Latest / Drawn of History / Roman Empire Expert Mike Duncan _ This Past Weekend w_ Theo Von _589(M4A_128K)

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Roman Empire Expert Mike Duncan _ This Past Weekend w_ Theo Von _589(M4A_128K) · Drawn of History

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Speaker 1: Hey, I just wanted to ask you something.
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Speaker 1: All right. Praise God, baby. Thanks.
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Speaker 2: I've got some tour dates to tell you about. We've
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Speaker 1: St.
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Speaker 2: Paul, Minnesota. Fargo, North Dakota. Rapid City, South Dakota. Philadelphia. Rochester,
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Speaker 2: New York, Detroit, Michigan. That's where we're going with the
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Speaker 2: Return of the Rat Tour. It's almost over. You can
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Speaker 2: get tickets at theovon.com slash T-O-U-R. And thank you so
0:41
Speaker 2: much for the support. Today's guest is a historian, an author,
0:46
Speaker 2: and a podcaster. He created the very popular History of
0:50
Speaker 2: Rome podcast, which spanned more than 175 episodes over five years.
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Speaker 2: I'm really grateful for this Walk through history, learning about
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Speaker 2: the rise and fall of the Roman Empire with today's guest, Mr.
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Speaker 1: Mike Duncan.
1:09
Speaker 3: Mike Duncan.
1:24
Speaker 1: Mike Duncan. I'm here. That's you, yeah. Thank you for
1:29
Speaker 1: having me. Thank you for joining me, man. I appreciate it.
1:32
Speaker 2: You have a famous series called The History of Rome
1:35
Speaker 2: that is on YouTube.
1:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and available where all fine podcasts are found.
1:41
Speaker 1: You can get it on Spotify. You can get it
1:42
Speaker 1: on Apple. You can get it anywhere. How extensive is it?
1:46
Speaker 1: It took me five years to write, and it is
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Speaker 1: 189 episodes long, and it will take you, through the
1:54
Speaker 1: complete history of the empire, at least through the fall
1:57
Speaker 1: of the West. It starts with Aeneas' arrival in Italy,
2:00
Speaker 1: which is sort of a precursor to the founding of Rome,
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Speaker 1: the legendary founding of Rome, and then takes you through
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Speaker 1: a thousand years worth of history all through to the
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Speaker 1: end of the 400s when the Western empire collapses.
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Speaker 2: It's one of the few things on YouTube right here
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Speaker 2: that people will go back, like at certain points in
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Speaker 2: their lives, like, or years later and be like, okay,
2:19
Speaker 2: I'm starting again.
2:20
Speaker 1: Yes. You know? There's a lot of re-listenability. in the
2:24
Speaker 1: history of Rome. And I've definitely heard that from people there,
2:27
Speaker 1: you know, I've listened to this 10, 15 times and
2:28
Speaker 1: I'm like, I listened to it like twice, you know,
2:31
Speaker 1: cause I'd like record an episode and then I listened
2:33
Speaker 1: to the episode. And then one time I kind of
2:35
Speaker 1: went back through it to like, remember what I had written. Um,
2:38
Speaker 1: but yeah, people, people who get into it and like it,
2:41
Speaker 1: they really love it and they go back to it and,
2:44
Speaker 1: you know, it reminds them of the time in their
2:45
Speaker 1: life when they listened to it for the first time.
2:47
Speaker 1: So they're, they're, it enters like the sort of like
2:49
Speaker 1: emotional connection beyond just like what they're learning about Roman history.
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Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I think that's something that certainly happened recently. You,
2:56
Speaker 2: there was like a lot of social media. There was
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Speaker 2: this buzz that happened a few months ago. It was
3:00
Speaker 2: like women asking men how often they think about the
3:03
Speaker 2: Roman empire. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, right when I saw that,
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Speaker 2: I was like, oh my God, I think about the
3:10
Speaker 2: Roman empire all the time. Right. Where do you think
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Speaker 2: the Roman empire can, why does, why was that so popular?
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Speaker 1: That meme? I mean, when people would ask me that,
3:20
Speaker 1: they're like, do you think about the Roman Empire every day?
3:21
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, I've thought about the Roman Empire every
3:23
Speaker 1: day for like 25 years. I'm writing a book about
3:25
Speaker 1: the Roman Empire as we speak. I'll probably think about
3:28
Speaker 1: Rome once a day. for the rest of my life,
3:31
Speaker 1: but I'm, I'm, I'm on like a, a very extreme
3:34
Speaker 1: edge of all this. And I am a sicko for
3:36
Speaker 1: Roman history. Like other people can be more casual about it,
3:38
Speaker 1: but I'm, I'm, I'm a, I'm a sicko for this stuff.
3:40
Speaker 1: You're like the Marilyn Manson of Rome. Yeah, I am.
3:43
Speaker 1: I'm really, really into it. But I think, you know,
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Speaker 1: Rome is always going to have like a hold on
3:50
Speaker 1: our collective consciousness because we're living in a post Roman society.
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Speaker 1: Most of the you know, cultures, nations, countries, whatever that
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Speaker 1: we think of sort of in the West, have roots
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Speaker 1: in Roman history, or at least have a phase in
4:05
Speaker 1: their own history where this is like the Roman period.
4:08
Speaker 1: Because the Romans, you know, eventually expanded to control the
4:12
Speaker 1: entire Mediterranean basin, like all of North Africa, like all of,
4:15
Speaker 1: you know, what we now consider the Middle East, and
4:17
Speaker 1: then they're up into like France and Britain. And this
4:20
Speaker 1: is a single unified state that has never been repeated
4:24
Speaker 1: in history. Like you look at a map of you know,
4:26
Speaker 1: Europe and the Mediterranean today, you know, it's 30, 35
4:29
Speaker 1: different countries. And once upon a time, this entire thing
4:32
Speaker 1: was the Roman Empire. And so their culture, their modes
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Speaker 1: of doing thing, their laws, their language, right? I mean, French, Spanish, Italian,
4:43
Speaker 1: these are all like post-Roman languages. These are all romance languages.
4:46
Speaker 1: And so I think that because there is this like
4:50
Speaker 1: point at which they were just everything for like a
4:54
Speaker 1: I mean not for– they didn't run the Mediterranean for
4:57
Speaker 1: a thousand years. But that they were just this thing
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Speaker 1: that we all come from. I think it's going to
5:01
Speaker 1: be very difficult to ever like purge the Roman Empire
5:05
Speaker 1: from the collective consciousness and I really don't think we
5:07
Speaker 1: should do that.
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Speaker 2: Even hearing you say that, I didn't realize that romance
5:12
Speaker 2: comes from Rome. Yeah, it's all linked to it. But
5:16
Speaker 2: even just that word, right? I never thought about that.
5:18
Speaker 2: It was like, or does it come from?
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Speaker 1: Oh, man, I don't know about that. I actually don't
5:23
Speaker 1: know about the etymology of romance versus like the city
5:26
Speaker 1: of Rome.
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Speaker 2: The word romance originates from the Latin word romanticus, meaning of.
5:30
Speaker 1: Of a Roman style. Or in the Roman style. Right.
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Speaker 2: It's just so funny because we all kind of romanticize it.
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Speaker 2: that it's that present, right? That it's that present, we
5:38
Speaker 2: don't even notice when it's in a term that we
5:40
Speaker 2: use to describe how we feel about it.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's everywhere. It's in tons of invisible ways.
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Speaker 2: How long was the Roman rule, like just in years,
5:50
Speaker 2: just a blanket, like including like the Republic, the Roman Empire?
5:55
Speaker 1: So, okay, there's many different ways we can answer that question.
5:58
Speaker 1: So like in terms of like the legendary origins of
6:01
Speaker 1: the city, it's founded in 753 BC. This is when
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Speaker 1: Romulus kills Remus and they found this city in the
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Speaker 1: legendary Seven Hills. And it goes in the West through
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Speaker 1: 476 AD. So that right there is 750 plus another 500.
6:20
Speaker 1: So we're like at 1200, 1300 years. And then we
6:24
Speaker 1: only hear talk about sort of the Western Empire. That's
6:28
Speaker 1: sort of what it captured the European imagination because they're
6:30
Speaker 1: in a post-Western society. But the Eastern Empire- just transformed
6:35
Speaker 1: seamlessly into what we now call the Byzantine Empire. And
6:37
Speaker 1: that lasted for another thousand years after that. So if
6:40
Speaker 1: you say that there's a continuum between Romulus founding Rome
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Speaker 1: in 753 and the final fall of Byzantium in the 1400s,
6:50
Speaker 1: you know, now we are over 2000 years.
6:53
Speaker 2: You hear the fable about Romulus and Remus, right? Can
6:57
Speaker 2: you tell me that fable of how Rome was founded?
6:59
Speaker 2: This is like kind of a, mythological fable. Do you
7:01
Speaker 2: know what I'm talking about?
7:02
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, for sure. It's, and it, and it is
7:03
Speaker 1: one of those, like these are archetypical, this is archetypical mythos, right?
7:09
Speaker 1: And what it is, is we have a couple of
7:11
Speaker 1: babies who were put into like a little like manger
7:15
Speaker 1: thing and sent down a river. They had to be
7:17
Speaker 1: purged because there was a King who was afraid of them. Uh, these,
7:20
Speaker 1: these are very standard stories. I mean, these are biblical
7:22
Speaker 1: stories in the same way. And they, allegedly, you know,
7:26
Speaker 1: wash up into some reeds and then a wolf comes
7:29
Speaker 1: along and they suckle. Yes, there it is. They suckle
7:31
Speaker 1: at the teat of the wolf and then they grow
7:34
Speaker 1: up big and strong and they wind up, you know,
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Speaker 1: they do overthrow the king who was afraid of them
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Speaker 1: and found their own city. And I was actually just
7:41
Speaker 1: talking about this with some friends the other day because
7:44
Speaker 1: there's a great bit in Livy, who's one of the great,
7:47
Speaker 1: you know, Latin historians who was writing- L-I-V-V-Y? L-I-V-Y. L-I-V-Y. Yeah,
7:52
Speaker 1: and he was around- during like the age of Augustus.
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Speaker 1: So he's writing about stuff like this is 750 years later,
8:00
Speaker 1: like he's talking about this and he's like, well, you know,
8:04
Speaker 1: it doesn't really seem plausible that it was a wolf.
8:07
Speaker 1: So I'm thinking that maybe it was like a, maybe
8:10
Speaker 1: it was like a corruption of language and that there
8:12
Speaker 1: was like a local prostitute whose name was Wolf and
8:15
Speaker 1: she was the one who got, so it's really funny
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Speaker 1: like watching him sort of wrestle with the mythos of Rome,
8:21
Speaker 1: like even trying to make this like a true story.
8:24
Speaker 1: At that time. At that, even at that time. And
8:26
Speaker 1: because he's 750 years in beyond all of that, like
8:29
Speaker 1: we go back 750 years from now, like we're, you know,
8:31
Speaker 1: we're like in Robin Hood days. That's how far away
8:34
Speaker 1: Livy was from the origin of his own city.
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Speaker 2: So the myth isn't true, but how- But how did
8:40
Speaker 2: it actually begin?
8:43
Speaker 1: In my opinion, right? And I think in the opinion
8:45
Speaker 1: of like if I was going to offer like sort
8:47
Speaker 1: of the most generalized and acceptable explanation for this, it's
8:51
Speaker 1: basically that at the Tiber River, which Rome is adjacent
8:55
Speaker 1: to and sort of runs through Rome, there was a
8:58
Speaker 1: bend in it. So there was an easy place to
9:00
Speaker 1: cross the river, to ford the river. And right next
9:04
Speaker 1: to that is a couple of prominent hills. And if
9:06
Speaker 1: you're a very, very early society, and you're looking for
9:09
Speaker 1: a place to build a settlement, it's very nice to
9:11
Speaker 1: have some hills around because you can build a little
9:13
Speaker 1: fortification on top of it. And if anybody comes around
9:16
Speaker 1: to mess with you, you have a really nice defensible position.
9:20
Speaker 1: So it really seems like there were just some early
9:23
Speaker 1: people who come across these hills, who recognize that there's
9:27
Speaker 1: this nice ford in the river, and now they're sort
9:30
Speaker 1: of on the trade routes that are running up from
9:33
Speaker 1: Southern Italy into Etruria and then deeper into the European
9:36
Speaker 1: interior and stuff that's coming down from the interior and
9:39
Speaker 1: out through Southern Italy. So location, location, location. And then
9:44
Speaker 1: the soil around Rome and in that whole swath of
9:48
Speaker 1: Italy is very fertile. So they plop themselves down. They've
9:52
Speaker 1: got some good farms going. They've got trade routes coming through.
9:55
Speaker 1: They have a defensible position. And they've actually done archaeological
9:59
Speaker 1: excavations especially around the Capitoline Hill and the Palatine Hill,
10:03
Speaker 1: which is where all of this stuff got going. And
10:06
Speaker 1: the earliest things that they find are not too far
10:09
Speaker 1: off of this alleged 753. And these are some of
10:13
Speaker 1: the early findings there on Palatine Hill excavation?
10:16
Speaker 3: Wow.
10:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's just layers and layers and layers because
10:20
Speaker 1: they built on top of what had come before them.
10:23
Speaker 2: Do you think we've found a lot of the stuff
10:25
Speaker 2: that's there or do you think there's still a lot
10:27
Speaker 2: to be found?
10:27
Speaker 1: There's always more to be found. And actually an interesting
10:31
Speaker 1: thing about just sort of archaeological theory is that some
10:34
Speaker 1: of these places that you go to, they know that
10:38
Speaker 1: there is stuff that is buried, that they are intentionally
10:41
Speaker 1: not excavating. Because what we have right now, the tools
10:45
Speaker 1: that we have right now for archaeology, it's inherently destructive.
10:48
Speaker 1: Like you're going to wind up destroying things in order
10:51
Speaker 1: to get at what you're looking for. Destroying things in
10:53
Speaker 1: the ground. Yeah, destroying things in the ground. And so
10:57
Speaker 1: there are definitely places where it's like we know that
10:59
Speaker 1: there's stuff there. We're not going to touch it because
11:01
Speaker 1: who knows? Maybe in 20 years or 30 years or
11:03
Speaker 1: 50 years we'll have better technology and we can analyze
11:06
Speaker 1: this stuff and dig into– like maybe literally dig into
11:09
Speaker 1: this stuff without damaging as much as we know that
11:11
Speaker 1: we would damage it today.
11:13
Speaker 2: Hmm. That's pretty amazing forethought, you know? So when you look,
11:18
Speaker 2: so going back just to that fable of Remus and Romulus, right?
11:21
Speaker 2: And Romulus Rome, that was how the name comes through,
11:24
Speaker 2: through the fable. Like how big was myth and fable
11:28
Speaker 2: at the time when Rome began?
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Speaker 1: Very big. I mean, this is, you know, early human
11:33
Speaker 1: societies have all had myths and legends about their own origins.
11:38
Speaker 1: Like this is, this is one of like the most
11:40
Speaker 1: basic things that you will find in like every society,
11:44
Speaker 1: you know, indigenous tribes in North America, indigenous tribes in Siberia,
11:48
Speaker 1: you know, the Romans, Native Americans. We have our own
11:51
Speaker 1: origin myths here in the United States of America right now.
11:54
Speaker 1: We've got, you know, George Washington like never telling a lie.
11:57
Speaker 1: Like these are, these are myths that we, you know,
11:59
Speaker 1: tell ourselves.
12:00
Speaker 2: Christopher Columbus and Thanksgiving, whether there's truth to it or not,
12:02
Speaker 2: but it's still, these are myths that we tell ourselves. Yeah.
12:04
Speaker 1: And so this is, this is a very common thing
12:06
Speaker 1: to just all human societies. And so, yeah, them, them
12:09
Speaker 1: telling this story and it helps you, you know, and
12:12
Speaker 1: it becomes less about telling an accurate story of where
12:17
Speaker 1: we came from, as opposed to telling a story about
12:20
Speaker 1: what kind of society we want to be right now.
12:23
Speaker 1: What are our values? What are our morals? What is
12:26
Speaker 1: it that we take seriously? What is it that we
12:28
Speaker 1: think you should do or not do? And a lot
12:30
Speaker 1: of early Roman history, like most of the stuff that
12:33
Speaker 1: we read today to try to glean factual information from Livy,
12:36
Speaker 1: from Polybius, from Plutarch, whatever, those guys were using the
12:41
Speaker 1: past to tell moral stories for their own contemporaneous audience
12:46
Speaker 1: to get certain things across to people like Marius. had
12:49
Speaker 1: an issue with ambition. Let's explore that. Let's talk about that.
12:53
Speaker 1: And that was really for them, the purpose of history
12:55
Speaker 1: was to tell these moral stories. And that's a very
13:00
Speaker 1: common thing in all societies. And it was certainly true
13:03
Speaker 1: for the Romans in a really big way. Dude, having
13:05
Speaker 1: an issue with ambition, what an interesting thing. Ambition's a
13:08
Speaker 1: dangerous thing, man. We can't do anything without ambition. Nobody
13:14
Speaker 1: can do anything without ambition. I would not have done
13:16
Speaker 1: what I did without ambition. You would not be sitting
13:18
Speaker 1: here without a little bit of ambition. For sure. You
13:21
Speaker 1: want to think about it. Yeah. You want to go
13:23
Speaker 1: do stuff, but if, but it's like, it's anything, it's,
13:25
Speaker 1: it's everything in moderation. If you indulge too much in ambition,
13:29
Speaker 1: now you're willing to do anything and break anybody do,
13:32
Speaker 1: you know, whatever it takes to get ahead. And now
13:35
Speaker 1: you're into hubris and now the gods are going to
13:37
Speaker 1: punish you. And not, nobody wants to be, uh, in
13:40
Speaker 1: the land of hubris where the gods are like, we,
13:43
Speaker 1: we have to show this person who's actually in charge
13:46
Speaker 1: and it's not him. It's the gods. Yeah. It's fascinating, man. Where,
13:50
Speaker 1: where did we get all of the information we have
13:53
Speaker 1: on Rome? There's many different places. Um, I think we
13:56
Speaker 1: could start by talking about the, what are called the
13:58
Speaker 1: literary sources, which is collections of either Latin histories or
14:03
Speaker 1: Greek histories that were written at the time. And, and again,
14:07
Speaker 1: like when I say at the time and we like,
14:09
Speaker 1: I'll just keep going back to Livy, Livy was writing
14:12
Speaker 1: at the time, but he's telling us about events from
14:14
Speaker 1: 200 years earlier, 400 years earlier, 600 years earlier. So
14:17
Speaker 1: it's not really a contemporary history, but he's a huge
14:21
Speaker 1: source of information. Sorry to interrupt you, but why weren't
14:24
Speaker 1: there histories at the time? Some of them were, and
14:28
Speaker 1: the ones that we like a lot are the ones
14:30
Speaker 1: that are written very close to events. Like there's a
14:32
Speaker 1: guy called Solace who wrote a couple of histories where
14:35
Speaker 1: he is writing about events very near to his own lifetime,
14:39
Speaker 1: where he is able to talk to people who were
14:42
Speaker 1: there at the time. And he himself was a political actor.
14:44
Speaker 1: He was in Caesar's faction during the wars. And so
14:47
Speaker 1: some of what he's writing about happened at the time.
14:50
Speaker 1: Polybius definitely gets into stuff that happened in his own lifetime.
14:53
Speaker 1: And then sort of off of Rome, there's a great
14:56
Speaker 1: history of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, who's one of
14:59
Speaker 1: the main sort of architects of what we think of
15:01
Speaker 1: as history. And he was definitely like, you can't write
15:04
Speaker 1: about history if you can't talk to people who were there.
15:06
Speaker 1: Like that was his theory. So there's sort of two
15:09
Speaker 1: branches of the literary sources. Most of the literary sources
15:13
Speaker 1: that existed have been lost. We are dealing with a
15:17
Speaker 1: microscopic fraction of what actually existed at the time. And
15:20
Speaker 1: the thing that is very frustrating is like we know
15:23
Speaker 1: that there were these great histories that were written that
15:25
Speaker 1: are referenced by other historians. You're like, God, if we
15:28
Speaker 1: could just get a hold of that. Oh, my God.
15:31
Speaker 1: I mean, the great white whale is the Emperor Claudius wrote.
15:36
Speaker 1: And he comes from the Julio-Claudian dynasty. And he wrote
15:40
Speaker 1: a history of the civil wars that put the Julio-Claudian
15:43
Speaker 1: dynasty in power.
15:44
Speaker 2: Wow.
15:44
Speaker 1: That was allegedly subsequently destroyed. For what reason? Because it
15:50
Speaker 1: was too honest and it was too truthful. And so like,
15:54
Speaker 1: oh man, Claudius's history of how the Julio-Claudians got into power,
15:59
Speaker 1: like I would love to have a piece of that.
16:00
Speaker 1: But so we only have like a microscopic amount. And
16:04
Speaker 1: this stuff is like, you know, how did it get
16:06
Speaker 1: to us? It's like, it's stuff that winds up in
16:08
Speaker 1: like monasteries, you know, like monks are copying the stuff
16:11
Speaker 1: down and forwarding it along. Things are just like found
16:15
Speaker 1: randomly in libraries. So those are the literary sources. And
16:19
Speaker 1: then we supplement that with a lot of archaeology and
16:23
Speaker 1: like analysis of material culture, because there are limits to
16:26
Speaker 1: what the literary sources can tell us. And this is
16:30
Speaker 1: how we know more about how they lived like on
16:32
Speaker 1: a daily basis, you know, because we've got pottery, we've
16:35
Speaker 1: got different– how do their furnaces run? Like how do
16:39
Speaker 1: their ovens run? Like all of this stuff is coming
16:41
Speaker 1: from archaeology. In Roman history in particular, we also do
16:47
Speaker 1: a lot of study of coins because they were constantly
16:50
Speaker 1: pumping out coins and coins were a means of sort
16:54
Speaker 1: of universalizing– you could call it propaganda but like messages
16:58
Speaker 1: that the emperor or the state wanted to put out there.
17:01
Speaker 2: And, uh, that was a big thing. If you started
17:03
Speaker 2: to get some control, you'd have a coin almost.
17:05
Speaker 1: It was the, the thing, like you could almost say that, like,
17:08
Speaker 1: what did it mean to be the Roman emperor? And
17:11
Speaker 1: there are lots of different sort of things that that means.
