. He's very. He has Arete. He's very excellent, right? Arete is Greek word. Excellence is the core value of a hero, that they're really good at something. He is the best Trojan fighter. He is the second best fighter on the field, which is awkward for him. He's devoted to his family. He is true to his word, bound by duty, a faithful kind of guy. The poem loves him. And of course, he dies. And the thematic resonance of that, right? The last line of the Iliad is, so they buried Hector, breaker of horses. It says nothing about Achilles. The Iliad opens on the wrath of Achilles and closes on the funeral of Hector, which is already, like, a deeply conflicted sort of approach. And then the Odyssey is like. Whole point is, like, all of those cool guys in the Iliad, they mostly got murdered by their wives when they went home. Like, it was a disaster. They're mostly dead. The ones that are in the underworld, none of them think they made good choices. All of Odysseus's men, they also end up dead, mostly horribly. A lot. A surprising number of them get eaten.
• 20:12
  Ed: That is a theme.
• 20:13
  Bret Devereaux: And then Odysseus himself, and this is something that Nolan channels as a theme, even though he doesn't quite pick up on the events. My kingdom that I don't have. For someone with the guts to actually adapt the last book of the Odyssey. If it's been a while since you've read the poem, every adaptation you've ever seen cuts off one book short. Because what happens after the. Literally the next day, after the joyful reunion of Odysseus and Penelope and everybody's whatever, is that all the families of the suitors show up with weapons to start a civil war, because obviously you. You murdered all of their brothers and sons and so on. And Odysseus, like, is grabbing his gear and ready to. Here I go with killing again. And Athena has to. To stop it. She has to show up in person to be like, okay, that's enough violence. I realize we've all ruptured the value of hospitality here. And the only way to put this feud to rest is literal divine intervention. And what's amazing is everybody then is putting down their weapons, except for Odysseus, who is still ready to charge. And she has to give him a what the hell? Speech. It's quite short, but she's like, odysseus, you were about to piss off Zeus, you know, and then he finally stops and, like, Then the poem can end. So this idea that, like even Odysseus, like, he gets home, but this is a man who cannot leave the war behind, who short of, again, literal divine intervention, was about to inaugurate an endless cycle of feuding and bloodshed in his own tiny kingdom. And he's the smart one, right? You know, there are a handful of fellows who get back from Troy in more or less one piece, most notably Nestor and Menelaus. The usual. The usual rule for did you get home alive? Is, did you do some kind of sacrilege while you were sieging Troy? Which is actually something, as a side note, a theme that the movie catches really well, why, like, the film makes explicit what is, I think, not necessarily in the poem, for it is in the poem, but it is delivered differently in the poem. Why is it Odysseus's men can't survive? And the answer is they keep doing sacrilege, you know, famously, right? They eat the sacred. The sacred cattle. Nolan transforms this to write. When we. When we see the sack of the city, when everything's burning and everything's going wrong, Odysseus's men are out there killing civilians, and Odysseus is not. And they, they, you know, right, we have the. The. And here we're well into spoiler territory, but we have that really striking scene where they're murdering Zendaya's young priestess and Odysseus does not take part, so he survives and they don't. And that's again, picking up something from. From the Odyssey in the broader sort of Greek conception, like, why do Menelaus and Nestor get to go home? Because they didn't do any sacrilege. Nestor, if people aren't familiar with that character from the poems, Nestor is one generation older than everybody else. So he's the past is prime blowhard that occasionally gives good advice, but nobody ever listens to him because why would you listen to this fussy old annoying man? Telemachus is the only guy that listens to him in the Odyssey. And I guess it works out well for Telemachus. So maybe other people should have listened to him. Achilles sure as hell doesn't in the Iliad. And of course, Menelaus is there to get his wife back, which is like a reasonable thing to be doing. And these two guys avoid.
• 23:58
  Ed: Like, he also doesn't do that.
• 23:59
  Bret Devereaux: No, he doesn't. He doesn't do that much.
• 24:00
  Ed: Yeah, he fights Paris.
• 24:01
  Bret Devereaux: But other. Like, whereas, you know, Agamemnon sacrifices a daughter, not a great idea. And of course, in the broader kind of poetic setting, we have characters like Ajax the Lesser, who's dragging women off of the altar of Athena to assault them. Athena takes some umbrage at that, and so she ultra murders him and all of his guys when they're on the way home. But this sort of like, the overall thing that I think that the. The film actually kind of captures the vibe, even though it doesn't kind of give you the roll call of heroes, is that these guys are all being destroyed and consumed by this. And, you know, the Greeks had a whole category of tales of the Nostoi, the returns. And like, the upshot is almost nobody gets home. And in fact, the Trojan War is in the Greek mythological consciousness. Basically, it's the last significant event that the Greek heroes engage in because it's the extinction event.
• 25:09
  George: Do. Do we think there's any truth in that in terms of what actually happened in the oh boy and heroic period of the. Because, like, I know, obviously, just to be sure here, like the Nolan, our Age of Bronze is ending is. Is absolute nonsense. And to my understanding, the. I mean, well, okay, there's no.
• 25:32
  Bret Devereaux: No, Homer does not say that. Homer does not say that.
• 25:37
  George: But wasn't the Trojan War after the Bronze Age during.
• 25:40
  Bret Devereaux: Anyways, so the. The traditional Greek date for the sack of Troy is 1184. Should have the Trojan War, since it's supposed to be 10 years run from 1194 to 1184. That would put it squarely inside of the late Bronze Age collapse. And given the archeology. So a very sloppy German 19th century German archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, famously decided that he was gonna. He was gonna trust Homer and go digging where Homer said stuff was. This is how he found Mycenae in Greece. And then he went and dug on a hill called Hassarlik in Turkey and found Troy. And on the one hand, I would argue that it's a bit of a stolen base for us to just like straight up call this site Troy. But I think the identification is sound. And there is a destruction layer at kind of the right spot in the. In the stratigraphy. So the idea that there was a city here that was destroyed in the late Bronze Age collapse, potentially in 1184, could have happened. Now, does that mean that, like, Achilles and Agamemnon are real people? No, it does not. But it does mean that Homer is probably working with some kind of oral cultural memory of the destruction of this site. Under what circumstances we don't know. And it is. If people don't Know, this is happening in the context of the late Bronze Age collapse, which starts in 1200 and runs through the 1170s. And this is a wave of psych destructions that begins in Greece and then ripples across Anatolia and then down through Syria and the Levant and eventually kind of laps against the shores of Egypt and Mesopotamia. And it is most extreme in Greece, I should note. It isn't. It isn't that every site is destroyed. It's very uneven. You'll have. The city over here is fine. That city over there got totally wrecked. And Nolan is, of course, channeling this connection, which Homer is oblivious to. The Greeks don't understand any of these events as historical in that sense. The Greeks believe as a religious matter that, like, Achilles was a real dude. But the idea of, oh, there was an. An older form of civilization before that collapsed in a very historical way. That's not something they understand or have knowledge of. The collapse in Greece is extreme. It is so extreme that the Greeks lose writing and we'll have to write, reinvent writing, or readopt, as the case may be, writing. So the Greeks have a writing system in the Bronze Age called Linear B for reasons. And the palaces collapse. So you have no literate scribes because who's going to pay them? So that writing system is completely lost. You know, around 1200.