17:14
Speaker 1: The main thing it means is that your face is
17:16
Speaker 1: on the money and your, your face goes on the money.
17:19
Speaker 1: And when we talk about like people rising up and
17:21
Speaker 1: trying to usurp, like, like rival emperors, like there's always
17:25
Speaker 1: this point where they start minting their own coins with
17:27
Speaker 1: their own face on it. And that's, okay, now we've
17:30
Speaker 1: got a viable dude here because he's got control of
17:33
Speaker 1: a mint.
17:33
Speaker 2: Right.
17:33
Speaker 1: Instead of show me the money, it's like, show the
17:35
Speaker 1: money me. Show the money to the people. And it's
17:37
Speaker 1: always stuff like, I love the army. And then they
17:42
Speaker 1: bump out all these coins and then the army's like, oh,
17:44
Speaker 1: he loves us. Maybe we should support him. Oh, they
17:46
Speaker 1: would put little slogans on them? Yeah. Yeah. And they
17:49
Speaker 1: had all this like shorthand for like what different symbols meant.
17:52
Speaker 1: And they would recognize these things, like Romans would recognize
17:55
Speaker 1: these things at the time where these days you've got
17:57
Speaker 1: to be an expert to really like decode what's going
18:00
Speaker 1: on on these coins.
18:01
Speaker 2: But they had slang at the time almost, or like
18:03
Speaker 2: almost emoji, not emojis, but... I mean, emojis isn't far gone.
18:06
Speaker 2: I mean, it's iconography. Emojis are just iconography. And there's
18:11
Speaker 2: also changes in like sort of how the faces are depicted,
18:15
Speaker 2: depending on what era of Roman history we're into. And
18:18
Speaker 2: so people can spend their entire lives just studying like
18:22
Speaker 2: Roman coinage. But those are roughly like the three main
18:25
Speaker 2: pillars of then how we know things about the Roman empire.
18:30
Speaker 2: So did people at the time keep diaries? Did they
18:33
Speaker 2: think about like writing about their own lives at the time?
18:36
Speaker 2: Like we do like recording ourselves as much or that wasn't.
18:40
Speaker 1: I think for most people they're illiterate. That's, I mean,
18:44
Speaker 1: mass illiteracy is definitely a thing. So when we are
18:48
Speaker 1: talking about like, what was it like for the Romans,
18:51
Speaker 1: like on a daily basis? I think the first thing
18:54
Speaker 1: to say is, well, it depends on what era, because
18:57
Speaker 1: we're talking about thousands of years here and it does
18:59
Speaker 1: change over time. But in the main, the ancient world
19:05
Speaker 1: was largely rural and agrarian. Most people were doing farming.
19:09
Speaker 1: Most people were doing either subsistence farming or maybe they've
19:12
Speaker 1: got a surplus that they can sell into the market.
19:15
Speaker 1: And so you are living and working on farms in
19:17
Speaker 1: those little communities. And it's kind of the same way
19:20
Speaker 1: that we think about rural agrarian communities at any time
19:24
Speaker 1: and place. You're kind of circumscribed. You're probably not going
19:28
Speaker 1: within 50 miles of where you grew up. You're living
19:32
Speaker 1: and dying. Going further than you mean. Yeah, yeah, excuse me.
19:34
Speaker 1: For sure, very similar still to a lot of places today.
19:37
Speaker 1: It's very similar. These are very human things. People don't
19:41
Speaker 1: go far from home. And so that's their life, is
19:45
Speaker 1: they are living you know, a life of, of rural
19:48
Speaker 1: agrarian work, which is either nice or not, depending on
19:53
Speaker 1: if you like the work, if you know, when, when
19:55
Speaker 1: it's going good, it's going good. If there's a drought
19:58
Speaker 1: and there's a, and you know, then famine is sweeping
20:01
Speaker 1: through and that's not so good. And then, but we
20:03
Speaker 1: also do have at this point, the rise of like
20:06
Speaker 1: major urban centers. So there is, There is a major
20:10
Speaker 1: urban society that is happening inside Rome. When you say
20:13
Speaker 1: a major urban society, what does that mean? I'm talking metropolises,
20:17
Speaker 1: cities in the way we think about cities. And Rome,
20:21
Speaker 1: for example, was the first city in history to go
20:24
Speaker 1: over a million people. That's how big it was at
20:26
Speaker 1: its height. There's a million people there.
20:30
Speaker 2: As big as Tucson. I think how many people are
20:31
Speaker 2: in Tucson, Arizona? I bet that's about the same. Oh,
20:36
Speaker 2: Tucson only has 542,000.
20:39
Speaker 1: Try Milwaukee. Milwaukee's probably like 500,000. Yeah, but it's close too.
20:43
Speaker 1: Look at that. So the size of Milwaukee and Tucson combined. Yeah, yeah.
20:48
Speaker 1: Double the size of Milwaukee. I love Milwaukee. I do too. Yeah,
20:51
Speaker 1: Milwaukee's a great little city.
20:52
Speaker 2: Dude, Milwaukee is, we've been touring for like years, but
20:56
Speaker 2: one of the places I found that surprised me the
20:59
Speaker 2: most was Milwaukee. It's got like really cool old architecture.
21:02
Speaker 2: It's right there on this bay and it has like
21:04
Speaker 2: this whole like, Yeah.
21:06
Speaker 3: Yeah.
21:06
Speaker 1: I'm about like, I don't know, 90 minutes west of Milwaukee.
21:09
Speaker 1: And so I'll get over there a couple of times
21:10
Speaker 1: a year, usually for a Brewers game. And then I'll
21:13
Speaker 1: like stick around. Wisconsin's amazing, man. La Crosse was one
21:16
Speaker 1: of the other favorite places that I've found. La Crosse.
21:19
Speaker 2: Yeah.
21:19
Speaker 1: All right. And that's a deep cut. Just a perfect. Right.
21:23
Speaker 2: Yeah.
21:24
Speaker 1: Yeah. I've been through La Crosse.
21:25
Speaker 2: Yeah.
21:26
Speaker 1: But anyway, but getting back to it. So Rome actually
21:29
Speaker 1: is like a huge, And there are other cities that
21:33
Speaker 1: are over 100,000 people. This is big for the ancient world.
21:37
Speaker 1: And inside of those cities, you do have sort of–
21:41
Speaker 1: this is when you have a different life depending on
21:44
Speaker 1: what era of Roman history you're actually talking about, whether
21:47
Speaker 1: you're there as a wage worker, whether you're an artisan,
21:51
Speaker 1: whether you're one of the elite and whether you're involved
21:54
Speaker 1: in the law. Like there's this whole like stratification of
21:57
Speaker 1: like professions that you can have. And then we get
22:00
Speaker 1: into later sort of like the bread and circuses aspect
22:04
Speaker 1: of Roman civilization, where the empire itself became so rich
22:08
Speaker 1: and so powerful and all like the wealth of the
22:10
Speaker 1: entire Mediterranean world is like flowing into this city. And
22:13
Speaker 1: this is what's causing people to like move there and,
22:16
Speaker 1: and come into Rome. And then, you know, we need,
22:19
Speaker 1: we do need to feed these people. And so you
22:21
Speaker 1: start getting like grain doles and, and then, you know,
22:25
Speaker 1: circuses and games were always a huge, huge part of
22:27
Speaker 1: Roman society. And, So they would throw these spectacles for
22:30
Speaker 1: people and there is a book about daily life in
22:33
Speaker 1: ancient Rome that at the height of the empire, a
22:35
Speaker 1: lot of what you were doing is kind of like
22:37
Speaker 1: bouncing around from patron to patron, picking up a few
22:39
Speaker 1: coins from this guy, picking up a few coins from
22:41
Speaker 1: that guy, getting through your day and then getting up
22:44
Speaker 1: the next morning and doing it all over again and
22:46
Speaker 1: you didn't really have a profession. You were able to
22:48
Speaker 1: just kind of like– bum around. Figure out your.
22:51
Speaker 2: Hustle a little bit. And what was the religion at
22:54
Speaker 2: the time? Like, did things start to change from mythology
22:57
Speaker 2: into actual religion during Rome?
23:00
Speaker 1: I think those two things are very linked. The Romans
23:03
Speaker 1: are very religious people. They were very into ritual and sacrifice,
23:10
Speaker 1: and they took it really, really seriously. And when we
23:14
Speaker 1: look at the myths that they told about themselves, you know,
23:18
Speaker 1: the first... the first King of Rome is Romulus. And
23:22
Speaker 1: what was Romulus? Romulus was a warrior above all. And
23:25
Speaker 1: this is actually like what the Romans are above all.
23:27
Speaker 1: They are the children of Mars. They do war. They're
23:31
Speaker 1: really good at it. That's why they conquer the entire
23:34
Speaker 1: Mediterranean world. They're better at it than just about anybody else.
23:37
Speaker 1: So it's a very masculine society. Oh yeah. I mean, it's, it's,
23:40
Speaker 1: it's the patriarchy like to the max and, and they
23:44
Speaker 1: were very martial society and, and they're sort of martial
23:47
Speaker 1: society and, and like they're, Their political institutions are mirroring
23:52
Speaker 1: their military institutions. And the consul and their leaders are
23:55
Speaker 1: simultaneously– they're the political leader but also the leader of
24:00
Speaker 1: the armed forces. This is actually what their job is.
24:03
Speaker 1: The other role of the consul, however– The consul. The consul, right,
24:07
Speaker 1: which is one of the key leaders in the republican
24:09
Speaker 1: era is– overseeing these critical sacrifices and critical rituals that
24:15
Speaker 1: the Romans felt that they had to perform and needed
24:17
Speaker 1: to do in order to stay on the right side
24:20
Speaker 1: of the gods. And that was the job of the
24:22
Speaker 1: political leadership was to defend the city using the armies
24:26
Speaker 1: and to make sure that the gods were happy by
24:28
Speaker 1: making the proper sacrifices. And so the second king of Rome,
24:31
Speaker 1: this guy called Numa, he was all about religion. And
24:35
Speaker 1: so when they tell the story, they're like the first
24:37
Speaker 1: guy is war. And then the second guy comes in
24:39
Speaker 1: and he's like, we need religion to like guide this
24:42
Speaker 1: in like an ethical way and like to make sure
24:44
Speaker 1: that we're not just like insane barbarians, that we actually
24:48
Speaker 1: like have an ethical and moral structure to our society.
24:51
Speaker 1: And those are the two things. And then the next
24:53
Speaker 1: there's legendarily like seven kings of Rome, like there's seven hills,
24:56
Speaker 1: there's seven kings of Rome, like, you know, seven's a
24:57
Speaker 1: lucky number. It kind of always has been. And so
25:00
Speaker 1: when you when we talk about the seven kings of Rome,
25:02
Speaker 1: there's like it goes like warrior religious guy, warrior, religious guy, warrior,
25:06
Speaker 1: religious guy, because those two things go hand in hand
25:10
Speaker 1: for them.
25:10
Speaker 2: Like one side, the other, one side, the other. So
25:12
Speaker 2: that's even still today in our society. It kind of
25:14
Speaker 2: seems like it's like there's two parties sort of, and
25:16
Speaker 2: it's one side, the other, one way, the other.
25:18
Speaker 1: Yeah. And those sides and what they are change and
25:21
Speaker 1: their values change over time. Yeah. And when we talk
25:24
Speaker 1: about them being a religious people, you know, this is
25:29
Speaker 1: sort of pagan polytheistic religion. And so there were different gods, right?
25:34
Speaker 1: And we know these gods, a lot of them were
25:36
Speaker 1: borrowed from the Greeks. So it's, you know, it's Jupiter
25:39
Speaker 1: is Zeus and there's, you know, Minerva and there's, you know,
25:42
Speaker 1: Bacchus and all of these, you know, different gods that
25:45
Speaker 1: are out there. So they didn't have religion in the
25:48
Speaker 1: sense of like there was one thing that everybody did
25:52
Speaker 1: and was a part of and everybody went to church
25:55
Speaker 1: on Sundays. There were just There were different temples in
25:57
Speaker 1: different places and like one city, their patron would be Apollo.
26:00
Speaker 1: Another city, their patron would be Diana, right? And so
26:04
Speaker 1: it would change from time to place. And so they
26:05
Speaker 1: had this very open-mindedness towards religion and how you practiced religion.
26:13
Speaker 1: When they would come across a new society– and by
26:16
Speaker 1: come across, I mean conquer– they would often incorporate those
26:20
Speaker 1: religions or they would make sort of what they were doing,
26:23
Speaker 1: their religious sacrifices, their gods. And they would be like, oh,
26:25
Speaker 1: this is analogous to our thing over here. It's probably
26:28
Speaker 1: two aspects of the same God that we're talking about.
26:31
Speaker 1: And it would all just be integrated into one thing.
26:33
Speaker 1: And how were they able to master that control? But
26:36
Speaker 1: just because their army was so powerful? At its base,
26:40
Speaker 1: the legions do a lot to keep people in line.
26:45
Speaker 1: So the political leaders were often also the leaders on
26:47
Speaker 1: the battlefield. They were. Wow. They were. That's what that's
26:51
Speaker 1: literally what they were there to do.
26:53
Speaker 3: Wow.
26:53
Speaker 2: Yeah. So that's as if James Carville would actually would
26:57
Speaker 2: also then have a military. He would have to be
27:00
Speaker 2: a politician or Fetterman, you know, the laid back warriors.
27:06
Speaker 2: But anybody or the casual dress down Friday warriors, you know,
27:10
Speaker 2: which I think they would love it.
27:12
Speaker 1: Great. They would love it.
27:14
Speaker 2: But those people also, if I love the fact that
27:16
Speaker 2: if they made rules for people, they also would have
27:19
Speaker 2: to get out on the battlefield and at some way
27:21
Speaker 2: they have to put their money where they have to
27:24
Speaker 2: put their blood where their mouth is.
27:25
Speaker 1: A hundred percent. And it actually goes deeper than that.
27:27
Speaker 1: So yeah, if, if you're running, if you're running for
27:29
Speaker 1: console and you want to be console, the thing that
27:31
Speaker 1: you want for yourself and expect for yourself is to
27:34
Speaker 1: be the leader of the Legion and then go out
27:36
Speaker 1: and defeat something or someone on behalf of Rome and
27:39
Speaker 1: then come back and have a triumph. And the triumph
27:42
Speaker 1: is you getting to parade through Rome and show off
27:44
Speaker 1: the spoils of your conflict. And sometimes there were actual
27:48
Speaker 1: wars to fight. And sometimes there's this very funny thing,
27:51
Speaker 1: it's called triumph hunting, which is when a consul comes
27:55
Speaker 1: into power and he's like, there's nobody to fight. And
27:57
Speaker 1: so he'll just pick some random tribe and attack them
28:00
Speaker 1: and be like, oh, I defeated such and such a
28:02
Speaker 1: people so he can have his triumph. Which we still
28:04
Speaker 1: do today in different ways.
28:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.
28:07
Speaker 1: Create enemies, I mean. Yeah, yeah. We do invent enemies
28:10
Speaker 1: and then go fight them, don't we? But there is
28:14
Speaker 1: a thing like in early Roman society, really through almost
28:19
Speaker 1: to the end of the Republic, there was a property
28:22
Speaker 1: qualification to serve in the legions because you had to
28:25
Speaker 1: have enough money. You had to have enough land to
28:29
Speaker 1: participate in the legions. Their assumption, their sort of cultural
28:33
Speaker 1: assumption was that the people who constitute this society that
28:37
Speaker 1: we are in are fundamentally like the landowners. And so
28:40
Speaker 1: if you own a plot of land, then you're a
28:42
Speaker 1: part of the society. You're the people who go and
28:45
Speaker 1: fight for this society and defend this society. If you're
28:49
Speaker 1: in poverty, if you don't have land, you don't qualify
28:52
Speaker 1: for service in the Legion because in their mind, you're
28:54
Speaker 1: not actually really truly a part of this thing that
28:57
Speaker 1: we are trying to defend.
28:58
Speaker 2: Right. So how could you put that? You're, you're all
29:00
Speaker 2: into it. If you don't have something, you don't have
29:02
Speaker 2: a vested interest almost.
29:04
Speaker 1: Yeah. And, and then the leaders and then, and then, yeah,
29:06
Speaker 1: the higher you go, the more you are out there now, granted,
29:09
Speaker 1: like they're in the command tent. Uh, you know, they're,
29:12
Speaker 1: you're not like on a horse, like literally leading the charge,
29:15
Speaker 1: but you were expected to be out there and an
29:18
Speaker 1: active military leader and everybody who had a stake in
29:23
Speaker 1: that society. That meant that you also had to be there.
29:26
Speaker 1: The richest people in society went off to war. The
29:28
Speaker 1: poorest people stayed behind and we have kind of flipped that. Yeah. God,
29:33
Speaker 1: that's fascinating.
29:34
Speaker 2: I can't even imagine. But it sounds like, you know,
29:37
Speaker 2: you always hear like, oh, I wish all of these.
29:40
Speaker 2: you know, if these politicians had to have their children
29:43
Speaker 2: go off to war, they would feel totally different about
29:45
Speaker 2: the things that they send children off to war to do.
29:47
Speaker 1: Yeah. They're called chicken hawks.
29:48
Speaker 2: Yeah.
29:49
Speaker 1: Wow. I didn't know that that was the term it is. Yeah. Yeah.
29:52
Speaker 1: Chicken hawks.
29:53
Speaker 2: Yeah.
29:53
Speaker 1: We've had chicken hawks all throughout history. The people who
29:56
Speaker 1: will bang the drums of war and then send other
29:58
Speaker 1: people off to die.
30:01
Speaker 2: A chicken hawk has, go back up to the top, sorry,
30:03
Speaker 2: has multiple meanings. In bird names, it refers to three
30:06
Speaker 2: hawk species, coopers, sharp-shinned, and red-tailed. In gay slang, it's
30:11
Speaker 2: used to describe an older man who prefers younger males, okay?
30:15
Speaker 2: And politically, it can describe someone who supports war but
30:19
Speaker 2: avoids military service.
30:21
Speaker 1: Like draft dodgers, kind of. Yeah. Similar to that. Yeah.
30:25
Speaker 1: And we've had a whole run of them as presidents.
30:26
Speaker 1: You know, Clinton got out of it. Bush got out
30:28
Speaker 1: of it. Trump got out of it. Oh, you know, Obama,
30:31
Speaker 1: I don't think, had the opportunity to.
30:34
Speaker 2: But yet we certainly have not followed that same steed
30:37
Speaker 2: where the people who are writing the rules are the
30:39
Speaker 2: same when we have to go out there and make
30:42
Speaker 2: sure it's not make sure it's their own blood that's
30:44
Speaker 2: providing the ink.
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33:09
Speaker 1: Holy shit, dude.
33:10
Speaker 2: You're so good at this. Have you ever taken this
33:13
Speaker 2: on tour, Mike? Do you ever think about that? So
33:17
Speaker 2: I go on book tours and I do that. I
33:20
Speaker 2: did two years ago, I went, I wrote a 75
33:23
Speaker 2: minute monologue. It's just me like at a table talking
33:25
Speaker 2: for 75 minutes and took that around. And that was
33:29
Speaker 2: moderately successful.
33:31
Speaker 1: Um, there was sort of like a big, you know,
33:33
Speaker 1: meta and not analysis, but like meta take on history
33:38
Speaker 1: and how we tell stories and what the stories of
33:40
Speaker 1: history mean to us. And it is like a lot
33:42
Speaker 1: of what I just said, how we shape our present
33:44
Speaker 1: society is the stories we tell about the past.
33:48
Speaker 2: I could see this being a fascinating tour. I don't
33:51
Speaker 2: know exactly how you do it, but I just, you
33:54
Speaker 2: got to do a tour of this.
33:54
Speaker 1: I could see this.
33:55
Speaker 2: I want to talk at the end about what it
33:56
Speaker 2: would be like if we had a tour that you
33:58
Speaker 2: went on Like with some visual effects.
34:00
Speaker 1: We're actively planning this now. Yes. Great. Good. This is
34:03
Speaker 1: how things happen. Yes, it is. Because we both got
34:06
Speaker 1: a little bit of ambition, don't we? Yes. Yes, we do.
34:08
Speaker 1: That is fascinating.
34:10
Speaker 2: And the fact that if a government found a way
34:13
Speaker 2: to curtail people's ambition, wow, how fascinating that is. Because
34:17
Speaker 2: you never even think that that could be happening to you.
34:20
Speaker 2: Were they curtailing people's ambition during Rome?
34:24
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, certainly not. A slave was encouraged to
34:27
Speaker 1: not think that there was anything else that they could
34:29
Speaker 1: do but be a slave. A woman was encouraged to
34:31
Speaker 1: believe that there was not anything that she could do
34:33
Speaker 1: but be a woman who was mostly there to make
34:36
Speaker 1: little Roman boys. Um, so yeah, there, there was an
34:39
Speaker 1: elite that was allowed to have these kinds of ambitions,
34:42
Speaker 1: but a lot of other people were supposed to know
34:43
Speaker 1: their place. Got it. And so it was a caste
34:46
Speaker 1: system pretty much. Yeah. And, and, you know, like stoicism, there,
34:50
Speaker 1: there's lots of great stuff about stoicism as, you know,
34:52
Speaker 1: one of the, you know, main sort of philosophies that
34:55
Speaker 1: comes out of the ancient world. Um, but one of
34:57
Speaker 1: the sort of, I think negative things about stoicism is
35:00
Speaker 1: it encouraged people to just do the best they could
35:03
Speaker 1: with whatever they were meant to be. And so, yeah,
35:06
Speaker 1: if you're a slave, you were just told, well, be
35:07
Speaker 1: the best slave that you can be. That's not really
35:11
Speaker 1: a great message. And Marcus Aurelius, who's one of the
35:14
Speaker 1: great voices in stoicism, would be like, we all have
35:18
Speaker 1: our role to play in this, and I should be
35:19
Speaker 1: the best emperor that I can be, and you should
35:21
Speaker 1: be the best soldier you can be, and you should
35:22
Speaker 1: be the best slave you can be, and aren't my
35:24
Speaker 1: burdens the same as that of the slave? And it's like, well,
35:27
Speaker 1: Marcus Aurelius, I'm not actually sure that's true. It's a
35:31
Speaker 1: nice thought, and I do understand that there are burdens
35:33
Speaker 1: to being emperor, but like- It's easier for you to
35:35
Speaker 1: say that.
35:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's pretty easy for you to say that, less
35:39
Speaker 2: so for the slave. What did people wear during the time?
35:42
Speaker 2: Like what was some common garb kind of?
35:46
Speaker 1: Well, I am not an expert on what they were
35:49
Speaker 1: wearing around. Oh yeah, I feel that. For sure. But,
35:53
Speaker 1: you know, I can say this, the sort of the
35:56
Speaker 1: togas that we all imagine them wearing- This is very
36:00
Speaker 1: upper crust wear. The toga was practically a tuxedo. Like
36:04
Speaker 1: you would clock that in Roman society as like this
36:07
Speaker 1: person's walking around in something very fancy. And it's something
36:11
Speaker 1: that the senatorial class would wear around. So like most
36:14
Speaker 1: people are not bumming around in daily life wearing a toga.
36:18
Speaker 1: And those were actually like, they're very cumbersome to wear around.
36:21
Speaker 1: It was a cumbersome piece of clothing. Yeah. It's almost
36:24
Speaker 1: like you're playing hide and go seek in your own clothing. Yeah.
36:27
Speaker 2: You know, cause you think it's going to be easy
36:28
Speaker 2: and you had to keep this end up. It's like,
36:30
Speaker 2: people was like, yeah, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a
36:32
Speaker 2: ghost or whatever. But, and you probably had a nice
36:35
Speaker 2: piece of fabric from somewhere, which was something only wealthy
36:37
Speaker 2: people would have.
36:38
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. And when you get into sort of like, what,
36:41
Speaker 1: what are the fruits of having this kind of empire
36:43
Speaker 1: and having a trade routes that are now reaching to China? Yeah. They, yeah,
36:47
Speaker 1: they've got silks coming in. They've got other kinds of
36:49
Speaker 1: like fancy finery that they get to wear, but like,
36:52
Speaker 1: Most people are in rough tunics, you know, and like
36:55
Speaker 1: some sandals. And that's about what they're wearing.
36:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, you didn't have any Air Force Ones or anything.
37:02
Speaker 2: Did they have, what were people eating at the time?
37:07
Speaker 1: If you are just a peasant, you're eating whatever's around.
37:12
Speaker 1: you know, barley, millet, you know, like... Like parts of beer. Yeah.
37:20
Speaker 1: There's a lot of barley and millet, you know, that's
37:22
Speaker 1: going around. You know, if you're on the coast, you know,
37:25
Speaker 1: you've got fish coming in and you've got, you know,
37:28
Speaker 1: different kinds of, you know, the fruits of the... The
37:31
Speaker 1: fruits de mer, right, in French, which is the fruits
37:33
Speaker 1: of the sea, which is seafood. There's some you know,
37:38
Speaker 1: there's meat, there is red meat that people are eating,
37:40
Speaker 1: but it's, you know, in far less quantities than we
37:44
Speaker 1: eat today. And then, you know, you can get Roman
37:46
Speaker 1: cookbooks today where people go through like different recipes that
37:50
Speaker 1: we sort of knew that they had. And like, you know,
37:52
Speaker 1: dormice always seemed to show up as one of the
37:55
Speaker 1: things that people like to eat. A little dormouse. Yeah,
37:59
Speaker 1: a little dormouse action. We always got to do that
38:02
Speaker 1: when we do Roman food. There's a great sort of
38:05
Speaker 1: like fish sauce called garum that they were all, you know,
38:09
Speaker 1: that they were wild for, which is actually the principal
38:11
Speaker 1: export of Pompeii, uh, before they was garum. Yeah. Before they, yeah,
38:15
Speaker 1: they were famous, famous for their fish sauce. Um, and then,
38:19
Speaker 1: you know, and then what are they drinking? They're, they're
38:21
Speaker 1: drinking wine and, you know, there's a lot of wine
38:24
Speaker 1: being consumed, uh, in the ancient world. And they would,
38:27
Speaker 1: they would make this, like it was, it was very
38:30
Speaker 1: It was a very thick wine. And so you- Like
38:33
Speaker 1: a port almost? Yeah, but so much so that like
38:35
Speaker 1: you would cut it with water. And so it was
38:37
Speaker 1: almost like concentrate, right? And the way it's like Kool-Aid.
38:41
Speaker 2: I remember we used to have like that– they used
38:43
Speaker 2: to sell that orange juice concentrate like in a frozen block. Oh, yeah.
38:46
Speaker 1: That's good. And your mom would buy that. Yeah. And
38:48
Speaker 1: put that into something. So yeah, it's basically that. And
38:51
Speaker 1: that's a lot of what their wine was. So a
38:52
Speaker 1: lot of their wine was a concentrate. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
38:54
Speaker 2: And then people would splash– would cut it with water
38:57
Speaker 2: and then have themselves a bit.
38:59
Speaker 1: And there would be sort of like– if somebody was
39:04
Speaker 1: really– had a problem with alcohol, you would say that
39:07
Speaker 1: they drank it without cutting it. You know, that was
39:10
Speaker 1: like a thing that would get passed around. Oh, yeah. Yeah,
39:13
Speaker 1: he would just drink it straight. That's not so good. Oh,
39:16
Speaker 1: Ricky's drinking it straight, huh? Oh, he's not doing well.
39:18
Speaker 2: No, he's not doing well. We need to have an intervention. Yeah.
39:23
Speaker 2: Could a peasant rise up in society at the time?
39:27
Speaker 2: Was there any chance that like, cause you always, there's this,
39:29
Speaker 2: I think there's this idea, right? That like you're the
39:32
Speaker 2: peasant in the, at the, on the parade route and
39:35
Speaker 2: you see the princess go by and you catch her
39:38
Speaker 2: eye and then you have a chance to be her
39:41
Speaker 2: boyfriend or whatever spouse or whatever, you know, you have,
39:44
Speaker 2: I think that's every like poor kid's dream, you know, like,
39:48
Speaker 2: Certainly when I was growing up, you would think like
39:50
Speaker 2: some rich girl would see you and then her dad
39:52
Speaker 2: would think you were nice. And then you would have
39:54
Speaker 2: a chance to help run his car dealership one day.
39:57
Speaker 1: Right. That's the dream. Or coin car wash, dude. We
40:02
Speaker 1: had this hottie at our school, dude, named Emily, dude.
40:06
Speaker 2: And her dad had two coin car washes, bro.
40:10
Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh, aspirate aspirations of a lifetime. Oh man. Yeah.
40:14
Speaker 1: And that's what you could have been doing. And instead
40:16
Speaker 1: you're stuck here doing this. I bet that what, what
40:19
Speaker 1: an awful turn of events, but you could have had
40:21
Speaker 1: two coin operated car dealerships. And instead you just have
40:26
Speaker 1: a very successful career in podcasting. But you know, it's funny.
40:29
Speaker 2: There's a part of me that's still just, you just
40:32
Speaker 2: still want to be picked by her to be the
40:34
Speaker 2: inheritee of those two coin op car washes.
40:38
Speaker 1: God, they were nice boy.
40:40
Speaker 2: And I still, man, that just, the idea that still
40:42
Speaker 2: just pressure washes my soul, you know?
40:45
Speaker 1: So to answer your question, you know, social mobility in
40:49
Speaker 1: the ancient world ain't great. You know, if you were
40:53
Speaker 1: born a peasant, you're almost certainly going to die a peasant.
40:56
Speaker 1: There are, you know, once we move along through the empire,
41:00
Speaker 1: sort of the republic has fallen, we are now into
41:03
Speaker 1: the imperial age. There's certainly like commoners who are elevated,
41:09
Speaker 1: a little bit in the way that you're talking about.
41:11
Speaker 1: They become a favorite of the emperor and then there's
41:14
Speaker 1: a lot of griping like who is this guy? Why
41:16
Speaker 1: does he get access to the emperor when we don't?
41:20
Speaker 1: This is all very embarrassing that we have this commoner around.
41:25
Speaker 1: And that will happen sporadically over hundreds of years. It
41:29
Speaker 1: didn't happen very often. When you get into sort of
41:32
Speaker 1: like the second and third centuries, there is a phenomenon
41:37
Speaker 1: of being able to enter the army. and having that
41:41
Speaker 1: be the main sort of avenue of social mobility. And
41:45
Speaker 1: this is actually, you know, now that I think about it,
41:46
Speaker 1: this is actually true for most of the empire, at
41:49
Speaker 1: least once the legions become professionalized. How do you move
41:52
Speaker 1: up in the world? The legions, and when you say
41:53
Speaker 1: those are the bad, the... Those are just the armies.
41:56
Speaker 1: The armies, okay. We're just talking about the armies. When
41:58
Speaker 1: they become professionalized. When they become professionalized. So when people
42:01
Speaker 1: start to see that as a way to move up rank.
42:03
Speaker 1: And if you're provincial, and there is a legion... And
42:06
Speaker 1: what does provincial mean? Just so you... A provincial is
42:08
Speaker 1: somebody who lives in a province of the Roman Empire
42:13
Speaker 1: who is not themselves a Roman citizen. OK. So these
42:17
Speaker 1: are the provincials. And a provincial could become a citizen
42:22
Speaker 1: through service in the army. And if you somehow managed
42:26
Speaker 1: to make it through 20 years of service, you would
42:28
Speaker 1: be discharged with citizenship papers. And there are tablets. They're
42:32
Speaker 1: called resumes. you can find them in museums that then
42:35
Speaker 1: you would carry that around. Like for the rest of
42:36
Speaker 1: your life, it was like the most precious thing in
42:40
Speaker 1: your possession, right? If you had one of these things,
42:42
Speaker 1: because then wherever you went, you're like, you have to
42:45
Speaker 1: treat me differently because I have citizenship. You can't mess
42:48
Speaker 1: with me. And so these, these, yeah, these are very,
42:50
Speaker 1: very important things that people would have when, when the
42:54
Speaker 1: empire starts to run into troubles, militarily, socially, politically, like
42:58
Speaker 1: in the second insert and third century, There is a
43:01
Speaker 1: run of emperors in the third century who become emperors
43:06
Speaker 1: because they had risen through the ranks from the lowest
43:08
Speaker 1: rank all the way up because when you're in a crisis,
43:13
Speaker 1: there's kind of two paths in front of you. You
43:15
Speaker 1: can either cling to the leadership that had been leading
43:18
Speaker 1: you before and in fact, like probably created this crisis
43:21
Speaker 1: or you allow talent to rise up and you're like, okay,
43:24
Speaker 1: let's have the people who know what they're doing wherever
43:26
Speaker 1: they come from. Like who cares? Let's have them be
43:29
Speaker 1: in charge. And so there's this run of emperors from
43:32
Speaker 1: Illyria who when we look at their biographies, it's always
43:35
Speaker 1: like they were peasants. They were commoners. They enter in
43:39
Speaker 1: the lowest possible rank and then they rise up through
43:42
Speaker 1: talent and through will and through merit to become generals.
43:46
Speaker 1: And then that's the transition point into becoming an emperor.
43:49
Speaker 1: But like when you actually dig into it, there's this
43:53
Speaker 1: way of like if you're really rich and you're like, oh,
43:56
Speaker 1: that person came from nothing. A lot of the times
43:59
Speaker 1: they're just talking about a regular middle class kid, not
44:02
Speaker 1: really somebody who grew up in poverty. It's just somebody
44:05
Speaker 1: who grew up without insane amounts of wealth. And so
44:08
Speaker 1: sometimes when they're like, oh, this future emperor came from nothing,
44:12
Speaker 1: it was very possible that they were a well-to-do local family.
44:16
Speaker 1: who rise up.
44:17
Speaker 2: Right.
44:17
Speaker 1: They just weren't royalty. They just, yeah, they just weren't royalty.
44:19
Speaker 1: So it's, so it's kind of difficult to tell, but
44:21
Speaker 1: there is, but, but in general, that's how you're going
44:24
Speaker 1: to go from being what you were, which is nothing
44:26
Speaker 1: to maybe being something is it's the army that's going
44:28
Speaker 1: to do it for you.
44:29
Speaker 2: Wow. And it was, but it's been that way for
44:31
Speaker 2: a long time in America. So I don't feel like,
44:32
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's that way as much now,
44:35
Speaker 2: but I certainly felt like it used to be that
44:37
Speaker 2: way more.
44:38
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, like America's experience with armies is, uh,
44:42
Speaker 1: is different, uh, But very similar to what it was,
44:46
Speaker 1: you know, kind of in the early days of Rome
44:48
Speaker 1: where it's not so much like only rich people would
44:51
Speaker 1: go off and serve in war. But when we did
44:54
Speaker 1: have broad-based conscription for like World War II and for
44:57
Speaker 1: the Korean War and for World War I, like all
45:00
Speaker 1: of society is kind of going off and being a
45:03
Speaker 1: part of the army. And then you come back and yeah,
45:05
Speaker 1: maybe you have, like you rose up the rank and
45:07
Speaker 1: now you're a captain. And then when you come back
45:09
Speaker 1: to civilian society, now you've got some stature, you know,
45:11
Speaker 1: you've you know, you've, you've proven yourself and now your
45:14
Speaker 1: resume looks a bit better for sure. Oh yeah. I remember.
45:17
Speaker 2: Yeah. When military guys would come to visit your school
45:19
Speaker 2: or something, I mean, it felt like it meant something,
45:21
Speaker 2: you know, it's certainly when I was a child. Um,
45:23
Speaker 2: and not that it still doesn't, I just think there
45:25
Speaker 2: was probably more combat then or coming off of more combat,
45:29
Speaker 2: or you had more friends, dads who had gone into
45:32
Speaker 2: heavy combat. And so you would, those stories were more
45:34
Speaker 2: plentiful probably in society at the time.
45:36
Speaker 1: That's why I say that.
45:38
Speaker 2: Um, What were women regarded like at the time? Did they,
45:42
Speaker 2: because there were female gods, goddesses.
45:45
Speaker 1: Sure.
45:46
Speaker 2: So obviously there was a, and it was a war
45:49
Speaker 2: society and you had like Athena, the god of war, Athena.
45:54
Speaker 2: But you had female goddesses that were powerful. How were
45:57
Speaker 2: women viewed in society during Roman times?
46:00
Speaker 1: So it's a strongly patriarchal society and the head of
46:04
Speaker 1: the household is invariably a man. And they are in
46:08
Speaker 1: charge of everything. And so if you're a woman in
46:12
Speaker 1: one respect, you don't really have rights at all. Like
46:15
Speaker 1: who you marry, what happens to you, where you go,
46:17
Speaker 1: like most of these things are completely out of your hand.
46:21
Speaker 1: And what you're really there to do, the most important
46:24
Speaker 1: thing that you can do is make babies to fill
46:28
Speaker 1: the legions so that we can continue to be this
46:31
Speaker 1: strong military society that we are. But all of that said,
46:35
Speaker 1: The Romans also did have written into law, actually, there
46:39
Speaker 1: did become spaces for women to own property in their
46:43
Speaker 1: own right, to be able to manage some of their
46:46
Speaker 1: own affairs financially. A lot of early Christianity, for example,
46:52
Speaker 1: is bankrolled by wealthy widows because they had had a husband,
46:56
Speaker 1: they had had a family, that husband dies, they don't remarry.
46:59
Speaker 1: There is legal space for them to exist as a
47:03
Speaker 1: widow who's unconnected to a man who controls her own money.
47:07
Speaker 1: And when we– the story of early Christianity, like who
47:10
Speaker 1: was patron– who was a patron of this? Like who
47:13
Speaker 1: was patronizing these early Christian groups? A lot of it
47:15
Speaker 1: is like wealthy widows is where the money is coming from.
47:18
Speaker 1: So it's a mixed bag. But I would say like
47:22
Speaker 1: in the main, if you were a woman in Roman society,
47:26
Speaker 1: you do not have a ton of rights at all.
47:29
Speaker 1: Were there, what did they do?
47:30
Speaker 2: Like if children were born with disabilities, handicaps and stuff
47:33
Speaker 2: like that, how were people treated like that?
47:36
Speaker 1: Not great. You know, exposure is a thing, you know?
47:39
Speaker 1: And what does that mean? Exposure? Like put them out
47:41
Speaker 1: on a trash pile. Really?
47:43
Speaker 2: Yeah.
47:44
Speaker 1: That's crazy, dude.
47:46
Speaker 2: What did people think of life at the time? Did
47:48
Speaker 2: they value their life? Did it mean as much to
47:50
Speaker 2: them as it feels? Seems like it does to us
47:53
Speaker 2: today in America.
47:54
Speaker 1: Does that make sense to you? It does. And I think,
47:56
Speaker 1: It did. I think their lives did matter to them
47:59
Speaker 1: a lot. And even though, you know, we were just
48:02
Speaker 1: talking about like exposing babies because they couldn't live, right?
48:04
Speaker 1: That was like a difficult choice that they would make.
48:08
Speaker 1: But we often today, because we have all this advanced
48:12
Speaker 1: medical technology and because we have vaccines and because we've
48:14
Speaker 1: basically eradicated childhood diseases, which is one of the biggest
48:18
Speaker 1: killers in world history, like childhood vaccines is one of
48:23
Speaker 1: the greatest accomplishments in the history of human civilization, right?
48:27
Speaker 1: Prior to the 20th century, the mortality rates for children
48:31
Speaker 1: were appalling. And this is why you had to have six,
48:34
Speaker 1: seven kids, because three or four of them might not
48:37
Speaker 1: live to adulthood. Wow, bring that up. And so we
48:39
Speaker 1: think these days that like, oh, because of that, because
48:42
Speaker 1: there was that much death surrounding them at all times,
48:46
Speaker 1: because loved ones were dropping dead left and right, that
48:48
Speaker 1: they must have been more callous. They can't possibly have
48:51
Speaker 1: cared about each other as much if they're just going
48:53
Speaker 1: to die. And I have, in all of the historical studies,
48:56
Speaker 1: studies that I have done, I just don't find that
48:59
Speaker 1: to be true. People loved their children. We love our
49:03
Speaker 1: children as human beings. It wasn't different for them. If
49:06
Speaker 1: a woman gives birth to a child, she loves that child.
49:09
Speaker 1: And if that child dies at the age of 18 months,
49:11
Speaker 1: that is a devastating tragedy. It is the worst thing
49:15
Speaker 1: that can happen to a person is the death of
49:17
Speaker 1: a child, full stop. Nothing else even comes close. It
49:21
Speaker 1: affected them in that way. They cared about each other
49:23
Speaker 1: in that way. They tried to protect each other and
49:25
Speaker 1: save each other. We always, we are always fighting for
49:28
Speaker 1: life and we are always fighting to save people that
49:30
Speaker 1: we love. And so it is absolutely not the case.
49:34
Speaker 1: that they were more callous or more hard-hearted.
49:37
Speaker 2: Why do we get that idea then? Because I see
49:39
Speaker 2: what you're saying, because yeah, God, I can only imagine.
49:42
Speaker 1: Because we can't conceive of what that must have been like.
49:45
Speaker 1: Because if I had five kids, I mean, if either
49:50
Speaker 1: one of my kids died, that's it. I'm a wreck.
49:54
Speaker 1: I don't even know how to recover from that.
49:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, we just had a guy on Kevin Von Erick,
49:57
Speaker 2: and he has a famous movie.
50:01
Speaker 1: He has a famous life. His Five of his brothers died. Okay.
50:06
Speaker 2: They were professional wrestlers in the 80s, 70s and 80s
50:10
Speaker 2: in Texas. And five of them died from suicides and different.
50:13
Speaker 2: And he said that he's just a remarkable man. He said,
50:19
Speaker 2: I lost all my brothers, he goes, but I could
50:22
Speaker 2: not imagine losing one of my children. Yep.
50:27
Speaker 1: And it was just fascinating, not fascinating to hear that.
50:28
Speaker 2: Of course you get that, but you know, yeah, it's
50:31
Speaker 2: interesting to think that, that, that, that the weight of
50:33
Speaker 2: that would be, it's interesting to have some quantifiable weight
50:37
Speaker 2: of that coming from someone like him and hearing it
50:40
Speaker 2: from you. Let me see in ancient Rome, infant mortality
50:42
Speaker 2: was significantly higher than today with estimates suggesting that about
50:45
Speaker 2: 25 to 30% of children died in their first year
50:47
Speaker 2: of life.
50:48
Speaker 1: That's every single one of those deaths mattered, right? Every
50:52
Speaker 1: single one of them mattered. You almost had to have
50:56
Speaker 1: three children to get two children. Yep. God, it's hard.
51:01
Speaker 1: It's hard, man. And that's why, that's why vaccines are
51:04
Speaker 1: so great. That's why it's so important that they exist
51:07
Speaker 1: because what was, what was killing these kids? It was
51:09
Speaker 1: early childhood diseases. Yeah.
51:10
Speaker 2: Bring up the, bring up how did vaccines change the
51:13
Speaker 2: life expectancy of children? Just so we know that we've
51:18
Speaker 2: never looked at that. You hear everybody talk about vaccines.
51:20
Speaker 2: We've talked about, we've listened a lot about it in here.
51:23
Speaker 1: Let me see.
51:24
Speaker 2: Childhood immunity specifically started with Edward Jenner's successful smallpox vaccination
51:28
Speaker 2: in 1796.
51:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
51:30
Speaker 2: The practice of vaccination, including for smallpox, gained traction throughout
51:32
Speaker 2: the 19th century, with Massachusetts being the first state to
51:35
Speaker 2: require it for school children in 1853.
51:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, great.
51:39
Speaker 2: Dude, they should require it in Massachusetts just for that accent.
51:43
Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying?
51:44
Speaker 1: But, I mean, this is obviously something that has been
51:47
Speaker 1: at the forefront of, like, scientific investigation. Right.
51:50
Speaker 2: The fact that they, that it was such a problem
51:52
Speaker 2: that they were losing this many children, that it was like,
51:54
Speaker 2: this is something we have to figure out.
51:56
Speaker 1: If we can figure this out and stop this, let's
51:58
Speaker 1: do it. Because every one of those deaths, it's not
52:01
Speaker 1: just like we've lost that person. Like every person who
52:04
Speaker 1: was connected to that kid is now traumatized by that.