• 28:38
  George: I'm going off memory from Patrick Wyman podcast here, but I recall like 50 to 70% population declines. Is that. Yeah, in the order of that.
• 28:46
  Bret Devereaux: I mean, with the proviso that ancient demography is a lot of. A lot of guesswork.
• 28:54
  George: Guesswork, yeah.
• 28:55
  Bret Devereaux: The population decline seems severe, especially in Greece. Nearly every urban center collapses. There are now, I should note, it's not necessarily that they all collapse in fire. And one of the oddities. So all of these urban centers in Greece are around palaces. Like, what's clearly happened is like, the local big man has made himself a king, and then a city is formed around his bureaucracy as he extracts resources from the peasantry that he uses for his army. The collapses of the palaces and the declines of the urban centers do not always happen at the same time. There are a number of sites where, like, the palace is, like, burned down and reduced to rubble. And then it's like three decades later, the city basically vanishes. Which, you know, when. When a palace at the center of a settlement is burned down and turned to rubble, but the rest of the settlement is fine. That is usually a strong indicator that those people were not very happy with their form of government. There are a couple of of settlements that. That persist. The most notable settlement where there is no obvious discontinuity is Athens, which may explain why Athens is such a jumbo sized city state as our vision resumes on the other end. And, and there is. There is definitely a Bronze Age palace on the Acropolis which we will never get to excavate because it's under the Parthenon. And who the hell is going to let you dig up the Parthenon? Like fair.
• 30:26
  Ed: Yeah, very carefully from one side.
• 30:29
  Bret Devereaux: No, you just dynamite your way sideways through the Acropolis. I'm sure that's gonna go great.
• 30:35
  Ed: It's fine, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine.
• 30:37
  George: The only way to make Greeks matter is to say something involving Turkey.
• 30:41
  Bret Devereaux: I don't know, I don't know. We could bring up the Elgin Marbles.
• 30:46
  George: Yeah, no, no, we don't like the British on this podcast.
• 30:49
  Bret Devereaux: No, no, I'm very much a. I'm very much carry added and Elgin Marble should go back kind of guy. So we're on the same page. Yeah.
• 31:00
  Ed: There is only one exception and that is the Falkland Islands are the rightful property of Great Britain. Thank you.
• 31:06
  Bret Devereaux: Yeah, no, that's fair.
• 31:07
  George: Yeah, fair. Yeah, we've been through that. Due to world yes man.
• 31:12
  Bret Devereaux: People like they did an imperialism on who nobody lived there before anyway. The fish.
• 31:21
  George: It's like one of five places on earth where definitively the current residents were the first humans to live there.
• 31:27
  Bret Devereaux: Nobody is there. Like it doesn't happen often people. Anyway.
• 31:32
  Ed: It is funny with the, the Bronze Age collapse though because like one of the cities that burned during the collapse was Pylos and it would have been really awkward for Telemachus to go there.
• 31:42
  Bret Devereaux: Right, That's Nestor's palace for those who are playing along.
• 31:44
  Ed: Yeah, yeah.
• 31:46
  Bret Devereaux: No, and, and so obviously like this collapse happens, it's very severe in Greece. It is significant. But less severe through the Levant. It is coincided with periods of relative weakness and chaos in Egypt, Assyria and Mesopotamia, though not as extreme collapse like the Egypt kind of keep more or less keeps going for a few more decades. But the. The dynasty is clearly weakened and things eventually come apart. The only one of the major because right before the late Bronze Age collapse we have a pretty extensive state system, what we call the late Bronze Age sometimes concert of powers. The only one of the major powers in the concert that makes it all the way through contiguously are the Assyrians. And they will be the first major empire expanding early in the Iron Age, presumably as a result. So it is a. It is A pretty kind of traumatic moment. We don't, we are not fully secure on what causes it. I think the, the best theory is climate change. And that's, and that's absolutely the. Absolutely the case. So because of, I mean, really, in part because of efforts to, you know, for some reason, we really want to understand the climate in the past and how it changes over time. A lot lately, I can't, I can't
• 33:13
  George: imagine why, why, why, but,
• 33:17
  Bret Devereaux: but that's allowed us to identify that, like, oh, things get kind of dry around when everything starts coming apart. And then the assumption is, is generally the period in the run up to the late Bronze Age collapse does seem, in the limited way that we can tell, to be a period of heightened escalated warfare. It's certainly true in Greece, these, these Mycenaean palaces at the center of these cities, Starting in around 1250, they start to go bonkers with fortifications. Huge, insanely thick walls, just very heavy, heavy fortifications. And you only do that if things are not going great with your foreign policy. And often the assumption is then when crops started failing, right, these kingdoms would have no resources with which to deal with the problem. Little in the way of reserves. One of the things that's notable is that again, the wave of destruction seems to move directionally. By the time it's reaching Anatolia and especially the Levant, we start to have bits and pieces of writing reporting what's going on. Often literally in the case of these are kingdoms that keep temporary records on clay tablets. And if you put all the clay tablets in a building and then someone lights it on fire, you've created a lot of porcelain tablets that survive to us. So this happens, for instance, in Ugarit, and we, we start to get these indications that there's, there's, you know, population movement happening, raiding happening. When these guys finally get to Egypt and we have records, the Egyptians throw up a whole bunch of demonyms that, like, were under attack by these people and those people, and a lot of them appear to be Aegeans. So one of the assumptions here is that the collapse kind of begins up in the Aegean, in Greece and, and western Anatolia. And then you can imagine, right, the collapse of the palaces where these kings have been using their wealth to hire lots of, like, thugs. Where do all the thugs go? And, you know, the answer is they go a pirating, like, what would you do? We're thugs with boats. And this then creates kind of a rippling pressure. The first empire it hits is the Hittite empire. The Hittite empire is already in bad shape. When this happens, because they've been fighting a bunch of kind of useless wars against the Egyptians and the Assyrians, they just come apart. One of the wild things is that we have tablets from Ugarit, which is a city that would today be in Lebanon. It's a Phoenician city that is notionally a Hittite vassal, where they're like desperately writing for help. They're like, please send reinforcements. And we know they're like, there's no Hittite government to reinforce you, mate. They're gone. That has already fallen apart.