52:07
Speaker 1: So you, so you have these societies that just everybody
52:10
Speaker 1: is walking around not hard hearted, not caring about these things,
52:13
Speaker 1: but basically victims of trauma. They've all been traumatized. And
52:17
Speaker 1: that is that does inform what previous societies were like. Um,
52:23
Speaker 1: that had a lot more to do with the fact
52:25
Speaker 1: that we care about each other than the fact that
52:27
Speaker 1: we did not care about each other.
52:28
Speaker 2: Wow. And I bet care was almost at a different
52:31
Speaker 2: depth then because it moments probably meant something more because you,
52:35
Speaker 2: there was, I mean, it was literally in the trash
52:39
Speaker 2: pile of your, like the morning was on the curb
52:43
Speaker 2: of not only of your heart, but of your home. Oh,
52:47
Speaker 2: I can't even imagine that.
52:48
Speaker 1: It's a hard thing to imagine.
52:50
Speaker 2: And God, I think, imagine how much more light, how
52:53
Speaker 2: real it was then. We are one, I guess it's
52:56
Speaker 2: a blessing that we have today is how we're able
52:59
Speaker 2: to kind of hide things from our own reality in
53:01
Speaker 2: a way. If that makes any sense, kind of, especially visually,
53:05
Speaker 2: you know, we're able to, you know, one thing I
53:09
Speaker 2: always that I thought was neat about being like, because
53:12
Speaker 2: we grew up in like a really poor area and
53:15
Speaker 2: you couldn't hide anything. Like if somebody was getting a
53:17
Speaker 2: butt whooping, if somebody was, if parents were fighting every day,
53:21
Speaker 2: it was all right there. Right. And it was a
53:23
Speaker 2: blessing and a curse. It was like, it was too
53:25
Speaker 2: much information for a kid. But then also it was like,
53:29
Speaker 2: this is real. I'm involved in a fucking show.
53:32
Speaker 1: Right.
53:32
Speaker 2: Like we're, nobody's talking anybody in the nightlight in my
53:36
Speaker 2: room gave.
53:37
Speaker 1: Up two years ago. He moved to fucking Minneapolis.
53:39
Speaker 2: It's like, you know, it just, I don't know if
53:42
Speaker 2: there was something real about it. And then when you
53:44
Speaker 2: have some money, you got like, you can get hedges
53:45
Speaker 2: and you get a fence and you get to, you
53:47
Speaker 2: get an attorney, you get things to hide behind.
53:49
Speaker 1: Well, I, I mean, I grew up in, you know,
53:51
Speaker 1: the affluent suburbs of Seattle, Washington.
53:54
Speaker 2: Right.
53:54
Speaker 1: So I, so I'm, I'm from the suburbs of the
53:56
Speaker 1: eighties and nineties. And so, yes, it was very much
53:59
Speaker 1: not that it was, everybody's fine. Everything is great. We
54:02
Speaker 1: all go to our little, you know, single standing houses
54:04
Speaker 1: and every family is doing great. And then, you know,
54:08
Speaker 1: And then, you know, behind closed doors. We're listening to Nirvana.
54:11
Speaker 1: And underneath all that, yeah, of course I listened to Nirvana.
54:14
Speaker 1: I was 11, man. Like, when, yeah, when Smells Like
54:17
Speaker 1: Teen Spirit came out, like, oh, I was 11 years old. So, like,
54:19
Speaker 1: I was just deep in the scene. Of course I was.
54:22
Speaker 2: Yeah.
54:23
Speaker 1: Oh, those early mosh pits, dude. Every one of my... friends,
54:27
Speaker 1: older brothers was in a horrible band. Sure.
54:30
Speaker 2: That would play, it would be like a pet store.
54:32
Speaker 2: They would move all the cages into the back and
54:33
Speaker 2: they would have a little mosh pit in there.
54:35
Speaker 1: Because Eddie Vedder showed everybody that you could sing with
54:38
Speaker 1: a kind of deep voice, which we can all kind
54:40
Speaker 1: of do.
54:41
Speaker 2: Yeah.
54:41
Speaker 1: And so it was like, oh my God, this is
54:42
Speaker 1: the thing that we can do now. And like, and
54:44
Speaker 1: so they're, because we can all do that. Whereas before
54:47
Speaker 1: that it was all the glam metal guys with these
54:49
Speaker 1: like registers that were just like, I don't even know
54:51
Speaker 1: how you do that. Like, I can't even hear that. Yeah.
54:53
Speaker 1: Like Vince Neil, those guys. Exactly. Yeah. Like I can't,
54:55
Speaker 1: I can't emulate that, but Eddie Vedder, I can do.
54:58
Speaker 1: And like, you know, screaming into him. I come from punk, right?
55:00
Speaker 1: That was sort of my. Like skinny puppy, that type
55:03
Speaker 1: of stuff.
55:04
Speaker 3: Oh no.
55:05
Speaker 1: Like, you know, like nineties, third wave stuff, you know,
55:07
Speaker 1: like rancid and bad religion and no effects. Acid bath. No,
55:11
Speaker 1: not acid bath.
55:11
Speaker 2: Okay.
55:12
Speaker 1: Sorry. It's okay.
55:13
Speaker 2: Yeah.
55:13
Speaker 1: All right. Slipknot? Gas huffer. Yeah. Well, no, slipknot is like,
55:17
Speaker 1: now that's metal.
55:18
Speaker 2: Right.
55:18
Speaker 1: We're getting into metal. And I'm not a metal guy,
55:22
Speaker 1: but I do not believe that there is a split
55:24
Speaker 1: between metal and punk. I think we have far more
55:26
Speaker 1: in common with each other than we don't. And so
55:28
Speaker 1: I will always be a peacemaker and an ambassador between
55:31
Speaker 1: metal and punk because I don't want us to fight.
55:33
Speaker 1: I want us to be on the same side because
55:35
Speaker 1: we're all probably throwing shows at the same crappy little place.
55:38
Speaker 1: I love that. And if there's ever a treaty to
55:39
Speaker 1: be signed, I'd love for you to be there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
55:42
Speaker 1: Metal and punk, right? We need to stand in solidarity
55:45
Speaker 1: with each other. But that said, I do not listen
55:47
Speaker 1: to metal at all. I think it's overblown and ridiculous.
55:50
Speaker 1: I want three chords and some incoherent yelling. Yeah. That's
55:54
Speaker 1: what I want out of music.
55:56
Speaker 2: Dude, that's so cool, man. Is pornography causing a problem
56:01
Speaker 2: in your life? Do you find yourself watching porno for
56:06
Speaker 2: longer periods of time? and having trouble stopping? Is porn
56:11
Speaker 2: affecting your relationship or dating life? Well, you're certainly not alone.
56:17
Speaker 2: Watching pornography has become so commonplace today, and oftentimes men
56:21
Speaker 2: use porn to numb the pain of loneliness, boredom, anxiety,
56:26
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56:30
Speaker 2: these issues and getting help for them. I want to
56:34
Speaker 2: introduce you to my friend, Steve, Steve is the founder
56:37
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56:40
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56:46
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56:50
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56:54
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56:58
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57:00
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57:02
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57:05
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57:08
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57:13
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57:18
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57:33
Speaker 1: Thank you.
57:34
Speaker 2: What did the kings and the royalty live like? Were
57:36
Speaker 2: they living, was it just like a, what was it
57:39
Speaker 2: like over there? Could you just knock on the drawbridge?
57:41
Speaker 2: How did you even get over there?
57:44
Speaker 1: Well, for one thing about the Romans is they did
57:47
Speaker 1: not have kings anymore. And this is an important part
57:50
Speaker 1: of their political ideology. Once they kick the kings out
57:52
Speaker 1: in the legendary day to 509 BC, there aren't kings anymore.
57:57
Speaker 2: Okay.
57:57
Speaker 1: And why did they kick the kings out? The For
58:00
Speaker 1: a variety of reasons, most especially like it was immediately
58:04
Speaker 1: caused by the aristocrats, most of the senatorial class, not
58:09
Speaker 1: liking the last king of Rome. And it's actually a
58:11
Speaker 1: story that he raped the daughter of a prominent senator.
58:15
Speaker 1: And so that's what precipitated the overthrow of the last
58:19
Speaker 1: Tarquin king. And that was the– That's how the Roman
58:24
Speaker 1: Republic started? Yeah. Yeah, because if you go back, Romulus
58:28
Speaker 1: allegedly founds Rome 753, and then they're kings of Rome
58:31
Speaker 1: for 250 years.
58:32
Speaker 2: Okay.
58:32
Speaker 1: And then around 500, that's when the Republic gets going.
58:35
Speaker 1: And what started the Republic? Take me through that story.
58:37
Speaker 1: The legendary story is that there's a last king who
58:42
Speaker 1: was the local senatorial elite in Rome, did not like
58:46
Speaker 1: him very much. What was his name? Tarquin. Okay. And
58:49
Speaker 1: the Tarquin family comes from– yeah, Tarquin is superfluous. But
58:53
Speaker 1: they were an Etrurian family. And Etruria is north of Rome,
58:58
Speaker 1: not Roman. So it was a foreign monarchy. So they
59:01
Speaker 1: were provincials? The Romans were being ruled– yeah, the Romans
59:04
Speaker 1: were being ruled by a king who came from someplace else.
59:07
Speaker 1: That's all it is. It's a foreign monarchy. which is
59:11
Speaker 1: something that is common throughout history. And so they don't
59:12
Speaker 1: like the foreign monarch. And this is all trying to
59:15
Speaker 1: sort of capture how the Romans get out from under
59:17
Speaker 1: the cultural hegemony of Etruria at the time, because the
59:20
Speaker 1: Etruscans were quite a bit better at things earlier than
59:23
Speaker 1: the Romans were. And then the Romans come along and
59:26
Speaker 1: supplant them. Um, but to your question of, which is
59:29
Speaker 1: really like the high aristocracy, the senatorial class, and then
59:33
Speaker 1: ultimately the emperors, like, how are they living? Well, Oh, wait,
59:37
Speaker 1: did we finish the story? What happened?
59:38
Speaker 2: Oh, you told us about the story, but what happened
59:40
Speaker 2: with the, with the.
59:41
Speaker 1: Oh yeah. According to, according to the story, Tarquin rips
59:43
Speaker 1: the daughter of, of a prominent setter in Rome. And,
59:46
Speaker 1: and that guy goes and he rallies all of his,
59:48
Speaker 1: you know, his brothers and his allies and his friends,
59:50
Speaker 1: and they overthrow the King and they, kick him out.
59:52
Speaker 1: And then they say, we're not doing kings anymore. We
59:54
Speaker 1: are going to do a like job rotation system and
59:59
Speaker 1: set up proto democratic assemblies. And then that's how they
1:00:03
Speaker 1: ran themselves for like 500 years.
1:00:05
Speaker 2: And is that how democracy began? Well, democracy, I mean,
1:00:08
Speaker 2: it's one of the places like, yeah, I mean, democracy
1:00:10
Speaker 2: is coming from like Greece, right? They're taking cultural cues
1:00:14
Speaker 2: from what's happening over in Greece because like just as,
1:00:18
Speaker 2: and there is debate about when The Roman Republic was
1:00:22
Speaker 2: actually founded because you do get sort of Solon coming
1:00:26
Speaker 2: over to Athens and being like the great lawgiver of
1:00:28
Speaker 2: Athens and sort of the like, I'm going to get
1:00:30
Speaker 2: this date wrong. But it's like around 470 is when
1:00:33
Speaker 2: he's the lawgiver of Athens. And this is when you
1:00:35
Speaker 2: start getting sort of like what we think of as
1:00:37
Speaker 2: democratic government. And it's entirely possible that later Roman historians
1:00:42
Speaker 2: went and backdated like they retconned their own history. so
1:00:44
Speaker 2: that they would come along like 30 years before that,
1:00:47
Speaker 2: because everybody knew about what was going on in Athens.
1:00:49
Speaker 2: And they were like, actually, we got there 30 years earlier,
1:00:51
Speaker 2: which is just them, you know, doing a little light
1:00:54
Speaker 2: revision of their own history in order to make sure
1:00:56
Speaker 2: that they were always the super bus.
1:00:58
Speaker 1: It's like an Instagram filter. It's like an Instagram filter. Exactly.
1:01:00
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:01:01
Speaker 1: A little Jakarta. Yeah. But, you know, if you're a senator.
1:01:05
Speaker 2: So now we have the Republic going on. This is
1:01:07
Speaker 2: where the Republic of Rome, this is the second Of
1:01:09
Speaker 2: kind of three of the– this is the second of
1:01:12
Speaker 2: kind of the three main parts of Rome.
1:01:14
Speaker 1: Then we get into the Roman Empire. Exactly. Okay. Yeah.
1:01:17
Speaker 1: So now we no longer have kings. No longer have kings.
1:01:19
Speaker 1: Kings bad. Kings bad. You cannot be a king. In fact,
1:01:21
Speaker 1: if anybody tries to be a king, if anybody tries
1:01:24
Speaker 1: to become a king, any Roman citizen can kill that person. Oh, yeah.
1:01:28
Speaker 1: Kill the kings.
1:01:29
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
1:01:29
Speaker 1: No kings. Sacramento kings even. No kings. There is a
1:01:31
Speaker 1: reason why the emperors are not kings because kings are verboten, right?
1:01:36
Speaker 1: You are not ever going to be a king. And
1:01:38
Speaker 1: every Roman senator ultimately thought that they were superior to
1:01:41
Speaker 1: any king. And there were kings throughout the Mediterranean world
1:01:44
Speaker 1: who would be like clients of the Roman Empire. And
1:01:49
Speaker 1: any Roman senator considered themselves socially, morally, politically above a
1:01:54
Speaker 1: mere king.
1:01:54
Speaker 2: So you have the Republic now and the counselors of
1:01:58
Speaker 2: the Republic, the rich guys, how were they living at
1:02:01
Speaker 2: the time?
1:02:02
Speaker 1: Those– the people who were sort of the aristocrats, which
1:02:06
Speaker 1: is synonymous with the senatorial class, they are the major
1:02:11
Speaker 1: landowners of Rome. And so they do not have occupations.
1:02:17
Speaker 1: They are living off of the rents of their land.
1:02:21
Speaker 1: They're living off of the produce of the peasants who
1:02:24
Speaker 1: are living on their land and then ultimately the slaves
1:02:26
Speaker 1: who are living on their land. That's That's where their
1:02:28
Speaker 1: income is coming from. That's where their wealth is coming from.
1:02:30
Speaker 1: They themselves don't have to do anything. They don't have
1:02:33
Speaker 1: to have a profession. They don't have to have a job.
1:02:36
Speaker 1: And in their minds, this is what made them the
1:02:39
Speaker 1: perfect people to lead the republic because they were the
1:02:43
Speaker 1: only people who had the leisure time to be literate,
1:02:46
Speaker 1: to read things about history, to learn things about how
1:02:49
Speaker 1: to actually do statecraft, to have the time to engage
1:02:53
Speaker 1: in all of those pursuits. And that made them uniquely
1:02:56
Speaker 1: And then if you say like, well, hey, maybe we
1:02:59
Speaker 1: should educate everyone then. And then like we can have
1:03:01
Speaker 1: all of these. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
1:03:03
Speaker 1: We don't want to go that far because really they
1:03:05
Speaker 1: just wanted to be in charge. But there is sort
1:03:08
Speaker 1: of a self-justifying ideological project there, which is like we're
1:03:14
Speaker 1: the ones who have the time to do this. And
1:03:16
Speaker 1: so we will be the ones who do it. And
1:03:18
Speaker 1: so they would have country villas. They would usually have
1:03:21
Speaker 1: like a place in the city. A lot of them
1:03:23
Speaker 1: clustered on the Palatine Hill. That's, I mean, to this
1:03:26
Speaker 1: very day, you know, jockeying for a house in the
1:03:28
Speaker 1: best neighborhood. This is, I mean, this is a tale
1:03:30
Speaker 1: as old as time. This is what was going on
1:03:32
Speaker 1: on the Palatine Hill. You know, you wanted to be
1:03:35
Speaker 1: in a good house and a bigger house.
1:03:38
Speaker 2: Amongst the other people who are thinking and making decisions.
1:03:41
Speaker 2: But at this time, even literacy was kind of a delicacy.
1:03:45
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Literacy was a, was a very rarefied thing. Um,
1:03:50
Speaker 1: And did they have like prostitutes and stuff like that?
1:03:52
Speaker 1: What was that? Was that going on? Oh, sure, man.
1:03:54
Speaker 1: I mean that's the world's oldest profession. So– Yeah, dude. Yeah, absolutely. PLM, bro. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah,
1:04:01
Speaker 1: there were sex workers for sure. And then they would
1:04:07
Speaker 1: do whatever they wanted to do. But, you know, they're
1:04:10
Speaker 1: living off the best food. They have household slaves who
1:04:13
Speaker 1: are doing all the manual labor for them, you know,
1:04:16
Speaker 1: up to and including, you know, at certain points, like
1:04:18
Speaker 1: literally hand feeding them.
1:04:20
Speaker 2: You know, you can really you could do it. I mean,
1:04:22
Speaker 2: would people get kind of exorbitant at that time? How
1:04:24
Speaker 2: did how strange did it get?
1:04:25
Speaker 1: Do you feel like? Well, you know, it probably got
1:04:29
Speaker 1: pretty freaky. There is definitely there's there's some there's some
1:04:35
Speaker 1: like satires that were written. There were some humorous. uh,
1:04:38
Speaker 1: sort of satires that were written about the life of
1:04:40
Speaker 1: the aristocracy. Um, and these are very much like, oh yeah, there, yeah.
1:04:45
Speaker 1: What was going on behind closed doors was quite, you know,
1:04:49
Speaker 1: we would consider it taboo. Like, well, like, was it perverted?
1:04:51
Speaker 2: Like, was it like, uh, I mean, I know like pet,
1:04:54
Speaker 2: was it like pedophilia type stuff?
1:04:55
Speaker 1: No, no, no, nothing. No, I don't think it's anything
1:04:58
Speaker 1: like that. Although in some times and places, yeah, for sure. Um,
1:05:02
Speaker 1: because that's always been something that's been with us, unfortunately. Um,
1:05:05
Speaker 1: but yeah, you know, there's, there's orgies, there's drinking parties, there's,
1:05:09
Speaker 1: you know, they're putting on, you know, theatrical plays and,
1:05:12
Speaker 1: you know, it's, it's body, it's ribald, you know, all that.
1:05:15
Speaker 1: Like Bacchanalia. Yeah.
1:05:16
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:05:17
Speaker 1: Bacchanalia. I mean, that's, that's where this stuff comes from. Yeah.
1:05:20
Speaker 2: I grew up in New Orleans area. So it's like,
1:05:21
Speaker 2: we would, you know, you'd see the float, you know,
1:05:24
Speaker 2: the different parades. I mean, the list we put up earlier,
1:05:26
Speaker 2: that was, that's 80% of the names of all the, uh,
1:05:31
Speaker 2: all the different parade groups that are there.
1:05:32
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:05:34
Speaker 2: Um, So the rich were living it up. They were
1:05:37
Speaker 2: enjoying themselves. They were the ones who were getting together
1:05:39
Speaker 2: and thinking. They were the ones that were strategizing. Are
1:05:42
Speaker 2: they still the ones that are going out into the
1:05:44
Speaker 2: battlefields too?
1:05:45
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. For centuries. Absolutely. And whether they liked it
1:05:51
Speaker 1: or not, Cicero famously complained about having to do military
1:05:55
Speaker 1: service because he wasn't a soldier. He didn't consider himself
1:05:57
Speaker 1: a soldier. He wanted to you know, he was engaged
1:05:59
Speaker 1: in the law. He didn't have to be. Like, Cicero
1:06:01
Speaker 1: could have just sat around and done nothing, for sure,
1:06:04
Speaker 1: if he wanted to, but he does get, you know,
1:06:06
Speaker 1: involved in, you know, basically having a legal career. But
1:06:09
Speaker 1: he had to go do his service in order to
1:06:10
Speaker 1: qualify to be a consul, even though he wasn't, you know,
1:06:15
Speaker 1: a soldier at all. And also, you know, there's a
1:06:17
Speaker 1: very famous, or famous inside the, you know, the Roman
1:06:20
Speaker 1: historian world, where a buddy of his is writing to
1:06:23
Speaker 1: him and is like, you know, how do you feel
1:06:25
Speaker 1: about being a consul? And and having to be in
1:06:27
Speaker 1: charge of all of these like religious things when you're
1:06:29
Speaker 1: like an atheist. And he's like, well, yeah, I'm an atheist.
1:06:32
Speaker 1: I don't believe any of it, not necessarily, but we
1:06:34
Speaker 1: go through the motions, don't we?
1:06:38
Speaker 2: How did, how did people, what was plumbing like? Waste management?
1:06:44
Speaker 2: How do people wash their clothes? Okay.
1:06:48
Speaker 1: These are not areas I'm an expert in. Okay. But
1:06:51
Speaker 1: I can tell you some things because the Romans were
1:06:56
Speaker 1: very good about aqueducts and sort of having running water
1:07:02
Speaker 1: in different places. But yeah, they've got pipes. They've got
1:07:07
Speaker 1: public latrines. Um, but sometimes you've also just got chamber
1:07:11
Speaker 1: pots that you're filling up and throwing out the window
1:07:14
Speaker 1: when you're done with it. You know, the, one of
1:07:16
Speaker 1: the things about the past is that it probably stunk
1:07:20
Speaker 1: to high heaven everywhere you go. Yeah. Yeah. Like I,
1:07:23
Speaker 1: like when you read about the way people live, like, yeah, like, like, oh,
1:07:27
Speaker 1: when you go back to the past, like, oh, it'd
1:07:29
Speaker 1: be so great. It's like, yeah, he's been like, this
1:07:31
Speaker 1: smells gross. You know, cause I've done a lot of
1:07:34
Speaker 1: work like in, um, in French history too. And like
1:07:37
Speaker 1: in the Louvre, which used to be like the palace
1:07:40
Speaker 1: of the king, they would talk about– this is up
1:07:42
Speaker 1: through like the 1500s, 1600s, just like princes and nobles.
1:07:46
Speaker 1: Like if they had to go to the bathroom, they
1:07:47
Speaker 1: would just literally go pee in the corner of a room.
1:07:49
Speaker 1: This is what they were doing.
1:07:50
Speaker 2: No way.
1:07:51
Speaker 1: And this is something that is really– Like a SIG
1:07:54
Speaker 1: app or whatever. Yeah, like okay. Because we've gotten very
1:07:58
Speaker 1: used today to the glories of indoor plumbing and what
1:08:01
Speaker 1: it can do for us. It's kind of cool though
1:08:03
Speaker 1: to just be like– Keep talking.
1:08:06
Speaker 2: You just turn your back and just piss the other
1:08:08
Speaker 2: way or somebody comes by with a little piss hat
1:08:10
Speaker 2: and you piss in there and they run off with
1:08:12
Speaker 2: it or whatever. I don't even know what they would
1:08:14
Speaker 2: do with it. Would they recycle the urine at all?
1:08:16
Speaker 2: Did they need like fluids that bad back then?
1:08:19
Speaker 1: So not fluids, but what they did need was like
1:08:24
Speaker 1: the chemicals that are in human urine. Actually, this ties
1:08:29
Speaker 1: directly into your point of like how do they do laundry?
1:08:32
Speaker 1: those chemicals that could be extracted from human urine was
1:08:35
Speaker 1: great for washing clothes. Yeah, this is.
1:08:38
Speaker 2: Really, Romans cleaned their clothes using a mixture of water, alkali,
1:08:43
Speaker 2: often urine, and fuller's earth. The urine provided ammonia, a
1:08:47
Speaker 2: natural detergent, while the fuller's earth acted as an abrasive
1:08:51
Speaker 2: to remove dirt. The process involved washing the clothes in vats,
1:08:55
Speaker 2: often with the fullers or their slaves treading on them
1:08:59
Speaker 2: to agitate the clothes. After washing, the clothes were rinsed
1:09:02
Speaker 2: and dried. That's kind of crazy to think that you
1:09:05
Speaker 2: would use urine and earth to clean something.
1:09:10
Speaker 1: And who figured that one out? Some. You know, it's
1:09:14
Speaker 1: like the thing, the bravest man who ever lived was
1:09:16
Speaker 1: the first person to eat an oyster. You know, there's like,
1:09:19
Speaker 1: there's those little things. It's like, okay, there was a
1:09:22
Speaker 1: guy who figured out that if you peed on clothes,
1:09:24
Speaker 1: you could get them clean. Who was that guy? What
1:09:28
Speaker 1: was that guy's story? Because we have no idea who
1:09:30
Speaker 1: it was.
1:09:31
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:09:31
Speaker 2: And it'd be tough to convince somebody that today. What
1:09:35
Speaker 2: were their news sources like? How did they get information?
1:09:39
Speaker 1: So information is going to be passed through like traders, right? Okay.
1:09:47
Speaker 1: So that's one way that you're going to find out
1:09:49
Speaker 1: what is happening throughout the world. And so like obviously
1:09:52
Speaker 1: if you live in a port of some kind, you're
1:09:55
Speaker 1: going to be more hip to like what's going on
1:09:57
Speaker 1: in Egypt or North Africa than if you're just like
1:10:01
Speaker 1: somebody who's living on some– living in some little village
1:10:05
Speaker 1: in the interior of Gaul, which you have no idea
1:10:07
Speaker 1: what's going on.
1:10:08
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:10:09
Speaker 1: The Romans do develop an incredibly extensive network of roads,
1:10:14
Speaker 1: like an insanely extensive network of roads. This is like
1:10:16
Speaker 1: one of also their greatest accomplishments. And a lot of
1:10:19
Speaker 1: these Roman roads like basically still exist. And a lot
1:10:22
Speaker 1: of what we use today are, you know, this is
1:10:24
Speaker 1: where the Roman road used to be. And so, especially
1:10:28
Speaker 1: among the upper classes, there's extensive correspondence that is going
1:10:32
Speaker 1: on between people in the upper classes. And like, if
1:10:34
Speaker 1: somebody goes off to a posting someplace, they're writing back.
1:10:37
Speaker 1: There's There's exchanges of letters and correspondence that is happening
1:10:40
Speaker 1: all the time. And then the government itself has agents
1:10:44
Speaker 1: and then ultimately like bureaucrats who are producing material and
1:10:48
Speaker 1: sending it back to the center and passing information amongst
1:10:51
Speaker 1: each other. And all of that is being done via
1:10:54
Speaker 1: these road networks or like people who are traveling from
1:10:58
Speaker 1: here to there like tell you, oh, well, this is
1:11:00
Speaker 1: what was happening down there and then this is happening
1:11:02
Speaker 1: down there.
1:11:03
Speaker 2: Would they spread misinformation too? Would they send false information out? Like,
1:11:06
Speaker 2: was that a thing then?
1:11:07
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm sure. Like, I mean, not on the regular.
1:11:11
Speaker 1: Definitely is there bad information? Yeah, because it's like a
1:11:15
Speaker 1: telephone game, right? And by the time you get to
1:11:17
Speaker 1: the other side, you're like monkey banana raffle. That does
1:11:19
Speaker 1: not mean anything to me. And it started out with like,
1:11:21
Speaker 1: there's a war in Egypt. And by the time it
1:11:24
Speaker 1: gets to Gaul, it's like monkey banana raffle. I do
1:11:26
Speaker 1: not know what that means, sir. But yeah, I mean,
1:11:31
Speaker 1: when you were engaged in a war, they were definitely
1:11:33
Speaker 1: intelligent enough. I can't think of any anecdotes right off
1:11:35
Speaker 1: the top of my head, but to try to trick
1:11:38
Speaker 1: people into thinking things. And the hidden army trick is
1:11:43
Speaker 1: always a thing. Hannibal managed to slip. uh, the, the
1:11:49
Speaker 1: Romans at one point in the second Punic war by
1:11:51
Speaker 1: like tying torches to, to some oxen and sending them
1:11:54
Speaker 1: off in the middle of the night. And then the
1:11:55
Speaker 1: Romans were like, oh, the army's leaving. And then, you know,
1:11:57
Speaker 1: it's just a bunch of oxen.
1:11:59
Speaker 2: In the Roman empire, Octavian used coins as a tool
1:12:01
Speaker 2: for spreading fake news. He had slogans and messages printed
1:12:03
Speaker 2: on them to discredit his political opponent, Marcus Antony. This
1:12:07
Speaker 2: strategy of using easily distributed small items like coins to
1:12:10
Speaker 2: spread political messages is an early example of using medium
1:12:13
Speaker 2: for propaganda.
1:12:14
Speaker 1: Just like you said earlier, the coins, how that was
1:12:16
Speaker 1: such a big thing. Exactly.
1:12:17
Speaker 2: And to think, oh, nobody would take a coin and
1:12:19
Speaker 2: make it fake to create a bad message.
1:12:21
Speaker 1: And that guy did. Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, and
1:12:23
Speaker 1: what Octavian was doing just then is making Mark Antony
1:12:27
Speaker 1: out to be no longer a true Roman, because at
1:12:29
Speaker 1: this point, Antony has gone east and he's now hooked
1:12:32
Speaker 1: up with Cleopatra. And the Romans had this like very
1:12:37
Speaker 1: sort of like, not standoffish attitude towards the East, but
1:12:40
Speaker 1: they were very much like, oh, that's the like effete,
1:12:43
Speaker 1: like effeminate, you know, this like orientalized part of, you know,
1:12:48
Speaker 1: they're just into luxury. And the old Roman conservative guard
1:12:52
Speaker 1: was always trying to like protect Rome from like these
1:12:55
Speaker 1: Eastern ideals. This is sort of like what's rattling around
1:12:59
Speaker 1: in their heads. And Octavian uses this to great advantage
1:13:01
Speaker 1: because he starts painting Mark Antony as somebody who is
1:13:04
Speaker 1: no longer truly a Roman. He's now, he's been, he's
1:13:07
Speaker 1: been Easternized. He's been Orientalized. He's gone native over there
1:13:10
Speaker 1: with Cleopatra, you know, which was a little bit true.
1:13:13
Speaker 1: So propaganda was, there was propaganda then for sure. Oh,
1:13:16
Speaker 1: propaganda is relentless. Yeah, of course. Were they, you know,
1:13:20
Speaker 1: I'm sure they were probably doing the equivalent of Photoshopping
1:13:23
Speaker 1: stuff too. Did regular people live in fear at the time?
1:13:27
Speaker 2: Did they, because if you were just a peasant, as
1:13:29
Speaker 2: a regular person, was a lot of your life dictated
1:13:32
Speaker 2: by what your.
1:13:33
Speaker 1: Not, I guess, yeah, what your government chose kind of
1:13:36
Speaker 1: for you? A lot of people who are just living
1:13:40
Speaker 1: their lives don't encounter the government at all, right? Like
1:13:46
Speaker 1: when we think about, especially like the high empire, the
1:13:50
Speaker 1: interaction between even the imperial bureaucracy, let alone the emperor themselves,
1:13:56
Speaker 1: and really like these peasant communities in Spain or in
1:14:00
Speaker 1: Gaul or in Syria or whatever, almost certainly you're not
1:14:03
Speaker 1: encountering the Romans and Roman bureaucratic administrative anything at all.
1:14:09
Speaker 1: You're going to encounter your local elites because they're going
1:14:12
Speaker 1: to come around and ask you for taxes. And that's
1:14:14
Speaker 1: the main thing is like, are you paying your taxes?
1:14:17
Speaker 1: Are the taxes of your community being generated? Most of
1:14:20
Speaker 1: that work though was being done either by private contractors,
1:14:22
Speaker 1: which they had an extensive private contracting operation to do
1:14:26
Speaker 1: tax collection, or it was the local elites who are
1:14:31
Speaker 1: doing this. So mostly you are just going about your
1:14:36
Speaker 1: own daily life. You're not really thinking about the wider
1:14:39
Speaker 1: world at all. You're certainly not encountering the Romans in
1:14:44
Speaker 1: any real way. And when we talk about sort of
1:14:46
Speaker 1: the tyrannical emperors, like the worst emperors, like Nero and Caligula,
1:14:51
Speaker 1: and we hear these stories about how horrible they were
1:14:54
Speaker 1: to people, all of that was being done to the
1:14:57
Speaker 1: senatorial class, right? The senatorial class were the people who
1:15:00
Speaker 1: were actually in the orbit of the emperor such that
1:15:03
Speaker 1: the emperor and the emperor's power could touch them immediately.
1:15:06
Speaker 1: You could be arrested and you could be executed by
1:15:08
Speaker 1: a mad emperor at like at any time. But that's
1:15:11
Speaker 1: not happening to peasants. It was not about like the
1:15:14
Speaker 1: oppression of the people. And in fact, if we really
1:15:18
Speaker 1: went back through it and really started doing like revisions
1:15:21
Speaker 1: of what we think about things, there's definitely a revisionist
1:15:24
Speaker 1: case to be made for Caligula. There's a revisionist case
1:15:26
Speaker 1: to be made for Nero that they were actually– if
1:15:30
Speaker 1: you talk to regular people, they were like, we loved him.
1:15:33
Speaker 1: That guy was great. He looked out for us. He
1:15:37
Speaker 1: gave us money. The only people who don't like him
1:15:39
Speaker 1: are the senators because he's abusing the senators. But who
1:15:42
Speaker 1: writes the history? The senators. The senators write the history.
1:15:45
Speaker 1: And so now we hear all the bad things about
1:15:47
Speaker 1: these guys because they were mostly bad to the senatorial class.
1:15:51
Speaker 1: Maybe they get into the equites a little bit.
1:15:52
Speaker 2: But I still love that the effects of things fell
1:15:56
Speaker 2: on the higher ups, like even the higher ups, like
1:16:01
Speaker 2: you're saying, had to go out and fight the battles,
1:16:02
Speaker 2: like still, because it seems like now more the effects
1:16:05
Speaker 2: of things, because it's so capitalistic now that the effects
1:16:08
Speaker 2: of things fall on the lower class, but even then
1:16:10
Speaker 2: the effects of things fell on the higher class. What
1:16:12
Speaker 2: were things that Nero and Caligula were accused of for
1:16:15
Speaker 2: being bad?
1:16:17
Speaker 1: Oh, well, I mean, a lot of it is sort
1:16:19
Speaker 1: of arbitrary arrest and execution. That's always going to be
1:16:21
Speaker 1: a fear. That's bad. Just arresting people for no reason
1:16:25
Speaker 1: or whatever. Yeah. And having them killed type of thing. Yeah. And,
1:16:28
Speaker 1: you know. Or for bad information. Seizing, you know, seizing
1:16:31
Speaker 1: property is a big one. And then, you know, it's
1:16:35
Speaker 1: sort of like there's always this, they're living too luxuriously.
1:16:39
Speaker 1: They're like, all they're doing is throwing parties and not
1:16:42
Speaker 1: actually paying attention to statecraft and this, you know. And
1:16:46
Speaker 1: that's a fair hit on Nero. Nero wanted to be
1:16:51
Speaker 1: a musician and an actor. He did not want to
1:16:53
Speaker 1: be like an emperor necessarily. Like his passion was the lyre.
1:16:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's hard to go to open mic night when
1:16:59
Speaker 2: you're the emperor. Yeah, yeah, but he kind of did.
1:17:02
Speaker 2: And it was very embarrassing to the Roman aristocracy that
1:17:06
Speaker 2: he would debase himself and give these performances because in
1:17:10
Speaker 2: Roman society, not counting the slaves, But the absolute lowest
1:17:16
Speaker 2: rung in the Roman social order was like actors and musicians.
1:17:20
Speaker 1: Really? They were the lowest of the low. And like
1:17:24
Speaker 1: being caught around. Still are. And of course, and people
1:17:27
Speaker 1: would slum it. Like, of course they would. You'd go
1:17:29
Speaker 1: down and you'd slum it and you'd hang out with
1:17:30
Speaker 1: these people. And Sulla very famously like spent a lot
1:17:33
Speaker 1: of time slumming it with actors. But this is like
1:17:35
Speaker 1: a disreputable thing. Really? For them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big time.
1:17:38
Speaker 1: And this is, again, one of those things it's like,
1:17:41
Speaker 1: it's completely flipped because now musicians and actors are you know, that's, that's,
1:17:46
Speaker 1: that's S tier level celebrity for us. But for them,
1:17:49
Speaker 1: it was like, no, you, these, this is the scum
1:17:52
Speaker 1: of the earth. You got to keep these people separate.
1:17:55
Speaker 1: Why was it looked at so poorly? You feel like
1:17:57
Speaker 1: I don't actually know. It was just like, it's certainly,
1:18:02
Speaker 1: it's not productive in any way, you know, it's not
1:18:05
Speaker 1: real probably.
1:18:06
Speaker 2: But one, it's like they're, pantomiming things, they're reenacting things.
1:18:11
Speaker 2: I bet it probably didn't have as much value at
1:18:14
Speaker 2: a time when it was like, you know, we, we
1:18:16
Speaker 2: want the real, you know, you know, the grad, there's
1:18:19
Speaker 2: no real gravitas here maybe.
1:18:21
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:18:21
Speaker 1: But at the same time, like there's theaters everywhere that
1:18:24
Speaker 1: like theaters are like, are like the thing that we
1:18:27
Speaker 1: have a lot of the time that is like leftover.
1:18:29
Speaker 1: So like they cared about drama, they cared about performance.
1:18:32
Speaker 1: They just like on the, on a social level, they
1:18:36
Speaker 1: were just treated as really, really second rate, second class.
1:18:40
Speaker 1: And so for somebody like Nero to be doing these
1:18:42
Speaker 1: things is really like, oh my God, that is not
1:18:45
Speaker 1: what we want him to do. So this is Nero- Yeah.
1:18:50
Speaker 1: And he also, you know, he also spread the money around. Right.
1:18:53
Speaker 1: And he was he was good at that. So this
1:18:55
Speaker 1: is him playing the liar when Rome burns like this
1:18:59
Speaker 1: is not true. Like he didn't actually do this. And
1:19:02
Speaker 1: I think, you know, it's been it's been a minute
1:19:04
Speaker 1: since I've gone through the exact details of this. but
1:19:07
Speaker 1: Nero definitely was trying to organize a fire relief in
1:19:11
Speaker 1: Rome when, because the fire is real, like, like Rome, Rome,
1:19:15
Speaker 1: Rome would burn periodically. Like, but the Rome was burning.
1:19:18
Speaker 1: You always hear that term, right? Rome was burning. Yeah.
1:19:20
Speaker 1: Rome burned a lot. It's, you know, wood, wood, wood
1:19:24
Speaker 1: burns and they don't exactly have fire codes at the time.
1:19:27
Speaker 1: And so, you know, any little thing could, could set
1:19:30
Speaker 1: off a blaze and, and portions of the city would burn.
1:19:34
Speaker 1: And in fact, like if you look at the, the, um,
1:19:37
Speaker 1: Sort of the buildings that they would live in because
1:19:39
Speaker 1: they did have kind of like tenement buildings a lot
1:19:41
Speaker 1: of the time. What does tenement mean? Just like a
1:19:44
Speaker 1: multi-story housing unit. OK. Right? Inside the city itself. And
1:19:48
Speaker 1: these days, where do the rich people live in a building?
1:19:53
Speaker 1: They live upstairs. They live upstairs. They live in the penthouse, right?
1:19:55
Speaker 1: Like that's the best place you can be. During Roman times,
1:19:58
Speaker 1: that was the absolute worst place you could be. And
1:20:00
Speaker 1: so if you had money, you were living like on
1:20:02
Speaker 1: the ground floor. Why? Because if there was a fire,
1:20:04
Speaker 1: you could get out. Get out first. And if you're
1:20:06
Speaker 1: on the seventh floor and a fire breaks out, I'm sorry,
1:20:08
Speaker 1: you're dead.
1:20:09
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:20:10
Speaker 1: Dang.
1:20:10
Speaker 2: How did they get up and down? Through stairs and stuff?
1:20:12
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
1:20:13
Speaker 3: Wow.
1:20:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, stairs, ladders. And then there's like– there's great stories
1:20:16
Speaker 1: about how to combat fires, right? And combating fires was
1:20:21
Speaker 1: often sort of like private companies, like basically like privately
1:20:25
Speaker 1: organized things and crassest. who's very famous in Roman history.
1:20:29
Speaker 1: He was connected to Pompey the Great and Caesar in
1:20:31
Speaker 1: this thing called the Triumvirate. And they are a major
1:20:35
Speaker 1: force in sort of collapsing the Republic and turning it
1:20:38
Speaker 1: into an empire. Each one of them thought they were
1:20:41
Speaker 1: using the other two to advance their own interests. And
1:20:44
Speaker 1: then Caesar is the one who winds up getting killed.
1:20:48
Speaker 1: It's like a Spider-Man meme, kind of like that. Did
1:20:51
Speaker 1: you ever do Game of Thrones? Yeah. Great. So there's
1:20:53
Speaker 1: a part in Game of Thrones in the very first
1:20:55
Speaker 1: season where that guy gets like the molten gold like
1:20:58
Speaker 1: poured down his– OK. So that's Crassus. That's the death
1:21:00
Speaker 1: of Crassus. That's where that comes from. Is that supposedly true? Yeah. Well,
1:21:04
Speaker 1: I mean it's allegedly true because he goes off and
1:21:06
Speaker 1: tries to conquer Syria and winds– or he tries to
1:21:09
Speaker 1: conquer Parthia and winds up getting caught. And Crassus was
1:21:13
Speaker 1: the richest man in Rome. This is the thing about it.
1:21:16
Speaker 1: Like Crassus is one of the richest people who ever lived.
1:21:19
Speaker 1: He acquired most of his real estate portfolio during a
1:21:23
Speaker 1: thing called the Sullen Prescriptions when he was in charge
1:21:25
Speaker 1: of going around and finding the enemies of Sulla and
1:21:28
Speaker 1: killing them. And he would often find that the enemies
1:21:31
Speaker 1: of Sulla were people who had really nice estates that
1:21:33
Speaker 1: he would like to own, right? And this is what
1:21:35
Speaker 1: he would do. And once he's sort of past that phase,
1:21:39
Speaker 1: he had a little fire brigade and your house would
1:21:42
Speaker 1: be burning down. And this fire brigade would come around
1:21:45
Speaker 1: and say like, well, give us money, we'll put it out.
1:21:47
Speaker 1: And if you don't, then we won't. So like mafia style.
1:21:50
Speaker 2: Yep.
1:21:51
Speaker 1: And there's definitely, you know, stories that these fires were
1:21:54
Speaker 1: being started on purpose. And then he would send his
1:21:56
Speaker 1: little fire brigades in, or he would say, um, sign
1:22:00
Speaker 1: over the deed to this place and we'll put the
1:22:02
Speaker 1: fire out.
1:22:02
Speaker 2: Right. Then you can have your stuff, but I'm going
1:22:04
Speaker 2: to own the property. That flame mafia. And like this,
1:22:07
Speaker 2: and this is how, this is how you get rich. There,
1:22:10
Speaker 2: there is, I mean, there is a thing like no
1:22:12
Speaker 2: great for like all great fortunes begin with a crime.
1:22:15
Speaker 2: And that's, I've largely found that to be true.
1:22:18
Speaker 1: I think that that still is true today. Wow. That's wild, dude.
1:22:22
Speaker 1: And crassus, that's where we get the term crass from?
1:22:24
Speaker 1: That I do not know, actually. Where does that come from, crass?
1:22:28
Speaker 1: Because people say that's so crass. Crass, the only true punk.
1:22:32
Speaker 1: Late 15th century in the sense dense or coarse from
1:22:35
Speaker 1: Latin crassus. Solid or thick. Okay. I mean, it comes
1:22:38
Speaker 1: from the same word then. So probably maybe not far off. Stupid, insensitive, blundering.
1:22:45
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah. Who knows?
1:22:46
Speaker 2: But that's how he allegedly died. They poured that gold
1:22:49
Speaker 2: down him? Yeah, because he was captured.
1:22:51
Speaker 1: Really? So take me through that. What was that story? Oh, well,
1:22:54
Speaker 1: like I said, if you wanted to be a major
1:22:57
Speaker 1: political player in Rome, you needed to win battles, right?