• 36:13
  Ed: Not all of those tablets
• 36:17
  George: there.
• 36:18
  Ed: Yeah, yeah.
• 36:20
  Bret Devereaux: And I mean, as a side note, you know, if people want to make more late Bronze Age collapse movies, there's some real pathos to milk out of a desperate city calling for help from an empire that was supposed to protect them, that collapsed before the crisis even got to them. Like, that's wild. Levels of the world is ending.
• 36:41
  George: Just the speed, even at the communications delays in that period, like where 100 miles is like a really long way to go, like that is just incredibly fast for very durable power structures that have lasted decades or centuries to just
• 36:56
  Bret Devereaux: disappear and, and again it takes a few decades for the whole thing to, to kind of finish coming apart. We also generally assume part of what's causing this collapse to be so contagious is that there's a lot of trade interdependence between these states particularly. This is the Bronze Age. One of the things to know about Bronze is that you can never make bronze all in one place for fussy geological reasons. Tin and copper don't generally occur in the same kinds of, of environments, so you're invariably importing one, the other or both.
• 37:31
  Ed: And yeah, I have to get some of it from Alibaba and some from
• 37:36
  Bret Devereaux: Amazon or a Nasser, although it's bad copper.
• 37:42
  George: No, don't, don't, don't buy from him.
• 37:47
  Bret Devereaux: The world's oldest one star review.
• 37:50
  Ed: No, I mostly work in plastic, but
• 37:53
  George: it really does remind me a lot like the narrative you're describing here of the unwind of the Roman Empire. Right. Very similar vibes. It didn't play out exactly the same way. I mean, Rome falling apart took a lot longer in part because it was so much more complex and structured differently. It wasn't a multi state system, it was a single state system. But you start running out of food and then you have to decide what you're going to actually supply with resources. And instead of expansion fueling more resources for everybody, contraction starts. Meaning that you have to make hard decisions with resources. And before you know it, the central powers are no longer available anymore. And also the social contract falls apart and you've got people retreating into, you know, country exclaves as opposed to investing in the urban center and trade networks shrink and the whole thing just unwinds over the period of, in the Roman Empire's case, it took 300 years roughly in the West. But it, you know, it was a long term process, but it happened in a way that I don't think anyone at the start of it could have possibly imagined and happened because of an exogenous thing. Rome was also largely because of climate shifting, not because of anything the Romans did, but you know, exogenous climate shift.
• 39:04
  Bret Devereaux: And to be, to be fair, like all the Romans are pushing on it from another direction, which is civil wars are really bad, right? And that's, I mean that's the other factor especially. And, and we can see this, right? I mean obviously the late Bronze Age collapse is multi state system and the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west is a single state system. But obviously if you're doing civil wars, it kind of behaves like a multi state system. And in, in both cases, one of the things that's happening here, right, is that, you know, the base state of humanity is poverty is grinding, brutal, awful poverty. Poverty is normal, prosperity is unusual. And you can build complex, finicky clockwork economic and social systems to, with great effort, lift yourself a little bit above poverty. And until the Industrial revolution, it's only ever a very little bit.
• 40:00
  George: And it's also a highly contiguous. Exactly, because until the Industrial revolution and really the Green revolution, you, you just couldn't ever create enough calories for a consistent surplus that lasted decades plus, like there was always a contingency of dry or cold climate shifts that absolutely nuke.
• 40:16
  Bret Devereaux: And ironically of course trade across multiple regions is part of how you insulated yourself from that. Because if their crop failed, then these other guys on the other side of the hill are probably okay. What ends up, what ends up happening in both cases though, right, is that internal conflict is disrupting those, that's those economic systems disrupting that trade. And as a result the economy doesn't stop, but it becomes less efficient. And the problem with your economy becoming 10% less efficient, say is that it supports 10% less people. And the story of these collapses that we can see, we see in the form of like will be like, ah, settlement patterns are changing, the society is de. Urbanizing. The number of rural settlements is also declining. And then you'll get Some sort of like bloodless estimate of population decline. But like that, population decline is the sort of concentrated essence of human misery. And it usually isn't. The population decline is not caused by barbarians running around stabbing everybody. The population decline is caused by a restriction in the food supply, an inability to get other kinds of goods, resulting in heightened, typically infant and child mortality, so that death rates outpace birth rates. Despite these, in these societies, birth rates are extremely high. And so the population over a few generations contracts down to a new stable number. But remember, like we're contracting from what I like to some as call from a high equilibrium to a low equilibrium. These were both equilibriums. The high number was also stable and it just required not messing up the economic system. And so what you see in both cases is there is this kind of climatic push.
• 42:05
  George: It knocks you out of equilibrium as opposed to makes it.
• 42:08
  Bret Devereaux: And what makes it fatal is then the decision to fight yourself and the sort of internal political collapse which disrupts these sort of fragile economic systems that, to be honest, like, the ancients don't think very much about. At least the ancients that write to us, right? Your Roman aristocrat who's deciding to do some assassinations and try and seize the throne knows functionally nothing about economics. The Romans have built this wonderful economic system by accident in an effort to be better at doing war, which is. We don't have quite the sources to say this with confidence, but certainly seems like what's happening in the late Bronze Age collapse too. These guys don't know anything about economics. They probably think tariffs are good. You know, that level of being dumb about economics. And so when it begins to fall apart, they don't know how to fix it. They don't even necessarily know that it's broken. I mean, you can see this in sort of Diocletian's weird flailings trying to fix the Roman economy after he, whoopsie daisies kicked out the only functional leg underneath their currency system.