1:23:01
Speaker 1: That was the currency. That was the currency of the
1:23:03
Speaker 1: realm in terms of like your political influence. Caesar had
1:23:07
Speaker 1: gone off and conquered Gaul. you know, he did some
1:23:09
Speaker 1: light genocide along the way, which is, you know, not
1:23:11
Speaker 1: so great, but he was definitely winning battles on behalf
1:23:15
Speaker 1: of Rome and conquering territory for Rome. That makes him huge.
1:23:18
Speaker 1: Pompey the Great had a whole resume of battles that
1:23:22
Speaker 1: he could point to and say, like, I did this
1:23:23
Speaker 1: for Rome and that for Rome. I conquered the pirates.
1:23:25
Speaker 1: I conquered all this territory in the East. And that's
1:23:28
Speaker 1: why I'm Pompey the Great. And Crassus was rich and
1:23:31
Speaker 1: Crassus wanted in on political power. Of course he did.
1:23:34
Speaker 1: But he didn't really have a great military victory to
1:23:38
Speaker 1: point to and say, this is what I've done. Because
1:23:41
Speaker 1: when he was consul, the war that he had to
1:23:43
Speaker 1: fight was the war against Spartacus and the slaves, which
1:23:47
Speaker 1: is not the same as going off and conquering some
1:23:51
Speaker 1: group of people far away. You're just fighting slaves. Is
1:23:54
Speaker 1: that even really that big of a deal? So if
1:23:56
Speaker 1: you watch Spartacus, the movie Spartacus, like Crassus- Michael Douglas? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:24:00
Speaker 1: So Crassus is you know, probably the main... With Kirk Douglas, sorry. Yeah,
1:24:04
Speaker 1: Kirk Douglas, yeah. He's the main antagonist. Like, he's the
1:24:07
Speaker 1: one who's fighting against Spartacus. And so that wasn't that
1:24:11
Speaker 1: great of a moment. And so he's still looking for...
1:24:16
Speaker 1: He's triumphanting. He's still trying to figure out what he
1:24:17
Speaker 1: can do. And so he picks the Parthians, who are
1:24:20
Speaker 1: basically the heirs of the Persian Empire, who then become
1:24:24
Speaker 1: the Sassanids. This is now basically like Iran, who... control
1:24:28
Speaker 1: things all the way into Mesopotamia. And so Crassus is
1:24:30
Speaker 1: going to try to go in and take Mesopotamia and
1:24:33
Speaker 1: conquer that for the Romans. And he was led astray
1:24:38
Speaker 1: and he made some mistakes and his legions were defeated
1:24:41
Speaker 1: and he died. And then they tell this story about
1:24:43
Speaker 1: having gold poured down his throat, which to tie this
1:24:46
Speaker 1: all the way back to what we were talking about
1:24:47
Speaker 1: at the beginning and how Roman history was morality tales
1:24:52
Speaker 1: more than it was like a factual accounting of events.
1:24:55
Speaker 1: Look what happened to the richest man in Rome. Look
1:24:57
Speaker 1: at what happened to the man who spent his entire
1:24:59
Speaker 1: life doing nothing but trying to acquire money. He died
1:25:03
Speaker 1: in the desert having molten gold poured down his throat. Right,
1:25:07
Speaker 1: which is like, could you be happier? Your life's over,
1:25:09
Speaker 1: here you go. So what's the lesson to be learned
1:25:11
Speaker 1: from that? Maybe dial back the greed a little bit
1:25:14
Speaker 1: and you won't die like that. You'll die like Caesar,
1:25:17
Speaker 1: stabbed many times in the back by your best friends.
1:25:20
Speaker 1: But still a little more respected. But maybe a little
1:25:23
Speaker 1: more respectable death.
1:25:25
Speaker 2: What inventions or practices did they start in Rome that
1:25:28
Speaker 2: we still have today?
1:25:29
Speaker 1: A lot of things that the Romans were doing are
1:25:34
Speaker 1: still around. They were great at aqueducts. They were brilliant
1:25:37
Speaker 1: at road building. I think Roman concrete is still a
1:25:41
Speaker 1: legendary mixture for keeping things together. Yeah, bring that up
1:25:47
Speaker 1: about concrete in Rome. That's fascinating. Yeah, yeah, Roman concrete.
1:25:51
Speaker 2: Ancient Roman concrete, a blend of volcanic ash, lime, and aggregate,
1:25:55
Speaker 2: was a remarkable building material that enabled the construction of massive,
1:25:59
Speaker 2: enduring structures like the Pantheon and Colosseum. Its longevity stems
1:26:04
Speaker 2: from the interaction of lime, volcanic ash, and seawater, which
1:26:07
Speaker 2: promotes the growth of minerals like tobermorite that seal cracks
1:26:11
Speaker 2: and strengthen the concrete. Modern concrete, in contrast, often relies
1:26:15
Speaker 2: on Portland cement, which is more prone to degradation.
1:26:19
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, Roman concrete was like better than what
1:26:22
Speaker 1: we have. Oh yeah. A couple of grams. Yeah. And so,
1:26:25
Speaker 1: and so the Romans are like brilliant engineers, like brilliant engineers. They're,
1:26:29
Speaker 1: they're road building, they're, they're monumental building. And they take
1:26:33
Speaker 1: pride in it too. Yeah, very much so. And like
1:26:36
Speaker 1: through all, they're maintaining the roads through all of this.
1:26:38
Speaker 1: They're maintaining these buildings through like all of this. And,
1:26:42
Speaker 1: and it's a lot of civil engineering going on, a
1:26:44
Speaker 1: lot of civil engineering going on like a lot and
1:26:46
Speaker 1: building projects like this was another way. Um, you know,
1:26:50
Speaker 1: like I said, like, like military victory is the main thing,
1:26:53
Speaker 1: but if you were an up and coming politician and
1:26:55
Speaker 1: you wanted to get your name out there and you
1:26:57
Speaker 1: wanted people to know who you were in the great
1:26:58
Speaker 1: thing you were doing. you would sponsor things. You would
1:27:01
Speaker 1: sponsor games, you would sponsor chariot races, or you could
1:27:07
Speaker 1: construct a building, and then that building would have your
1:27:10
Speaker 1: name on it. The Appian Way is called the Appian
1:27:12
Speaker 1: Way because a guy called Appian started its construction. The
1:27:16
Speaker 1: Flaminian Way is called the Flaminian Way because that guy
1:27:19
Speaker 1: started construction of it. And so it was another way
1:27:22
Speaker 1: to demonstrate how rich, how important, how powerful you were,
1:27:27
Speaker 1: and how much you were committed to improving the wellbeing
1:27:31
Speaker 1: of your society, like improving the society you were living.
1:27:33
Speaker 1: And so to commission a great work like this and
1:27:35
Speaker 1: then have it, you know, be carried out to the end,
1:27:37
Speaker 1: this is, this is a way that you would spread
1:27:39
Speaker 1: your own name.
1:27:40
Speaker 2: And now we've kind of flipped it where they'll name
1:27:42
Speaker 2: a street after you, if they choose to kind.
1:27:44
Speaker 1: Of, right. It's an, it's an honor to have something
1:27:46
Speaker 1: named after you as a, but, but we definitely still
1:27:48
Speaker 1: have people, you know, like if you look at like universities,
1:27:51
Speaker 1: like where are they getting there? Because if you call
1:27:54
Speaker 1: it the so-and-so and so-and-so, like building craft or whatever. Yeah, exactly.
1:27:58
Speaker 1: And that, and that's, it's exactly the same kind of
1:28:01
Speaker 1: vanity and name spreading that the Romans of America. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Um,
1:28:08
Speaker 1: but you know, one of the other interesting things about
1:28:10
Speaker 1: the Romans and like the ancient world in general is
1:28:12
Speaker 1: that we, you know, we have this very sort of
1:28:15
Speaker 1: like technological progressive mentality. Yes. Like, like modern society. I
1:28:20
Speaker 1: just interviewed Mark Zuckerberg the other day. Okay, great.
1:28:22
Speaker 2: Like, So it was crazy. I'm like sitting in front
1:28:24
Speaker 2: of literally, and this is the, I felt like this,
1:28:26
Speaker 2: an emperor.
1:28:27
Speaker 1: Okay. Well, that's what he would like you to think.
1:28:29
Speaker 1: He's really big on Roman history. And I think he
1:28:32
Speaker 1: kind of thinks that he's Augustus. He's got the haircut.
1:28:35
Speaker 1: He he's done the reading. Like I know this about Zuckerberg. Oh,
1:28:38
Speaker 1: it was fascinating. I mean, there's some little things you
1:28:40
Speaker 1: see right now.
1:28:41
Speaker 2: You see like, uh, Bernie Sanders is preaching against like
1:28:44
Speaker 2: these oligarchs, you know, when you see, um, yeah.
1:28:46
Speaker 1: So he's the Grok guy.
1:28:47
Speaker 2: And you see like, there's a lot of, uh, uh,
1:28:51
Speaker 2: like people that just have so much wealth and a
1:28:54
Speaker 2: lot of it is in tech, you know? And I
1:28:56
Speaker 2: believe that we've kind of become this privatized communism, right?
1:29:00
Speaker 2: That's a thing that I believe. It's like a lot
1:29:02
Speaker 2: of people are like– I feel like the government is–
1:29:09
Speaker 2: it's almost– I'm not saying it's disappearing, but people are
1:29:13
Speaker 2: having to hire their own fire departments to take care
1:29:15
Speaker 2: of their buildings now. It's like it's getting more privatized
1:29:18
Speaker 2: than it is public.
1:29:21
Speaker 1: Yeah. A lot of our commitment to universal civic values
1:29:24
Speaker 1: has– decline has declined. And if, and if we can
1:29:27
Speaker 1: privatize it, we will privatize it. And if we can
1:29:30
Speaker 1: turn this thing that used to be just a public
1:29:32
Speaker 1: utility or a public good or a public space and
1:29:35
Speaker 1: make it private so that we can make money off
1:29:37
Speaker 1: of it, we will definitely do those things.
1:29:40
Speaker 2: Right. And I don't even know if, but it doesn't
1:29:41
Speaker 2: feel like our government's doing any, I mean, they are
1:29:43
Speaker 2: doing some stuff, but it feels like our, it's all
1:29:46
Speaker 2: become privatized now, which is kind of crazy, you know,
1:29:48
Speaker 2: and that's very scary.
1:29:49
Speaker 1: Um, anyway, where, where are we going? The point I
1:29:52
Speaker 1: was going to make is that, is that for the
1:29:53
Speaker 1: last couple of hundred years, really coming out of like
1:29:55
Speaker 1: the enlightenment, we have a very, uh, progressive mentality that,
1:30:00
Speaker 1: that we want to improve things. We want to reform things. We're,
1:30:03
Speaker 1: we're having these great technological breakthroughs and like our society
1:30:06
Speaker 1: and our lives are driven by rapid technological progression. You know,
1:30:11
Speaker 1: we lived through, you know, like when I was born,
1:30:14
Speaker 1: there's not really personal computers. They don't even exist. Like
1:30:17
Speaker 1: you know, and then personal computers come along and the
1:30:19
Speaker 1: internet comes along. And before that it was TV. And
1:30:21
Speaker 1: before that it was cars. And so you, you, you know,
1:30:23
Speaker 1: every generation is living like a very different life because
1:30:28
Speaker 1: of all this technological progress. And we just assume that's
1:30:32
Speaker 1: the way things are. And like, so, but then you
1:30:34
Speaker 1: go back to the Roman empire and you go back
1:30:36
Speaker 1: to the Roman world and yeah, they tinkered with stuff
1:30:38
Speaker 1: and they improved things. And, you know, they would do
1:30:41
Speaker 1: things like, you know, make this better form of concrete,
1:30:44
Speaker 1: So I don't want to say that they were not
1:30:45
Speaker 1: interested in like invention or improvement. But they kind of
1:30:49
Speaker 1: fundamentally had like a small C conservative approach to the
1:30:53
Speaker 1: world that they wanted today to be like yesterday and
1:30:57
Speaker 1: they wanted tomorrow to be like today. They liked that–
1:31:00
Speaker 1: there's a stasis there that that's what they were aiming
1:31:03
Speaker 1: for and especially the political elite want things to just–
1:31:06
Speaker 1: Stay the same. Just basically stay the same. And so
1:31:09
Speaker 1: they're not really aggressively trying to– they didn't have like
1:31:13
Speaker 1: legions of inventors. They're not constantly trying to like invent
1:31:18
Speaker 1: a new way to do things the way that we–
1:31:21
Speaker 1: we've got scientists. We've got institutions. We've got people who
1:31:24
Speaker 1: are constantly trying to make a better world for us.
1:31:28
Speaker 1: And the Romans– Right.
1:31:30
Speaker 2: And at the cost though of a lot of stasis,
1:31:31
Speaker 2: it feels like a lot of times. It's like things
1:31:33
Speaker 2: have become so– it feels– I don't know. at the
1:31:37
Speaker 2: cost of almost homeostasis completely sometimes, because it feels like
1:31:41
Speaker 2: you're not human sometimes.
1:31:42
Speaker 1: Sometimes, yeah. Like at a certain point, it's like, how
1:31:44
Speaker 1: much technology, I'm good. Yeah, yep. I mean, I think
1:31:48
Speaker 1: we're due for a little bit of a reset. You know,
1:31:52
Speaker 1: I would love to get away from having a screen
1:31:53
Speaker 1: in my pocket all the time. And it's annoying because,
1:31:56
Speaker 1: you know, like I've got kids. And so like, I
1:31:59
Speaker 1: always have to have my phone on me because I
1:32:01
Speaker 1: could get a call from the school, like at any moment,
1:32:02
Speaker 1: like I could, there's an emergency at any moment. And
1:32:04
Speaker 1: so I got to have the thing that is like
1:32:06
Speaker 1: my phone, that's my communication device with me. But then
1:32:09
Speaker 1: it's also like this stupid thing that is just designed
1:32:12
Speaker 1: to be addictive. And the next thing you know, you're
1:32:14
Speaker 1: just staring at the screen because they're like, the most
1:32:17
Speaker 1: fascinating thing that we can look at with our eyeballs.
1:32:20
Speaker 1: And so what I want, there was this very, now
1:32:24
Speaker 1: we're really getting off on it, but there was a
1:32:25
Speaker 1: very specific moment in like cell phone technology where we had,
1:32:29
Speaker 1: it was kind of like the Blackberry. T-Mobile sidekick. Exactly,
1:32:31
Speaker 1: where we had, yeah, where we've got, because I want
1:32:33
Speaker 1: to be able to text, you know, because I don't
1:32:35
Speaker 1: want to talk to you on the phone a lot
1:32:36
Speaker 1: of the time. I want to text with you. Yeah,
1:32:38
Speaker 1: it's nice. So I need a QWERTY keyboard because I
1:32:40
Speaker 1: don't want to do like the three tap that we
1:32:42
Speaker 1: had to do like in the late 90s and early.
1:32:44
Speaker 2: Insane, if you saw someone doing that now, you would
1:32:46
Speaker 2: literally- euthanize them.
1:32:48
Speaker 1: Yeah. Drop him off on the trash pile. 17 year olds.
1:32:52
Speaker 1: But it is kind of proof that like humans can
1:32:54
Speaker 1: kind of get good at anything if it's what they
1:32:56
Speaker 1: need to do. Like 17 year olds in 2003, being
1:32:59
Speaker 1: able to run the little like ABC thing and just
1:33:02
Speaker 1: like fire off texts. Like I was never even that
1:33:04
Speaker 1: good at it, but have it. So having the QWERTY keyboard,
1:33:07
Speaker 1: being able to make a phone, being able to make
1:33:09
Speaker 1: a phone call, be able to text, but then not
1:33:11
Speaker 1: have it be like a screen that is my window
1:33:14
Speaker 1: into the world.
1:33:14
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:33:14
Speaker 1: That would, that would actually feel great. It really would. Yeah.
1:33:18
Speaker 2: I wonder if there's a point where technology, they don't
1:33:20
Speaker 2: even think of what happened. I mean, I wonder if
1:33:23
Speaker 2: it's a point where you being humans, just like, ah,
1:33:26
Speaker 2: we're good. It, you know, just like it goes and
1:33:29
Speaker 2: then it just, you know, it's like, no, we're, It's,
1:33:31
Speaker 2: you know what I'm saying? Like at a certain point,
1:33:33
Speaker 2: just whatever's inside of us that wants to be human
1:33:35
Speaker 2: has just been pushed too far. It just, the governor
1:33:38
Speaker 2: strikes and it just comes back.
1:33:39
Speaker 1: And we just pop back because fundamentally we're human. And I,
1:33:41
Speaker 1: I think we're experiencing that some with AI, you know, the, the, the,
1:33:46
Speaker 1: The things that AI is putting out there, I mean,
1:33:48
Speaker 1: we're looking at it now, God knows if that stuff
1:33:51
Speaker 1: is even true, because a lot of what AI is
1:33:54
Speaker 1: spitting out is just like garbage slop that's being fed
1:33:56
Speaker 1: off of its own like pack of lies. Or it's data,
1:34:00
Speaker 1: but it's data can be manipulated. Yeah, exactly. But being
1:34:03
Speaker 1: a human being and encountering other human beings, and encountering
1:34:06
Speaker 1: the artistic work of other human beings. There is a
1:34:09
Speaker 1: difference between a poem that is written by AI and
1:34:11
Speaker 1: a poem that is written by a person. And we
1:34:13
Speaker 1: can feel that. And you know this, going out and
1:34:16
Speaker 1: doing live events and live music performances and live comedic performances,
1:34:22
Speaker 1: there's nothing like a room full of people who are
1:34:24
Speaker 1: all participating in the same thing together. That's really the
1:34:28
Speaker 1: essence of the good stuff of life. And we've always
1:34:32
Speaker 1: been communal creatures. We've always wanted to come together in
1:34:34
Speaker 1: these ways. And so I do think that those kinds
1:34:37
Speaker 1: of direct human interactions like inherently matter more to us
1:34:41
Speaker 1: and we will be more willing to shit. But of
1:34:44
Speaker 1: course we're all addicted to it right now, which is
1:34:46
Speaker 1: the problem. And addiction is a hell of a drug.
1:34:47
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:34:48
Speaker 1: Shit. Hell yeah.
1:34:49
Speaker 2: It is.
1:34:49
Speaker 1: I'm all so much addicted to everything, but I'll be okay.
1:34:53
Speaker 2: But, um, speaking of communal things, tell me, take me
1:34:57
Speaker 2: into like the call us, take me into how we
1:34:59
Speaker 2: get into the Roman empire.
1:35:01
Speaker 1: How do you get into it? Like from the, from
1:35:03
Speaker 1: the Republic. Oh, how do we get into it? Oh God.
1:35:05
Speaker 1: Not like if, if you're in Germany, how do you
1:35:07
Speaker 1: get to the Republic? Well, you got to go through
1:35:09
Speaker 1: the Limey's Germanicus. You probably got to check in with
1:35:11
Speaker 1: a legionary and then they let you cross and, you know,
1:35:13
Speaker 1: trade your wares. And then you go back and you
1:35:14
Speaker 1: pick up some Amber from proto Russians. And then you
1:35:16
Speaker 1: bring that back. Yeah. You know, yeah, yeah. You just
1:35:19
Speaker 1: stop off at a brothel and it's great. Um, did
1:35:22
Speaker 1: they have brothels then? Of course. Yeah. Brothels are everywhere. Always,
1:35:26
Speaker 1: especially around legionary camps. Really? Of course. For the war?
1:35:29
Speaker 1: For just being a soldier. Yeah. And a lot of
1:35:32
Speaker 1: times it's, you know. Are they cool or what were
1:35:34
Speaker 1: they like? Do they have AC in there? No AC, huh?
1:35:36
Speaker 1: They have AC in the brothels. That's crazy. Sorry, stupid.
1:35:39
Speaker 1: They did not. It was hot in there. But they
1:35:41
Speaker 1: have a cold guy that's fucking. Well, they, you know, with,
1:35:44
Speaker 1: you know, their, you know, their baths were incredible. Oh, really? Yeah, sure.
1:35:48
Speaker 1: And they had like, you know, Roman baths had like
1:35:52
Speaker 1: a tepidarium and a frigidarium. And the frigidarium is like
1:35:55
Speaker 1: the cold room and the cold bath. And you could
1:35:56
Speaker 1: go in there. and cool off and they would do this,
1:35:59
Speaker 1: like the hot plunge and the cold plunge. And you know,
1:36:02
Speaker 1: they had this all down to a science, man. That's
1:36:04
Speaker 1: one of them. Yeah. They did understand. They did understand
1:36:07
Speaker 1: how to make a good bath house. That is absolutely true.
1:36:10
Speaker 1: And were the brothels hooked to the bath house a
1:36:12
Speaker 1: lot of times? That I don't know. Probably they were
1:36:17
Speaker 1: close to each other, you know, but I don't want
1:36:20
Speaker 1: somebody to now send me an email and be like, no,
1:36:22
Speaker 1: that's not actually for the brothel. People are sick. Yeah.
1:36:26
Speaker 1: I hope that, I mean, I don't know.
1:36:26
Speaker 2: Okay.
1:36:27
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, they seem, both seem pretty good. Oh,
1:36:30
Speaker 1: there you go. According to the AI. Right. Who knows
1:36:35
Speaker 1: if it's true?
1:36:37
Speaker 2: It's crazy, man. I thought about this years ago. I
1:36:39
Speaker 2: thought people are like, well, people can make information that's
1:36:44
Speaker 2: not true. Right. But then I thought, what if the
1:36:46
Speaker 2: paper can adjust the information you put on it?
1:36:50
Speaker 1: That's what I started to think. This is like about
1:36:51
Speaker 1: three years ago.
1:36:52
Speaker 2: I started to say, well, at some point, but the
1:36:55
Speaker 2: Imagine if you wrote a letter to somebody, but then
1:36:57
Speaker 2: the paper got to determine what you actually said. Right.
1:37:00
Speaker 1: That's the kind of place I feel like we're entering. Yep.
1:37:01
Speaker 1: Where it's like, you can say whatever you want.
1:37:03
Speaker 3: Yep.
1:37:04
Speaker 2: But now the paper and whoever owns the paper, they
1:37:07
Speaker 2: can construct the ink to create whatever the, you're not
1:37:11
Speaker 2: allowed to say, but what can be said.