• 43:16
  George: I mean, it's only been a century since our understanding of economic output has moved beyond send somebody down to the rail yard to count how many cars are moving by. Like, that was literally what they were doing a century ago to measure the US economy. So the idea of even the best organized and most economically oriented ancient people having a clear view into everything that was going on and why it was going on and the feedback loops they were stuck in is just. I mean, it's just not realistic. There's just no way. Information didn't move fast enough. And there wasn't enough visibility into what was happening. I mean, that said, I think it's a really good point you made Brett, that the population declines. Like what that looks like is 1 dead kids, 2 kids that are starving to the point where disease burdens soar and you are vulnerable to stuff that is maybe worse to death. And like in the Roman case it was the Black Death, you know, Pestis, you know, that's what really doomed the Eastern Roman Empire. But you know, throughout the ancient world, anytime you had a hard time getting enough calories to people, suddenly you're dealing with a lot more Yersinia pestis, a lot more smallpox, a lot more stuff that normal populations can shrug off. But when you've got a lot of starving people concentrated in an urban area with not that much sanitation, boy, anyone without a high tuned immune system is toast. And that's what happened. And it's, it's really grim to think about in these terms.
• 44:43
  Propter: And also, also fertility is going to take a hit. And you know, and, and that has like famine, Famine has multi generational effects on, on fertility that, that you've got a significant echo effect on expressed fertility coming from conditions of privation. So it's not just, it's not just that you take the short term hit in the one population cycle. It's that, it's that you're permanently depressing your output going forward for multiple generations.
• 45:17
  Bret Devereaux: Yeah. And of course these are, these are societies with mortality fertility regimes where it takes very little to push you over the edge because baseline mortality is, is already so high.
• 45:33
  George: I don't think people appreciate, you know, today, even with the American healthcare system's underperformance on infant mortality and maternal mortality like we under perform very significantly versus other developed countries even when you adjust for a bunch of different stuff that you should adjust for. But like all that being said, the way that childbirth now is not a 50, 50 shot at death and the way that you know, a kid being born has, you know, I'm not going to remember the number off the top of my head, but like a 99% chance of making to their first birthday is just like that is completely untrue about any period of human history other than roughly twice my lifetime back. Like if you go back more than a hundred years, even like that is just not true. And a kid being born is maybe not equally as likely to die as they are to live till they see the age of one, but pretty close even in the wealthiest, most advanced societies in the world.
• 46:34
  Propter: Right. And not, and not just true, not Just true on a society wide basis. But even, even if you are the economic elite of the society, even if you are relatively well fed within the society, you don't get to, you don't get to just opt out of the infant mortality thing.
• 46:47
  Bret Devereaux: And just to like put those in perspective, right, with some numbers and we talk about you know, US underperformance compared to the rest of the sort of very wealthy countries in terms of, of both maternal mortality does childbirth kill the mother and infant mortality does the kiddo survive? Right. We're talking about like what fraction below 1% are you like we're talking about, are you 05 or are you 05? Whereas when we're talking about maternal mortality in the pre modern world, we're talking about are you like what whole ass percentage are you, are you 2% or 5%? When we're talking about infant mortality the range is like 35 to 60%. Like where are you in there?
• 47:29
  Ed: Yeah, like Even in like 1900 it was like 1% maternal mortality in the U.S. it was, it was obscene. And like what do you, what we have what now? I think it's like 20 per 100,000 or something like that. It's, it's extremely shocking how much it has, has decreased. It's still, still high but like, compared to like, like equivalent nations. But like 20 is not a thousand. I know trenchant insights but like it's
• 48:01
  George: 649 per 100k as of 2024. So it's not, it's not zero but it is substantially less than 1% to say the least.
• 48:11
  Ed: Right.
• 48:13
  George: Which I mean it should be as close to zero as we can get it. And, and the US healthcare system fails in a ton of ways on this. And you know, like, like my wife when she was preparing for delivery was not super stoked about what was coming down the pike because you know the numbers out there, right. Even though we have access to great maternal care in the healthcare system that we live in and we have the income where we don't really need to worry about that and we were educated and we know what questions to ask and yada yada yada. Right. Like all down there. But it was still something that you know, in the back of our mind and like, you know, we can say oh there have been massive improvements. We obviously think, I don't want anyone to get the impression that were out here saying oh no, like maternal mortality in the US is not a problem because it is, it is. But in the historical context it's just important to Note the difference in numbers.
• 49:05
  Propter: And just. Just a quick correction on the numbers. That 649 number was total US mortality. Not. Not per 100k. The numbers about 18 per 100k.
• 49:16
  George: Oh, I'm sorry. I looked at the wrong summary. So I was right. I'm sorry, Ed. You were almost exactly correct.
• 49:22
  Ed: That's because I looked it up.
• 49:24
  Bret Devereaux: Well, yeah, I was gonna say that sounds like. That sounds like a guy who looked up the number.
• 49:30
  Ed: Yeah, it is. Look, George is on this podcast. This guy just, like, pulls out reams of oil stuff from. From memory. Some of us need a little help.
• 49:40
  George: I'm not going to talk about the east west pipeline capacity right now. Everybody, do not worry. We're going to stick to the program here.
• 49:47
  Ed: I mean, we said we were talking about a movie, and when. How much of that is happening?
• 49:51
  Bret Devereaux: Some. Some.
• 49:54
  Ed: That's.
• 49:55
  George: We did at least a solid half hour on it before we got into ancient demographics.
• 49:58
  Ed: I think we spent like five minutes.
• 50:00
  Bret Devereaux: Look, I am. I am resisting the urge to ask if we're going to still have oil in three months. So
• 50:09
  George: we are the answer.
• 50:11
  Ed: Yes.
• 50:11
  Propter: I think we can kind of come back through the movie for some of this stuff because we've got. We've got this transition from wartime ethics to peacetime ethics and the terrible fate that befalls many of those who. Who undergo that transition. But also we have a conversation here about. About military spending. Right. That happens at the end of Empire, and that seems like it may or may not necessarily map directly to our present situation, but we should at least consider whether or not it.
• 50:40
  Bret Devereaux: I think this is one of the. This is one of the really interesting kind of like, thematic threads in the movie that I'm not sure how many people pick up on. One of the threads that keeps weaving back in through the movie, especially as Telemachus travels, is right. The idea like, well, Ithaca needs a king. And when characters are pushed to be like, why does Ithaca need a king? The answer is, well, the sea people are coming, and somebody needs to be ready to raise Ithaca's army. And there's a sort of gender dynamic to this where, like. And it can't be Penelope, even though she's been running the place for 20 years. And, you know, Anne Hathaway makes her Oscar bid complaining about this. And
• 51:25
  George: just. Just to be clear, don't. Don't misinterpret what Brett just said. All four of us. And yes, I'm talking about YouTube. Brett, love.
• 51:32
  Bret Devereaux: Yes. No, Yeah, I actually thought that was a really good. Yeah, no, see, it Like. Like, it's the moment where she gets to go most nuclear at the camera, but it's actually a really effective scene. And, like, you suddenly get like, oh, yeah, she has been bottling it up for 20 years. And, like, it all comes out at once. It's a great scene. But anyway, but, like, people keep saying, like, you know, Ithaca needs to be able to raise its armies. Who's gonna. Ithaca needs a king to protect itself. Ithaca needs a king to protect itself. And then. And here we get into proper spoilers, right? Like, the reveal at the end is that the sea people are the Greeks. Ithaca's army is the sea people.
• 52:08
  Ed: Yep.
• 52:08
  Bret Devereaux: The thing that they're. That they're. That everyone's like, we need to protect ourselves from is themselves and their own raider pirate kings. Like, this is the sort of revelation that the wave of destruction that everybody has been afraid of, right? Like, I mean, it literally gets asked again in a moment of somewhat wooden dialogue, sort of point blank. Anne Hathaway's Penelope asks Matt Damon's Odysseus like, oh, you're the sea people. And he's like, yeah, right? And, like, the implications, like, all of these armies leaving Troy have been pillaging their way back home, and this is causing everything to fall apart. And of course, we see Odysseus has been do this, like, the very first village they meet, they rob and burn. And they're super mad at the people in the village who didn't just give them supplies. And they're like, why didn't you just give us supplies? And the village is like, we thought you were the sea people. And they're like, we're not the sea people. We're Greek. Because, like, this film is. Is not subtle. And then, of course, like, yeah, the Greeks are the sea people. And so what these guys are looking for, what's. What they think is going to save them from the collapse, is a manly man military king who's going to raise armies. And what's causing the collapse are manly man military kings raising armies again. Like, it is real on the nose.
• 53:29
  George: And.
• 53:30
  Bret Devereaux: And. And I will say, there's part of me. There's part of me that is like, why don't we do subtlety anymore? But having watched people on the Internet misinterpret their own popular culture for a long time, I find that I really suddenly understand and appreciate the Greek chorus where, like, just halfway through the play, like, these guys are gonna come along the side and be like, this dude's doing a bad idea. Don't be like, this guy. We're gonna sing the moral at you for a minute, and then we're gonna go off stage. And I'm suddenly like, you know, that's not a terrible idea, actually. Maybe. Maybe we should do that.
• 54:04
  Ed: It works better than. It works better than them having an iPad and half watching. So, I mean,
• 54:12
  Bret Devereaux: but it's just. I don't know.
• 54:15
  Ed: This was the first movie I have seen in, like, the last 10 years where no one had a phone up.
• 54:20
  Bret Devereaux: Okay.
• 54:20
  Ed: And I was like, okay, all right. That's all right. We can go with that. Because I was sitting in the far
• 54:25
  George: back movie I've seen in person at a theater since COVID hit. So to give you an idea of how I go to the theater, you
• 54:32
  Bret Devereaux: watch even fewer movies than me that.
• 54:34
  George: I don't like the theater. I love the theater. I watch a decent number of movies at home.
• 54:38
  Bret Devereaux: No, that's true. Yes. Well. And they all come to streaming reasonably quickly anyway. So. Although I will say, like, right, I'm.
• 54:46
  George: During COVID they were all released directly to streaming, so it's like, why would I bother? But now it's just like, okay, well, then we got to get a sitter. And then we, you know, all that stuff. So it's.
• 54:55
  Ed: Yeah, I'm. I'm the local weirdo. I can't do, like, streaming tv, but, like, I do watch movies. So we. We go less often than I'd like, but also, like, more often than most people. And sitting in the far back is really cool because you can see, like, how disinterested everyone else.
• 55:13
  George: I will say, though, the theater, it does have a very romantic place for me in the American cultural experience because it is one of the few places where everyone paid roughly the same amount for their ticket to. To see the show that you're sitting beside. You know, in the theater, it's. Whoever bought the ticket first gets the better seat. And, you know, it's. Everyone's charged roughly the same. Obviously, you can go to the IMAX or you can go to the, you know, different format, but at least when you're in the theater, you all pay the same amount. There wasn't somebody buying a box seat. There wasn't somebody in first class. There wasn't somebody in back in the bathroom, in coach, and there isn't somebody, you know, in. Up in the bleachers and the cheap seats. You're all in roughly the same seats, paid roughly the same amount for them. And, yeah, you know, going to the theater can be expensive, and it's a luxury for A lot of people, but at the end of the day, it's still reasonably accessible. If you work anything less than a minimum wage job or anything more than a minimum wage job, you can probably afford to go to the theater at some point. Maybe not every week, but it's accessible. It's not as it's more accessible than a cruise, a major sporting event, travel abroad, you know, all these other things. It's a really unique thing in American culture these days that you can have a collective experience that is that flat that so many people get to experience, both in terms of the actual sitting in the theater itself and the fact that you are all seeing the same picture that, well, I mean, again, IMAX versus standard definition or standard screen format, but whatever, close enough. You're all having the same cultural experience as well as millions of other people that are seeing this thing in their own theaters across the country. So, you know, even though I have not been voting with my feet in this respect, and I am a hypocrite for that, I will make a very passionate defense of the theater and cinema as just this really valuable thing in American culture that I don't think we're necessarily losing. This has been a great summer for the. For the movies business, but has dealt with a lot in the past five or 10 years. And you know, movies maybe will go away someday. And I think if it ever does go away, it'll be a shame.
• 57:13
  Ed: So naturally no one goes.
• 57:14
  Propter: Markets guy. Super excited about a fungible unit of experience.