1:37:14
Speaker 1: Yeah. The next, the information environment of the next 10, 15,
1:37:19
Speaker 1: 20 years is going to be really tough to navigate,
1:37:22
Speaker 1: even for people who are bright and who know what's
1:37:24
Speaker 1: going on. it's going to get tricky. It's going to
1:37:28
Speaker 1: get very tricky because these AI machines are going to
1:37:30
Speaker 1: be feeding off of themselves and they are going to
1:37:32
Speaker 1: be fed bad information that they will then spit out
1:37:34
Speaker 1: in very authoritative ways. And there are, you know, this
1:37:38
Speaker 1: is going to trick human consciousness into thinking that what
1:37:41
Speaker 1: you're looking at is a true thing. It's a true statement.
1:37:43
Speaker 1: It's already happening heavily already. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We, we
1:37:46
Speaker 1: all believe. And, and the thing is, is like, you know,
1:37:49
Speaker 1: I've been tricked by things. I'm sure you've been tricked
1:37:51
Speaker 1: by things. And I'm, I'm fairly conscious of, of like
1:37:54
Speaker 1: what I'm paying attention to and, And how this is
1:37:56
Speaker 1: all being manipulated.
1:37:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not illiterate or anything. And I'll get tricked
1:37:59
Speaker 2: by a video and then I'll be upset about it.
1:38:01
Speaker 2: And now I'm animated about it. And then somebody's like,
1:38:03
Speaker 2: that's not even real.
1:38:04
Speaker 1: And then we're stuck in this place where it's like
1:38:06
Speaker 1: anything cool that you see, you know, on an Instagram
1:38:12
Speaker 1: reel or like on a TikTok, you're like, okay, well,
1:38:14
Speaker 1: that's probably fake. You know, that probably never happened. That
1:38:17
Speaker 1: probably is fake. That probably never happened. And now we're
1:38:19
Speaker 1: in a place where we don't trust anything, even real things.
1:38:22
Speaker 1: And people are like, no, this really cool thing happened.
1:38:23
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, probably not though. So that where does
1:38:25
Speaker 1: that leave us? Not trusting anything or anyone for any reason,
1:38:30
Speaker 1: but also believing everything for every reason.
1:38:32
Speaker 2: Like this is- Perfect time for a simulation theory type
1:38:35
Speaker 2: of idea.
1:38:35
Speaker 1: Perfect time to talk to historians. Kind of true, right?
1:38:40
Speaker 1: See if we can't figure out how to pick our
1:38:41
Speaker 1: way through this mess. Because we've gone through stuff like
1:38:44
Speaker 1: this before and it's like outside of my specific area
1:38:47
Speaker 1: of expertise. But like when the printing press came along,
1:38:50
Speaker 1: very similar issues came out of the arrival of the
1:38:53
Speaker 1: printing press where the Catholic Church used to be able
1:38:55
Speaker 1: to control all information and now suddenly kind of anybody
1:38:58
Speaker 1: can print anything. And– you know, what's being put out there,
1:39:03
Speaker 1: what people are reading. There was, there was no controls
1:39:05
Speaker 1: on it. There was, there was no fact checking to
1:39:07
Speaker 1: any of this stuff. And that's a great point.
1:39:09
Speaker 2: If something was printed on paper, you almost thought it
1:39:11
Speaker 2: was true just because it was written down.
1:39:12
Speaker 1: Sure. Yeah. If it's in a book, it must be true.
1:39:15
Speaker 1: You know, that, that kind of mentality. And, and we
1:39:18
Speaker 1: come out of like the end of an era where
1:39:20
Speaker 1: there is robust and extensive editorial vetting of like a
1:39:24
Speaker 1: lot of things, like certainly in the newspaper. You mean
1:39:26
Speaker 1: right now or earlier? Earlier, like, you know, probably, you know,
1:39:29
Speaker 1: like through the 20th century, right? Oh, for sure. There's
1:39:31
Speaker 1: robust checks. And even though there's like, there's an elite
1:39:35
Speaker 1: ideological consensus and like what is allowed to be printed
1:39:38
Speaker 1: and what is not allowed to be printed is a
1:39:39
Speaker 1: part of like a Cold War consensus, like all of
1:39:42
Speaker 1: this stuff. But, you know, if you're reading it in
1:39:44
Speaker 1: the newspaper, there's a very good chance that it's true
1:39:47
Speaker 1: and it was fact-checked and they have sources. And Now
1:39:50
Speaker 1: the things that you fire up and read, no idea
1:39:53
Speaker 1: where any of this stuff is coming from. Who knows
1:39:54
Speaker 1: where any of it's coming from.
1:39:55
Speaker 2: And a lot of them, I notice, are created just
1:39:57
Speaker 2: by some automat, like a bot or something. Like, I'll
1:40:01
Speaker 2: see things of myself online with quotes that I've never said.
1:40:04
Speaker 1: Sure.
1:40:04
Speaker 2: And I'll see it shared thousands of times or commented on.
1:40:07
Speaker 2: And it's like, I never said that.
1:40:09
Speaker 1: Yep. You know?
1:40:10
Speaker 2: I'll see, like, news articles that have been put together.
1:40:13
Speaker 2: It's all misinformation. Mm-hmm. about a celebrity or about a
1:40:16
Speaker 2: place that you could go visit or something. And it's all,
1:40:18
Speaker 2: it's a complete lie, but you'll see it has 30,000 views.
1:40:22
Speaker 2: Like what is that's it's just crazy to think, Oh,
1:40:25
Speaker 2: I don't want to forget. What was, did take me
1:40:27
Speaker 2: into the Coliseum. What was that like? Did people go
1:40:30
Speaker 2: to it? Was everyone allowed?
1:40:32
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
1:40:33
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:40:33
Speaker 1: The Coliseum is open. And why did it happen? Why
1:40:36
Speaker 1: did they build a Coliseum? So, well, because they're Rome
1:40:40
Speaker 1: and they are hugely wealthy and hugely powerful. And so
1:40:43
Speaker 1: they need to have the biggest, you know, theater. So
1:40:47
Speaker 1: it was like Texas. We want to have the biggest thing.
1:40:48
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:40:49
Speaker 1: We want to, we, we want to have the biggest
1:40:51
Speaker 1: thing going, right? That's, that's what we want to have. Um,
1:40:54
Speaker 1: the Coliseum is a, is like a later edition. Like
1:40:57
Speaker 1: it doesn't come until the Imperial times. Um, in the 400,
1:41:00
Speaker 1: someone was called. No, no. The Coliseum is, you know,
1:41:03
Speaker 1: in the first century. is when it's coming around. It's
1:41:06
Speaker 1: like Vespasian is the one who kind of kicks off
1:41:10
Speaker 1: that project. And then it takes many, many years to
1:41:14
Speaker 1: get built. Vespasian also famously, when he was collecting taxes
1:41:18
Speaker 1: off of the urine that they would collect, and people
1:41:20
Speaker 1: were like, that's a little disrupt. Are they collecting urine?
1:41:23
Speaker 1: When they're collecting urine so that they could do all the,
1:41:26
Speaker 1: so they could wash the clothes, right? And he would
1:41:28
Speaker 1: collect a little tax on that. And he would get
1:41:29
Speaker 1: money and be like, oh, it's kind of a gross
1:41:30
Speaker 1: way to make money. And he goes, money does not smell.
1:41:33
Speaker 1: And so he also started construction of the Colosseum. But
1:41:36
Speaker 1: so they do this... So in Roman society, these games,
1:41:41
Speaker 1: gladiatorial games, the chariot races, all of these things are
1:41:45
Speaker 1: tied to religious ritual. It's all a part of these
1:41:50
Speaker 1: religious rituals and performances that were integral parts of their society.
1:41:55
Speaker 1: And so a lot of these games are in honor
1:41:58
Speaker 1: of this or that God, right? And we're making sacrifices
1:42:01
Speaker 1: to the gods. That's sort of the origin point of
1:42:04
Speaker 1: all of this stuff. Was that true? You think it
1:42:06
Speaker 1: was just a selling point? Well, it starts that way
1:42:10
Speaker 1: for sure. I think it starts out as very much
1:42:14
Speaker 1: a religious obligation and a religious thing. And it turns into,
1:42:20
Speaker 1: you know, I do think that there's probably just mere lips.
1:42:22
Speaker 1: Like if you're a spectator, like, you know, you're there
1:42:25
Speaker 1: to see the action, right? They were sports fans, right?
1:42:29
Speaker 1: Anybody who's a sports fan would fit right in in
1:42:32
Speaker 1: ancient Rome because the Romans were nuts for sports. They
1:42:36
Speaker 1: loved gladiatorial combat. They loved chariot races. The best gladiators
1:42:39
Speaker 1: were famous celebrities. The best chariot racers were famous celebrities.
1:42:44
Speaker 1: And as you sort of go forward and get over
1:42:46
Speaker 1: into the Byzantine Empire, I mean, there were warring political
1:42:50
Speaker 1: factions that were tied to chariot teams, you know, like
1:42:53
Speaker 1: there was a huge riot in Constantinople between, uh, cherry
1:42:57
Speaker 1: teams that was very politicized. Wow. So they took, they
1:43:00
Speaker 1: took all this stuff like very, very seriously. And throwing
1:43:04
Speaker 1: these games was a way to bring people in and
1:43:08
Speaker 1: entertain them so that, I mean, a little bit so that,
1:43:11
Speaker 1: you know, it's the opiate of the masses kind of stuff. Um,
1:43:15
Speaker 1: speaking as a sports fan who enjoys sports, I think
1:43:17
Speaker 1: that there's quite a bit more going on inside of
1:43:21
Speaker 1: sports than just like, oh, this is just a distraction
1:43:24
Speaker 1: by the ruling class to trick you into not paying
1:43:26
Speaker 1: attention to what's really going on. It's like, no, I mean,
1:43:29
Speaker 1: feats of athletic strength are like pretty sweet, right? Like, yeah.
1:43:32
Speaker 1: Like watching great athletes be great athletes is like pretty cool, right?
1:43:36
Speaker 1: It's like the pinnacle of what the human body can do.
1:43:38
Speaker 1: And I love that stuff. And if you can get
1:43:41
Speaker 1: passionately committed to something that is happening down there, then
1:43:45
Speaker 1: I think that that's really fun, especially if you're doing
1:43:46
Speaker 1: it with like your friends and neighbors and parts of
1:43:49
Speaker 1: your community. I think sports is actually a really cool,
1:43:51
Speaker 1: great part of civic life. Yeah. And it's entertainment as well.
1:43:54
Speaker 1: I mean, it's, yeah, you marvel at some of them.
1:43:55
Speaker 2: Yeah. You yourself maybe played something at some point you
1:43:58
Speaker 2: can envision yourself or live vicariously through them.
1:44:01
Speaker 1: I mean, you watch, you watch, you watch some, I mean,
1:44:03
Speaker 1: I'm not even like a football fan, but you watch
1:44:06
Speaker 1: some wide receiver sprinting down the line. doing an over
1:44:09
Speaker 1: the shoulder catch while tiptoeing both of his lines, like
1:44:14
Speaker 1: in bounds, making the catch like, like this stuff is
1:44:17
Speaker 1: like crazy. And you're like, you watch it and you're like,
1:44:19
Speaker 1: this is just inherently cool. Like, don't tell me this
1:44:22
Speaker 1: is just erotic. I mean, they are fit, aren't they?
1:44:28
Speaker 1: But so, but so that kind of stuff, like that
1:44:30
Speaker 1: kind of like, you know, in enjoying sports in that
1:44:33
Speaker 1: way and competition in that way is a very, is
1:44:36
Speaker 1: a very human thing. And the Romans were huge, huge
1:44:38
Speaker 1: for it. So that's where the Coliseum comes from. Is
1:44:40
Speaker 1: it true that the animals would fight the people and stuff?
1:44:43
Speaker 1: I mean, this stuff gets into like, those were usually like,
1:44:47
Speaker 1: I mean, it's, it's overblown. Like when you see it
1:44:49
Speaker 1: in the gladiator movies, like certainly things would go on,
1:44:52
Speaker 1: but those were usually like if, if the exotic animals,
1:44:55
Speaker 1: so like exotic animals absolutely brought in to the mix. Okay.
1:44:59
Speaker 1: Which showing off an exotic animal is both take a
1:45:02
Speaker 1: look at this exotic animal. Isn't that cool? But also
1:45:05
Speaker 1: think about how much I had to do, how powerful
1:45:08
Speaker 1: and influential I needed to be to bring elephants to you,
1:45:11
Speaker 1: to bring tigers to you. Like aren't you impressed with
1:45:15
Speaker 1: what I've been able to do? So really showing off
1:45:18
Speaker 1: your wealth. Exactly. Like you're really showing it off. But
1:45:21
Speaker 1: there would be hunts, right? And there would be like
1:45:23
Speaker 1: hunting– um, sort of exhibitions like great, uh, you know,
1:45:27
Speaker 1: great archers taken, they would go out and shoot tigers. That's,
1:45:30
Speaker 1: that's usually at least my understanding of what would go on.
1:45:34
Speaker 1: And as opposed to send a gladiator out there and
1:45:36
Speaker 1: have them fight, but you know, it definitely did happen.
1:45:40
Speaker 2: Um, how much of ancient history from Rome is factual,
1:45:44
Speaker 2: do you think, or how much was adjusted to make
1:45:46
Speaker 2: things look a certain way?
1:45:47
Speaker 1: That's a, you know, I don't know what percentage I
1:45:51
Speaker 1: could give on things. Um, you know, how much of
1:45:54
Speaker 1: it is true. Like some of it for sure, because
1:45:57
Speaker 1: we can independently verify it from inscriptions and from other
1:46:01
Speaker 1: sort of physical evidence. But like I said at the beginning,
1:46:07
Speaker 1: what the Roman and Greek historians were mostly interested in
1:46:11
Speaker 1: was telling these morality tales about how to live a contemporaneous,
1:46:15
Speaker 1: how to live in contemporary society rather than fidelity to
1:46:20
Speaker 1: the objective truth. This is what really happened. Now, that said,
1:46:24
Speaker 1: they cared a lot about... They were looking through documents
1:46:28
Speaker 1: the same way that historians do today. Polybius is interviewing people.
1:46:33
Speaker 1: He's looking at documents, and they are trying to tell
1:46:37
Speaker 1: a correct story. I think that they're definitely trying to
1:46:41
Speaker 1: do it. But if the sort of morality tale runs
1:46:45
Speaker 1: into the facts, like which is going to win, they're
1:46:47
Speaker 1: going to massage it towards the morality tale. And then
1:46:50
Speaker 1: you have to sit down and you have to ask yourself, OK, well,
1:46:53
Speaker 1: where did this person come from? What is their own
1:46:55
Speaker 1: social position? What is their own family connections? There's a–
1:47:01
Speaker 1: for some reason, we keep going back to Livy because
1:47:03
Speaker 1: he's just apparently on the forefront of my mind. But
1:47:07
Speaker 1: there's a description of the Battle of Cannae, which is– Cannae? C-A-N-N-A-E. Okay.
1:47:14
Speaker 1: And this is one of the greatest defeats in Roman history.
1:47:18
Speaker 1: This is Hannibal is defeating the Romans. He just absolutely
1:47:22
Speaker 1: wipes them out. This is during the Second Punic War.
1:47:25
Speaker 1: And the story that Livy tells is about one particular
1:47:29
Speaker 1: Roman consul who was basically an idiot and caused all
1:47:32
Speaker 1: of this to happen, right? One consul did not want
1:47:35
Speaker 1: to go into battle. The other consul did want to
1:47:37
Speaker 1: go into battle. and they alternated days of who was
1:47:40
Speaker 1: in charge, right? So it's like, I'm in charge on Monday,
1:47:43
Speaker 1: you're in charge on Tuesday, I'm in charge on Wednesday.
1:47:46
Speaker 1: And so the guy who was in charge on Wednesday
1:47:49
Speaker 1: was like, we're going into battle, and you couldn't argue
1:47:50
Speaker 1: with him because he was the consul and he was
1:47:52
Speaker 1: in charge that day. And then they get wiped out
1:47:55
Speaker 1: by Hannibal. And then you go look into Livy's past
1:47:58
Speaker 1: and his own family tree, and you find out that
1:48:01
Speaker 1: he's maybe trying to make one of his ancestors look
1:48:04
Speaker 1: better than they actually were. So this is, and this
1:48:08
Speaker 1: is actually like, if you lean into it, this is
1:48:10
Speaker 1: one of the, it is a fun part of sort
1:48:13
Speaker 1: of deconstructing and decoding these things. If you really get
1:48:15
Speaker 1: into it, this stuff is fun. It's kind of, it's
1:48:18
Speaker 1: entertaining and it's interesting. You have to examine it.
1:48:20
Speaker 2: The author and some of his motivations and how much
1:48:22
Speaker 2: would he be willing to adjust things and possibly why.
1:48:25
Speaker 2: And then you have to put that on the same
1:48:26
Speaker 2: scale on the other side of the scale of the
1:48:28
Speaker 2: facts and information that you do have.
1:48:31
Speaker 1: The book that I'm writing right now, which is about
1:48:33
Speaker 1: the crisis of the third century, has like a missing
1:48:36
Speaker 1: battle that we have to contend with, where there's this
1:48:39
Speaker 1: huge inscription of these great Sassanid kings, this guy Sharpur
1:48:44
Speaker 1: and Ardashir, who have this like huge monuments that were
1:48:48
Speaker 1: built to them. And then on the side of these cliffs,
1:48:50
Speaker 1: they etched in huge letters, like basically their resume, all
1:48:53
Speaker 1: of their accomplishments, all the things that they did. And
1:48:56
Speaker 1: one of the things, references this battle where they defeated
1:49:00
Speaker 1: the Romans. And then you go look through the Roman
1:49:03
Speaker 1: historical record and it's patchy at the time, right? This
1:49:06
Speaker 1: is one of the things about the crisis of the
1:49:07
Speaker 1: third century is we don't have a ton of information
1:49:09
Speaker 1: because it was so chaotic. But we don't have any
1:49:12
Speaker 1: reference to this battle. And they're specifically referencing like which
1:49:17
Speaker 1: emperor was defeated. So it's like, who's lying? are the
1:49:21
Speaker 1: Romans trying to cover up a defeat by not mentioning it?
1:49:24
Speaker 1: Or is this, did this guy just make up a
1:49:25
Speaker 1: battle to tell his own people, look, I defeated the
1:49:28
Speaker 1: Romans this time too. And he did beat the Romans
1:49:31
Speaker 1: many times. Like we just, we don't. And the thing is,
1:49:34
Speaker 1: we don't know we absent a time machine. There's, there's
1:49:38
Speaker 1: ambiguity in the historical record at all times. And this is,
1:49:43
Speaker 1: you know, again, like when you become a real sicko
1:49:46
Speaker 1: for history, you stop needing history. to be just an
1:49:51
Speaker 1: objective set of events. Like, just tell me what happened
1:49:55
Speaker 1: is something that, like, take out your ideological biases. Like,
1:49:59
Speaker 1: take this out. Like, just tell me the facts. That
1:50:01
Speaker 1: never happens, and it can never happen because humans are
1:50:05
Speaker 1: always going to be writing in their own subconscious biases.
1:50:09
Speaker 1: When we pick and choose what information to share, when
1:50:11
Speaker 1: we pick and choose how to frame a certain event,
1:50:14
Speaker 1: nobody can ever just sit down, even me, like, and
1:50:18
Speaker 1: As I'm just trying to tell you the facts of
1:50:19
Speaker 1: Roman history, of course my little biases are coming into it.
1:50:23
Speaker 1: Of course my opinions are coming into it. There's no
1:50:26
Speaker 1: sort of escaping that. And once you understand that it's inescapable,
1:50:30
Speaker 1: then it just becomes a layer to have an even
1:50:32
Speaker 1: greater understanding of the human condition and human society, which is,
1:50:36
Speaker 1: I think, what we're really after when we study history. Yeah,
1:50:39
Speaker 1: that's fascinating.
1:50:40
Speaker 2: I was going to ask you kind of what makes
1:50:41
Speaker 2: a good historian, but obviously one of the things is
1:50:43
Speaker 2: being able to recognize that you're not going to be
1:50:45
Speaker 2: able to get something– absolute because it's kind of impossible.
1:50:51
Speaker 1: Yeah. And at the end of the day, it's impossible. Now,
1:50:54
Speaker 1: leading up to that, what makes a good historian? Fidelity
1:50:58
Speaker 1: to the facts, fidelity to the sources. Don't say something
1:51:02
Speaker 1: if you don't have a source backing it up. Go
1:51:05
Speaker 1: to the primary sources, read those primary sources, try to
1:51:07
Speaker 1: present those sources in as accurate a way as possible.
1:51:12
Speaker 1: And so it's absolutely not the case that professional historians
1:51:15
Speaker 1: are just running around out there only publishing their biases, right?
1:51:19
Speaker 1: Only doing things in the service of their own political
1:51:21
Speaker 1: or social beliefs. Most historians, most of the time are
1:51:26
Speaker 1: trying to do that project of like, I just want to,
1:51:28
Speaker 1: I want to examine this. I want to examine the
1:51:31
Speaker 1: evidence and I want to talk about it. It's just
1:51:34
Speaker 1: at the, it's an impossible dream, but moving towards that
1:51:38
Speaker 1: dream in a, in a way that is rooted in
1:51:42
Speaker 1: the facts is really important. And that does make a
1:51:44
Speaker 1: good historian for sure.
1:51:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, we certainly got off that path in the past
1:51:48
Speaker 2: 20 years where it's like it felt like news outlets
1:51:52
Speaker 2: had– it used to feel like it was real information
1:51:54
Speaker 2: and it was factual and it wasn't biased. And then
1:51:57
Speaker 2: they went down this other road it felt like. But
1:52:01
Speaker 2: then it's always been like can you trust your government?
1:52:03
Speaker 2: Can you trust the reporting? Can you trust these– the
1:52:07
Speaker 2: councils that are running things? Who can you trust? And
1:52:11
Speaker 2: that feels– it seems like from listening to you that
1:52:13
Speaker 2: it's kind of– it's always been some– version of that
1:52:18
Speaker 2: since the beginning, certainly through Roman times, when, you know,
1:52:25
Speaker 2: you always hear people say now, well, we're going to fall,
1:52:29
Speaker 2: Rome fell, the society, American society will fall. What comparisons
1:52:35
Speaker 2: do you see between the two or what Or is
1:52:38
Speaker 2: there any like footprints in the sand that you can
1:52:43
Speaker 2: follow to see a path, to see like a story
1:52:46
Speaker 2: arc of how societies fall? Do we like, are we
1:52:51
Speaker 2: parallel enough to Rome to even have the same trajectory
1:52:56
Speaker 2: as them? What do you think about some of that?