• 57:19
  Bret Devereaux: I will also note, of course, it's kind of funny that like, ah, yes, here you have one of the sort of few remaining like a true sort of vestige of 1950s Americana, the experience of going to the movie theater and bringing a movie. And it's a common cultural experience rather than all this sort of fragmented. Especially when you have a big event like the Odyssey that basically everybody goes to see. And of course the chuds hate it. Like they hate it with every AI generated 1950s idealized family picture they post. And I've just, this is what you said you wanted. It's like, oh, no. But they don't like it because it's inclusive.
• 58:02
  Ed: Yeah, yeah, pretty much, yeah.
• 58:05
  George: It's inclusive and it's aspirational and it appeals to something beyond raw power. Right. Like again, I think the specific form of virtue that Odysseus is being bashed over the head throughout that film to fall in with is not something that I would necessarily advocate for, you know, leadership in the United States today or any other country. Around the world today. I think it's, it is, I don't know, narcissistic maybe in it, in its expression. And it's not consistent with democracy and it's not consistent with a bunch of values that I think a lot of us hold dear. But you know, all that said, like, it's still a code and it's still holding to a code. And half of our current politics are based entirely around the idea that holding to any, you know, objective definition of virtue is a sin in and of itself against the movement and
• 59:09
  Ed: man.
• 59:10
  George: Like, it was refreshing to see that sort of message in a way that, you know, obviously he, he cast a trans man in a major male role. You know, he cast a black woman as Helen of Troy. Like, yeah, okay, like you can make the argument that superficially he was being woke or whatever, which is a dumb argument to make, but whatever. I mean, you can make that argument, but that's not why the movie was so, so much an indictment of about half of our current politics. And I love that, I love that the like the obvious critique was just like one that totally fit and that they completely missed the less obvious critique that. Really.
• 59:48
  Bret Devereaux: Well, I mean, I think I said this before, right? But like Nolan's positioning here is like pretty like aggressively small C conservative. Western civilization is a thing in this movie and it's good. It is embodied in the literature and storytelling and old fashioned norms and religious observance, and those are good. And destroying those things, violating those norms are bad. It is a from the right, but not from the far right, but a from the right critique of that politics of power. And, and that's.
• 1:00:31
  George: It's also totally consistent with Nolan's whole deal too, right? Like if you look at Interstellar, right? Like Interstellar is a movie about family being more important than anything else than like then parents caring for their children and children learning about the world from their parents. Like that is the message of that movie, right? That's a very conservative value. It's a value I also happen to hold, but I think objectively it's a small C conservative value. If you look at Tenet, right, They're literally going to war with the future. Like you couldn't be more beat you over the head with it that like the bad guys are the future and the past or the present is, is bad. Like again, that is as small C conservative as you can get, right? Inception also, like, new ideas are dangerous and like, you got to be careful about these, this, these flashes of brilliance that come into your mind. I Mean, that's not the only thing that's going on in Inception, but that's certainly like one of the messages of the movie and like, fairly prominently. And I, I just, like you said the Dark Knight trilogy or something like,
• 1:01:30
  Bret Devereaux: something like Dunkirk, which is reaction, which is a sort of a love letter to old fashioned virtue.
• 1:01:35
  George: Totally.
• 1:01:37
  Bret Devereaux: Right. Like, it's telling several different stories. But every story is intended at some point to highlight a moment of like, very old fashioned virtue, often exemplified by older men in contrast to the younger men around them. Like, the older man has to be the one, whether it's the officer on the dock or the old man on the boat. All these people are played by famous actors, but my head can't conjure any of their names. Branagh's the, the officer on the dock. Right. It's these like, older men who have to be the carriers of virtue and the exemplifiers for the, for the young. And, and again, yeah, it's like, it's a very, it's, it's an old fashioned conservative vision and it's striking how much it's at war with the, the mega vision which hates all of these things, right. Like they hate the hell out of the memory of John McCain precisely because he is exactly that person. Look, I'm not saying you need to like John McCain. I'm saying John McCain as the guy who went to war, endured a POW camp and dedicated his life to public service, whether or not you think he made a positive impact on that. Right? Like, he is, he is the. And, and Trump famously, like, launched his campaign talking crap about John McCain getting captured in a war and sort of recontextualized the heroic moment in his story as a negative. That's the, the charm. I mean, like, I'm not making a judgment on John McCain's politics.
• 1:03:18
  George: Yeah, I, yeah, for sure. No, I, I think that's right. And there is so much to, in the rejection of. I mean, the ultimate irony is that so many of these white marble statue guys are converts because, again, like, the Catholic Church is, again, not a measure of virtue or a definition of virtue that I would personally aspire to, but the Catholic Church is steeped in this approach to life, right? Where it's like there is a, there is a true set of conduct you should hold yourself to, and it's been true for a very long time, and we have written about it extensively and please make sure to check the footnotes. And would you like another encyclical detailing what the right way to be a human being Is, again, I don't necessarily endorse everything that the Catholic Church says in that respect, but there's a system,
• 1:04:07
  Bret Devereaux: and there's a set of. And there's a set of beliefs. There's a set of beliefs, right? Which is how you get a situation where this. This is always wild to me. JD Vance was denounced by two popes in one year, which is an impressive achievement. He's an adult convert to Catholicism. On some level, I'm like, jd, my man, you signed up for the version of Christianity that says, this dude gets to tell me what to do about matters of morality. And then you're like, well, I don't know that the Pope really understands, you know, the Ordo amorous. I'm like, I don't think you get to make that call. I'm not. I'm not Catholic, but I'm pretty sure if you are Catholic, he gets to make that call. And. And, yeah, you see that. That there's this. This sort of rupture. Although I will note among the chuds, like, this is one thing that you quickly pick up that, like, about half of the chuds are, like, Latin mass Catholic integralists, and then, like, the other half are, like, weird neo pagans. And it's always funny, like, observing fascist movements to be like, I, you know, I hope you guys never win, because that would be terrible. But if you do, it'll be interesting to see which. Which half of you has the other half up against the wall first.
• 1:05:22
  Ed: Well, the. The neo pagans mostly are the, The. The statue avatars who claim to be European, and the Catholics are the ones
• 1:05:31
  Bret Devereaux: who claim to be American.
• 1:05:32
  Ed: Right. Like, that seems to be about the breakdown here.
• 1:05:35
  George: And so, like, spiritually, correct me, I'm
• 1:05:38
  Ed: not saying they're from America. I'm not saying they're in America, but, like.
• 1:05:42
  Bret Devereaux: Well, that's.
• 1:05:43
  George: Yeah, good.
• 1:05:44
  Ed: Yeah.
• 1:05:45
  Propter: The point of agreement here is that we should have God kings, right? And the question is, you know, how much God, how much king? But what they all agree on, you know, at least the ones who are coming from the Catholic tradition, right, Is. Is that. Is that, you know, we have been failed by these God kings, but surely the next one will do that.
• 1:06:02
  Bret Devereaux: Right? They're all. They're all fascist authoritarians. They're just. They disagree on the kind of authority that they would like, but they are currently united by their opposition to liberalism.
• 1:06:14
  George: But I mean, fascism, though, like, fundamentally is a rejection of any restraining.
• 1:06:19
  Bret Devereaux: I think that's fair.
• 1:06:20
  George: Right? It's a. It's a. It's it's like that. It's not just a rejection of restraint from voters or restraint from academics or restraint from law or restraint from it. It's any restraining capacity at all. And that, I think that is what makes Trump indisputably a fascist, is that read through from the fascists of the 1930s to how he views the world, which is that literally any restraint on his ability to do whatever he wants for any reason is contrary to him and therefore contrary to his movement. And I mean, you know, the, the, that is really what gets the whole wedge between converting to follow the guy in Rome's orders. Not orders, but direction at the very least, and judgments. And no, actually now I, actually that binds me now, so, oops, never mind, I don't, I don't have to do it anymore. And it's because the definition of this fascist movement is rejection of any restraint.
• 1:07:20
  Propter: But I mean, that kind of, that kind of gets to the heart of it though, because like, that's, that's why this is appealing to a guy like Peter Thiel, who is not a traditionalist Catholic in a lot of respects, that what he, what, what he likes about that is the concept of ultimate authority that everyone has to bow down to. And then, you know, we're going to fill in the details on the authority later, you know, but it's, but it's important that we've established that we have an ultimate authority that everybody needs to submit to.
• 1:07:46
  George: As long as it's Peter Thiel.
• 1:07:47
  Propter: Right. You know, we'll figure out how to make that second part happen. So, I mean, I think, I think that's, I think that's kind of how you, how you square the circle on that. And the problem is that the people who sign up to be God Emperor are, are almost without exception terrible that, you know, there's never, there's never been a fascist movement that has had technocratic smart leaders.
• 1:08:14
  Ed: Oh yeah, they shot them.
• 1:08:16
  Bret Devereaux: Right. Well, and the, and the, I mean, the movement is, the ideology is it fundamentally comes from an emotional place of both pre and anti rational place anyway. So the sort of person that can say my emotions in this moment need to take a backseat to the law of supply and demand. Right. That person isn't going to be in on the ideology anyway. Right. It's going to be inimical to them.
• 1:08:43
  Ed: Yeah, I, I can't remember who wrote, I just went looking. But like somebody said this week on Blue sky, like Carl Schmidt wrote 2,000 pages of, of, of nonsense just to get to the point where he said and we can shoot everyone. And the Nazi said, why do you write anything about the last page?
• 1:09:00
  Propter: Yeah, that was Fred of the podcast Theophyte.
• 1:09:03
  Ed: I, I figured, but I couldn't find it to cite it.
• 1:09:07
  George: That's Washington State solidarity at work there.
• 1:09:11
  Ed: Go buy it.
• 1:09:12
  Bret Devereaux: I've just been, as a side note, like, horrified at the intellectual movement that we're in, where you now start to see people quoting Carl Schmidt. But leftistially, I'm like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
• 1:09:26
  Ed: Yep.
• 1:09:27
  George: No, no, no, no, no, no.
• 1:09:29
  Bret Devereaux: Oh, goodness.
• 1:09:32
  Ed: I had to take a walk after that one.
• 1:09:34
  George: Yeah, the, the reaction and counter reaction. The left is not immune to reactionary thinking, let me put it that way.
• 1:09:43
  Propter: Yeah.
• 1:09:44
  George: Either explicitly or in practical terms. Right. Because I mean, that's, that's what they're doing. They're just reacting to the current zeitgeist and riffing on it and like, that's not how it's supposed to work.
• 1:09:54
  Bret Devereaux: There is left authoritarianism in addition to right authoritarianism. Occasionally left authoritarians get into power too. It doesn't turn out great either.
• 1:10:07
  George: I'm sorry, are you saying that China isn't the ultimate advanced society and that they are much wealthier and happier than we are in every respect? And every single Chinese citizen would lay down their lives to maintain the glory and the year 2026.
• 1:10:22
  Ed: Oh, goodness. Have you looked at the cars, George?
• 1:10:28
  Propter: The cars. The cars are cool
• 1:10:31
  George: cars, Web. The cars.
• 1:10:32
  Bret Devereaux: Look, just, just, just as soon as it's done purging people for corruption that were appointed in the last corruption purge to replace the people who were purged in the previous corruption purge, to deal with the corruption purge before that, then, then true socialism will have been realized.
• 1:10:53
  Propter: One of my favorite.
• 1:10:53
  George: That's just Matt, the whole corruption thing is that Muay Thai used to be the biggest were for a long time was the biggest stock in China, like the onshore equity market in China. And that's because they got like a piece of all economic activity because they were used as bribes, basically. Their liquor was used as bribes. And so as China's economy got bigger, there were more and larger bribes paid. And so they were the biggest company by market cap because they collected a rent, basically. It's no longer true anymore for a bunch of reasons, but they're still very large and. Yeah, Kweichow Mutai. Very funny.
• 1:11:31
  Bret Devereaux: Well, I remember a story a while back in one of Xi Jinping's early corruption purges, and you may remember this, that it caused a significant crash in the market for Swiss watches. Because that had been another standard element of bribes, which you do.
• 1:11:47
  George: Actually. Swiss watches are funny. You can, you can map Swiss watch exports to global nominal domestic product growth pretty precisely. Like, they pretty much track over time. So, like, for instance, Swiss watch exports exploded in the mid 2000s and then plunged in like 2007 to 2009. And then they really ramped up and then commodity prices fell. And so you had a lot less people buying Swiss watch watches in the Gulf states. And so switch was switch Swiss watch man, it's tongue twister. Swiss watch exports decelerated sharply and then commodity prices picked back up and the global economy didn't. So up go Swiss watch price. Swiss watch exports. And so, yeah, very underrated economic indicator.
• 1:12:29
  Bret Devereaux: For, as the ancient historian, I am of course jealous of, of the economist's ability to like, track these statistics in real time rather than, like, I have 152 sites and I'm counting animal bones in those sites in order to gauge nutrition, to track the same thing.
• 1:12:46
  Ed: Sure. But, but, but consider, you don't have to use Excel.
• 1:12:51
  Bret Devereaux: Well, you do if you're working on the.
• 1:12:52
  George: Oh, you think you can track animal bones without using Excel?
• 1:12:56
  Bret Devereaux: Admittedly, admittedly, I, I don't work on that kind of archaeology, but I know the people who do, and I've seen their spreadsheets. If you want the really brutal spreadsheets, you want to talk to the numismatists, will it be like, here is my study. It's based on my database of 800,000 coins, which I had individually.
• 1:13:19
  Ed: If you're doing that in Excel, I'm concerned.
• 1:13:23
  Propter: Yeah.
• 1:13:24
  George: I will say the numismatists are really how we know anything about the economy of ancient Rome. And we know actually a lot about it because of those freaks. So, guys, keep it up.
• 1:13:34
  Bret Devereaux: God bless the coin people. I'm glad I don't have your job. Right. Like, I. It's one of these things where I find numismatics pretty fundamentally boring. But the historical evidence that we pull out of it and for people to understand if they're kind of not familiar with, like, ancient numismatics, particularly for the Roman world, like, we can get to the point where, like, we'll do dye studies where you'll get enough coins of the same issue that you can see the die wearing out across the strikes. And so you can tell roughly how many dies were made and you know, how many more or less coins you can strike with an individual die. And so you can get a sense of how many coins total were in circulation over a given Period of time. Like this sort of of stuff is kind of fantastic wizardry. And then you can look at like, where did the coins go? Because they're presumably moving across trade routes or routes of government spending, the coins are going out to the army and so on and so forth. Like all of this stuff is fantabulous. It's also extremely boring. And so like, God bless the numismatists for doing it for me so that I can pull their books out of the library, skip to the conclusion and figure out what's going on about the thing I care about.
• 1:14:51
  George: That's right, that's right. You also get this, you know, whenever you find a bunch of coins in one place, that means something was going badly wrong somewhere. Like you can find individual coins in pretty germane circumstances. That doesn't necessarily tell you there was a big famine. But man, if you find like a trove of, you know, 4th century Roman coins somewhere in Britain, like, oh yeah, we know what that was about.
• 1:15:16
  Bret Devereaux: Like, because, because folks, if, if you're wondering, like, think about what has to happen for a coin hoard to reach us. Which means someone first had to have the idea, right? Of like, normally your coins are in like a box in your house. They first have to have the idea of, oh shit, I should bury all my coins in the ground. Which usually doesn't mean things are going great. And then they were for whatever reason never able to come back and recover all the coins in the ground. A thing they would have definitely done if they could because it's a, a whole lot of money. So like a hundred percent of the time the person that buried your coin hoard is either very enslaved or very dead. Probably the second one. There are no good outcome for that person and, or their family unit or their village or anybody who saw them bury the coins, right? Like, because somebody would have come back to get them. And there's a, there's an older Walter Scheideau Peter Tieman article on this point noting that like coin hordes also tend to be time correlated, which is to see, you'll see the coin hordes ripple across the map at given points. They were looking at the Roman civil wars, which is, tell you, like a whole bunch of people were burying their life savings and then running for their lives and a whole bunch of them didn't come back. So yeah, anytime you're picking up large quantities of coin hoards that aren't, I should, I should clarify. There aren't burial deposits or votive deposits.
• 1:16:48
  George: Good, good, good note, good note.
• 1:16:50
  Bret Devereaux: Things are not going great. Bad day, bad times.
• 1:16:56
  George: All right, well, on that, on that happy note, I think we can be confident that as long as your neighbor isn't out at 3 in the morning with a shovel, a lantern, and a big wooden chest, it could get a lot worse. So just keep that in mind.
• 1:17:09
  Ed: Yeah, they might just be burying a body.
• 1:17:12
  George: Thank you so much, Brett, for coming on the podcast. This is great. Even if you are UNC guy, which I am going to somehow get past, this has been really, really fun and
• 1:17:22
  Ed: we was hoping you wouldn't notice.
• 1:17:23
  George: George, go and see the odd. Oh, come on, of course I'm gonna notice.
• 1:17:26
  Bret Devereaux: Wait, so here's, here's the key question though, right? Are you, are you, are you a Duke guy or are you. What, what, what is the nature of your beef? I must know. Is he a Duke guy? Because, I mean, I'm.
• 1:17:40
  George: I think you have yours. Well, from the school at the other end.
• 1:17:45
  Bret Devereaux: Because, because, because like, I'm a UNC guy, but I'm like, I'm also technically an NC State guy, which is a weird, which is a weird place to be, right? I got my PhD from UNC, but I am employed by NC State, so the only thing I and my students can agree upon is the Duke sucks. Which is a. A truth universally acknowledged.
• 1:18:03
  George: Seeing senior UNC guy but also an NC State guy is like saying, yeah, my wife left me she cousin. Okay, so for normal men, this week, that's going to be it. If you liked hearing what Brett had to say, and we really do appreciate him, despite the joke I just made,
• 1:18:21
  Ed: give us a George.
• 1:18:23
  George: Yes, any I rate NC State people, UNC people, people whose wives have left them or people who are or were
• 1:18:32
  Bret Devereaux: married to them, or the sea peoples
• 1:18:34
  George: get in my mentions in Blue Sky.
• 1:18:37
  Ed: I don't think they're on Blue Sky.
• 1:18:39
  Propter: Brad.
• 1:18:39
  George: Sure, the C people are also welcome to add me on our niche social networking site. So for normal men in Nelson, Columbia, I'm George.
• 1:18:48
  Propter: I can't believe you're gonna bring up cousin marriage and not let me do the Troy Jackson bit in D.C. on
• 1:18:53
  Ed: prompter and in Boston, Ahmed.
• 1:18:56
  George: Stay normal, y'. All. Sam.