1:52:58
Speaker 1: There is, I mean, like it's like both simultaneously, right?
1:53:04
Speaker 1: Because on the one hand, all civilizations and all societies
1:53:09
Speaker 1: are unique unto themselves. And it's not the case that
1:53:12
Speaker 1: we just are reliving some thing over and over again,
1:53:16
Speaker 1: that there actually is like a cycle to these things
1:53:19
Speaker 1: that is objectively true. And we're just sort of bit
1:53:22
Speaker 1: players in a historical force that's beyond our control. But
1:53:28
Speaker 1: also we are humans who have come together and humans
1:53:31
Speaker 1: are often behave in very similar ways and respond to
1:53:34
Speaker 1: certain things in very similar ways. And Yeah, I mean,
1:53:37
Speaker 1: Rome is a huge civilization that we see the entire
1:53:39
Speaker 1: course of it from its founding to its growth, to
1:53:42
Speaker 1: its peak, to its decline, to its fall. Was it
1:53:45
Speaker 1: even a fall? Was it merely a transformation? It's probably
1:53:47
Speaker 1: just a transformation. Calling it a fall is probably too dramatic.
1:53:50
Speaker 1: And of course, the Eastern Empire is gonna keep going
1:53:52
Speaker 1: for another thousand years. And like, is America gonna fall
1:53:57
Speaker 1: the way that Rome did? Well, number one, the United
1:54:00
Speaker 1: States of America is gonna go away eventually. There's no
1:54:03
Speaker 1: timeline that you can extend out far enough that does
1:54:06
Speaker 1: not involve the United States eventually disappearing from the face
1:54:09
Speaker 1: of the earth. That's just what gonna happen. Really, what
1:54:11
Speaker 1: makes you say that? Well, we're not gonna last for 10,000 years.
1:54:14
Speaker 1: We're not gonna last for a million years. The United
1:54:15
Speaker 1: States will eventually not be a thing anymore. I'm not
1:54:18
Speaker 1: saying it's gonna happen 20 years from now or a
1:54:20
Speaker 1: hundred years from now. Million years from now, are we here? No. Dang, boy. No,
1:54:24
Speaker 1: of course not. Of course we're not here. What's gonna happen?
1:54:27
Speaker 1: So live it up. Yeah, live it up because we're
1:54:29
Speaker 1: not gonna be here in a million years. So you
1:54:31
Speaker 1: may as well get your kicks in now. Ooh. Exactly.
1:54:36
Speaker 1: And so, but like we talked about the very beginning,
1:54:41
Speaker 1: you know, our society is rooted in Roman history. Like,
1:54:45
Speaker 1: and a lot of the things that stamps our political,
1:54:48
Speaker 1: our economic, our legal and social culture, like comes from Rome,
1:54:53
Speaker 1: comes from the Roman experience. And so it's not outside.
1:54:56
Speaker 1: I don't think it's out of bounds to say like, yeah,
1:54:59
Speaker 1: like there's probably going to be some some similarities into
1:55:02
Speaker 1: how these things progress, how great empires rise and fall.
1:55:05
Speaker 1: Like we've seen this happen before. Um, so where are
1:55:09
Speaker 1: we in the Roman timeline, right? Like, are we at
1:55:13
Speaker 1: the end? Are the barbarians at the gate? You know, is,
1:55:16
Speaker 1: is America about to fall? Um, I certainly don't think so.
1:55:20
Speaker 1: You know, that's, that's not my opinion at all. I
1:55:22
Speaker 1: don't think we're anywhere close to the end of this.
1:55:24
Speaker 1: And I certainly don't think that like, uh, poor people
1:55:27
Speaker 1: coming from Guatemala or El Salvador are like literally the Goths.
1:55:31
Speaker 1: which is, you know, how they're often portrayed in media.
1:55:34
Speaker 1: They're like, oh, you know, the Roman Empire fell because
1:55:36
Speaker 1: of immigration. Now, the Roman Empire, number one, didn't really
1:55:39
Speaker 1: fall because of immigration. And number two, like, trying to
1:55:43
Speaker 1: make the Huns or the Goths analogous to, you know,
1:55:47
Speaker 1: the kinds of people who are moving to the United
1:55:49
Speaker 1: States today is like wildly, it's like insanely inaccurate.
1:55:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know if I ever would think that
1:55:57
Speaker 2: the problem is at the everyday man level. To me,
1:56:01
Speaker 2: the problem is at the top. The problem is in
1:56:06
Speaker 2: that upper aura. I think that we've started to fall
1:56:10
Speaker 2: apart of having a purpose and feel a connection to
1:56:13
Speaker 2: our country. And I don't know why. I mean, there's
1:56:16
Speaker 2: a ton of different reasons for that. And there could
1:56:18
Speaker 2: be different reasons for people that have even different political
1:56:20
Speaker 2: beliefs or different ideologies. Um, but it certainly used to
1:56:25
Speaker 2: feel like we were all Americans and now it still
1:56:27
Speaker 2: feels like we're all Americans, but people have a lot
1:56:29
Speaker 2: of different thoughts about it. And so I don't know
1:56:32
Speaker 2: how that like kind of permeates as time goes on.
1:56:35
Speaker 1: Well, so, so, so like when I look back on
1:56:38
Speaker 1: this and actually my first book, which is called the
1:56:40
Speaker 1: storm before the storm, the beginning of the end of
1:56:42
Speaker 1: the Roman Republic, um, is about the decline and fall
1:56:46
Speaker 1: of the Republic, not the whole empire.
1:56:49
Speaker 2: Right.
1:56:49
Speaker 1: So that was when the Republic turned into the Roman Empire.
1:56:51
Speaker 1: When the Republic becomes an empire. And what I was
1:56:54
Speaker 1: curious about is when Caesar comes along and Crassus and
1:56:57
Speaker 1: Pompey come along and effectively destroy the Republic, but then
1:57:02
Speaker 1: goes to Octavian and Antony and Octavian wins that battle.
1:57:06
Speaker 1: Like what was going on 50 years before that, 80
1:57:10
Speaker 1: years before that, that sort of starts knocking out the
1:57:13
Speaker 1: foundations of Republican society. The Roman Republic lasted for 500 years.
1:57:18
Speaker 1: They went through a lot. They went through huge wars.
1:57:20
Speaker 1: They went through huge upheavals. There was ambitious men coming
1:57:23
Speaker 1: and going left and right for hundreds of years, and
1:57:27
Speaker 1: the Republic continued to persist. There was a Senate. There
1:57:30
Speaker 1: was assemblies. This Republican project continued. So what is it
1:57:35
Speaker 1: that started to go wrong prior to the collapse of
1:57:38
Speaker 1: the Republic. And then it turns into this authoritarian military dictatorship.
1:57:43
Speaker 1: That's what the Roman Empire was? The Roman Empire becomes
1:57:45
Speaker 1: an authoritarian military dictatorship after the fall of the Republic.
1:57:50
Speaker 1: What Octavian did when he becomes Augustus, which is like,
1:57:52
Speaker 1: you know, he's the first emperor of Rome though. He
1:57:54
Speaker 1: doesn't say like, I'm an authoritarian dictator now. He doesn't
1:57:57
Speaker 1: say like, I am now, you know, the emperor. They
1:57:59
Speaker 1: didn't even call themselves emperors. That's just something historians call
1:58:02
Speaker 1: them to describe the person who had all of the
1:58:08
Speaker 1: sort of powers of the republic. They were simultaneously a
1:58:11
Speaker 1: tribune and a consul and a proconsul and an aedile.
1:58:17
Speaker 1: They themselves had– they were the pontifex maximus. They were
1:58:20
Speaker 1: the head of sort of the Roman religions.
1:58:23
Speaker 2: So they were the Senate. They were the representatives.
1:58:27
Speaker 1: Yeah. They were the Senate. They were the Congress. They
1:58:29
Speaker 1: were the– Yeah. It's as if one person was president
1:58:33
Speaker 1: and speaker of the house and majority leader of the
1:58:35
Speaker 1: Senate and– Ruler of the military? Oh, of course commander-in-chief.
1:58:39
Speaker 1: Of course commander-in-chief of the military, four-star general. And five-star
1:58:43
Speaker 1: chef even? No, no. They pay for the five-star chefs.
1:58:47
Speaker 1: They don't cook for themselves. And then also like governor
1:58:50
Speaker 1: of 25 of the 50 states, right? That's what Augustus did.
1:58:53
Speaker 1: Augustus did this like power sharing thing with the Senate
1:58:56
Speaker 1: when he was trying to settle things afterwards. And he's like, okay,
1:58:59
Speaker 1: we'll divvy up the provinces. You can run half of them.
1:59:01
Speaker 1: I'll run half of them. Every province that Augustus had
1:59:06
Speaker 1: were the provinces with armies and all the provinces the
1:59:08
Speaker 1: Senate was allowed to govern were the provinces that did
1:59:11
Speaker 1: not have armies. So, you know, like who's actually in
1:59:14
Speaker 1: power here. But- The stuff that went on prior to
1:59:19
Speaker 1: the collapse of the Republic is the stuff that when
1:59:22
Speaker 1: I look around in contemporary American society, I wrote that
1:59:27
Speaker 1: book because I was like, I sure see a lot
1:59:30
Speaker 1: of echoes here. Is it going to proceed exactly the same? No.
1:59:36
Speaker 1: But can history rhyme? Yeah. I think history can rhyme
1:59:40
Speaker 1: a little bit. And there's a quote from Plutarch that
1:59:42
Speaker 1: I use in my book that's just like, if– If
1:59:46
Speaker 1: the sort of the constituent parts of a historical moment
1:59:50
Speaker 1: are the same here and the same there, it's not
1:59:52
Speaker 1: unreasonable to think that like the outcome will be the
1:59:55
Speaker 1: same or at least very similar. And if we're studying history,
2:00:00
Speaker 1: there is a point at which like what is the
2:00:02
Speaker 1: purpose of studying history? It's a little bit to learn
2:00:06
Speaker 1: what happened before, what mistakes were made, what– how events unfolded.
2:00:11
Speaker 1: so that we can like maybe do it better. Well,
2:00:13
Speaker 1: for surely it's like, why it's like rewatching a football game.
2:00:16
Speaker 1: It's like why you ran these plays. They were in
2:00:18
Speaker 1: these plays. Then this happened and this happened. This didn't
2:00:20
Speaker 1: let's never, let's never run that play again.
2:00:22
Speaker 2: And then we don't do that again. And then over
2:00:23
Speaker 2: time you have tons of games. You're like, okay, these
2:00:25
Speaker 2: are the plays. And then you, it'll build up statistics.
2:00:27
Speaker 2: So at a certain point, yes, you could, I mean,
2:00:29
Speaker 2: I'm surprised it's not on draft Kings yet, whether or
2:00:31
Speaker 2: not there'll be a, you know, a spread on the
2:00:35
Speaker 2: fall of America. What were some of the early things
2:00:37
Speaker 2: that you noticed?
2:00:39
Speaker 1: Well, one of the biggest is there was runaway economic
2:00:43
Speaker 1: inequality that was happening where, you know, like we talked
2:00:46
Speaker 1: about how you had to like have a certain amount
2:00:48
Speaker 1: of property in order to join the legions. And when
2:00:51
Speaker 1: they got into these like protracted wars, people would be
2:00:55
Speaker 1: brought into the legions. They would have to go off
2:00:57
Speaker 1: and fight in Spain for like five years. And while
2:00:59
Speaker 1: they were gone, their little plot of land back in
2:01:02
Speaker 1: Italy would fall into disrepair and you wouldn't really be
2:01:05
Speaker 1: able to make it productive. Maybe you'd be down on
2:01:07
Speaker 1: your luck financially and you would sell it off to
2:01:09
Speaker 1: your rich neighbor. And the richest component of Rome, the senators,
2:01:15
Speaker 1: there had always been stratification in the wealth. There had
2:01:17
Speaker 1: always been rich. There had always been poor. But the
2:01:19
Speaker 1: rich started becoming like super rich. During the Roman Empire?
2:01:23
Speaker 1: During the Roman Republic. The later days of the Roman Republic.
2:01:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, you said that's what the book is about.
2:01:28
Speaker 1: When you start getting these large estates, like insanely large
2:01:32
Speaker 1: estates as opposed to merely big estates that were surrounded
2:01:36
Speaker 1: by people, families who had their own individual plots. And
2:01:39
Speaker 1: basically the smallholders of Italy are like pushed out of
2:01:44
Speaker 1: the picture. They kind of don't exist anymore in Roman history.
2:01:47
Speaker 1: And so there is that– there is an economic inequality
2:01:51
Speaker 1: that is unfolding at the time. puts stress on the
2:01:56
Speaker 1: society because now they can't recruit for the legions, for
2:01:59
Speaker 1: one thing. Because you can't recruit for the legions because
2:02:02
Speaker 1: they don't respect you anymore? Because they don't meet the
2:02:05
Speaker 1: property qualifications anymore. Oh, that's right. So then what you
2:02:07
Speaker 1: got to do is you got to lift the property
2:02:09
Speaker 1: requirements and say, okay, now we can recruit anybody and
2:02:12
Speaker 1: they will be paid. And who's going to pay them?
2:02:14
Speaker 1: They're going to be paid by the person who's organizing
2:02:17
Speaker 1: that legion. Where's that money going to come from? It's
2:02:19
Speaker 1: probably going to come from them conquering something or defeating
2:02:22
Speaker 1: something and getting the spoils of war. So now we're
2:02:24
Speaker 1: going off and we are conquering things, not just for
2:02:26
Speaker 1: political reasons, but also to sort of enrich the army.
2:02:30
Speaker 1: And then this is where you get personalist armies where
2:02:33
Speaker 1: the legions aren't fighting for Rome. They are fighting for Caesar,
2:02:37
Speaker 1: for Marius, for Sulla. I'm here to fight for Sulla.
2:02:42
Speaker 1: That's who I'm fighting for. And so that has a
2:02:45
Speaker 1: major effect on the internal coherence of the Roman Republic.
2:02:50
Speaker 2: I don't know if we're there like in a war sense,
2:02:53
Speaker 2: but we're there in a capitalistic sense, it feels like. Yeah.
2:02:59
Speaker 1: And I mean, one of the things that gives me
2:03:01
Speaker 1: some hope is that one of the things that Augustus
2:03:04
Speaker 1: did during his settlements to kind of, because the Romans
2:03:07
Speaker 1: lived through like a 50-year period of nonstop civil war.
2:03:11
Speaker 1: And one of the things that Augustus did accomplish was
2:03:13
Speaker 1: like ending those civil wars. And one of the things
2:03:16
Speaker 1: that he did was he regularized the pay of the legions.
2:03:19
Speaker 1: He put out these mints. You were paid by the
2:03:22
Speaker 1: central state. You were no longer getting your money from
2:03:25
Speaker 1: your local commander. You were getting it from the central state.
2:03:28
Speaker 1: So like a UBI kind of. Well, and it's basically
2:03:30
Speaker 1: like what we have in the military today. And one
2:03:33
Speaker 1: of the reasons we don't have to worry about the
2:03:37
Speaker 1: army or the navy or the marines like hauling off
2:03:40
Speaker 1: and following some general is or some political leader as
2:03:43
Speaker 1: opposed to sticking to the Constitution is because their paycheck
2:03:47
Speaker 1: is coming from the centralized political authority, not from somebody else.
2:03:53
Speaker 1: And so dismantling that, creating private armies, of mercenaries, like
2:03:58
Speaker 1: that's when it starts to get a little sticky. And
2:03:59
Speaker 1: I don't think they would even let you do that
2:04:01
Speaker 1: in America. Oh, I mean, you know, like there's, there's
2:04:03
Speaker 1: the Eric princes of the world, right? Things should happen. Yeah.
2:04:06
Speaker 2: But it's, but it's definitely not at the scale that, right.
2:04:09
Speaker 2: Where it's, uh, popularly known.
2:04:12
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then there, like, there's this other sort of thing.
2:04:14
Speaker 1: That's a good point.
2:04:15
Speaker 2: I'm sure there are people, there's very wealthy people that
2:04:17
Speaker 2: have their own small military.
2:04:20
Speaker 1: Definitely. But not like nothing that can take the 82nd airborne. Right.
2:04:23
Speaker 2: Right.
2:04:24
Speaker 1: Exactly. And that's the thing is, You would have armies
2:04:26
Speaker 1: that could take the 82nd Airborne. And then to tie
2:04:29
Speaker 1: it later to the immigration issue, the reason why the
2:04:32
Speaker 1: Goths and the Huns were such a powerful force in
2:04:36
Speaker 1: smashing the empire is because they could take the 82nd Airborne.
2:04:40
Speaker 1: They were strong enough and big enough and well-armed enough.
2:04:43
Speaker 1: There's nothing that can touch the United States military right now.
2:04:45
Speaker 1: There's nothing on earth that can touch us. Not really.
2:04:47
Speaker 2: Unless the people in it who are fighting for it
2:04:51
Speaker 2: started to realize that they were being, if they decided
2:04:54
Speaker 2: that they were being used for practices that weren't good
2:04:59
Speaker 2: for the country.
2:05:00
Speaker 1: Right. But were just good for a select few. Is
2:05:02
Speaker 1: that right, you think? Or how would that happen? Well.
2:05:05
Speaker 1: I've thought about this. Okay.
2:05:06
Speaker 2: You know, and it's weird to say it because I
2:05:08
Speaker 2: have a lot of friends, but you start to think, well,
2:05:10
Speaker 2: how does the military get compromised? How do they choose
2:05:13
Speaker 2: to become like the people in....
2:05:20
Speaker 1: What does that mean with– oh, in The Patriot, right?
2:05:22
Speaker 1: How do they– you know what I'm saying?
2:05:23
Speaker 2: Like how do they decide that the– who they're fighting
2:05:27
Speaker 2: for isn't who they thought they were fighting for?
2:05:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's the plight of grunts throughout time and history, right?
2:05:35
Speaker 1: You are ultimately just following orders and you have to
2:05:37
Speaker 1: go do it. And can you have a large enough
2:05:42
Speaker 1: mutiny to overthrow a government because you don't like how
2:05:45
Speaker 1: you're being used anymore? It's happened. It's largely the story
2:05:49
Speaker 1: of the Russian Revolution. Those guys were being so badly
2:05:53
Speaker 1: mistreated that the army mutinied and winds up overthrowing the czar.
2:05:58
Speaker 1: That's definitely a major constituent part of the story of
2:06:02
Speaker 1: the Russian Revolution. So what was one of the other–
2:06:07
Speaker 1: there is this overarching notion that the Romans themselves often
2:06:12
Speaker 1: pointed to is that they had been engaged in this
2:06:15
Speaker 1: long struggle with Carthage as this great rival in the
2:06:19
Speaker 1: Western Mediterranean. This is where the war against Hannibal comes.
2:06:23
Speaker 1: This is a series of wars against Carthage where Roman
2:06:25
Speaker 1: Carthage are kind of equal going into it. And whoever
2:06:29
Speaker 1: wins this war is going to be the dominant power
2:06:31
Speaker 1: in the Western Mediterranean and then ultimately like the entire Mediterranean.
2:06:34
Speaker 1: So who wins this war is really important. And the
2:06:37
Speaker 1: Romans win the war after 100 years, 130 years is
2:06:41
Speaker 1: how long these things go on. But between the first
2:06:45
Speaker 1: between the first battle and the last battle, I think
2:06:47
Speaker 1: it's like 100. It's three generations. Yeah, I think it's,
2:06:49
Speaker 1: maybe it's like 110 years. I don't want to exaggerate.
2:06:53
Speaker 1: But once the Romans sort of lose that great unifying enemy,
2:07:00
Speaker 1: you start getting political rivalries inside the senatorial class breaking
2:07:07
Speaker 1: out beyond the bounds of what used to be acceptable practices.
2:07:12
Speaker 1: there used to be a really strong elite consensus and
2:07:14
Speaker 1: they did stick together at all times. And there were,
2:07:17
Speaker 1: there were things that you didn't do or wouldn't do.
2:07:20
Speaker 1: Even if you like, even if you lost a consul
2:07:22
Speaker 1: ship and you were pissed about it because I hate
2:07:24
Speaker 1: that family over there. Like you did not break the
2:07:28
Speaker 1: code of conduct. You didn't break the code of conduct.
2:07:30
Speaker 1: You didn't go get an army and then like overthrow
2:07:32
Speaker 1: that person because you're pissed off that you lost an election.
2:07:35
Speaker 1: You just simply wasn't done after the Punic wars are over.
2:07:40
Speaker 1: This is when we, It's like this is when it
2:07:42
Speaker 1: starts happening and it's like the internal cohesion of the
2:07:46
Speaker 1: elite ruling class breaks down and then they start seeing
2:07:50
Speaker 1: their own political ambitions as something that don't really need
2:07:54
Speaker 1: to have a check because I'm not worried about being defeat.
2:07:57
Speaker 1: We're not worried about being defeated by some foreign enemy.
2:08:00
Speaker 1: So I'm just going to keep going. Like we can,
2:08:03
Speaker 1: we can have a civil war. It doesn't matter because
2:08:05
Speaker 1: we don't have to worry about Carthage. And so if
2:08:07
Speaker 1: you're doing this sort of like, let's unfocus our eyes and,
2:08:10
Speaker 1: and look at sort of the beats of history. Okay.
2:08:12
Speaker 1: So what, what purpose is the cold war serving for
2:08:14
Speaker 1: the United States of America? through all of this? Is
2:08:17
Speaker 1: it a unifying force that enforces elite consensus and keeps
2:08:20
Speaker 1: things in bounds? Yeah, it sure does. And when we
2:08:24
Speaker 1: lose the communists as a unifying force that keeps the
2:08:28
Speaker 1: political class together, is that when we start seeing, as
2:08:31
Speaker 1: early as the 90s, great frayings in that fabric and
2:08:36
Speaker 1: people being willing to do things that are way outside
2:08:38
Speaker 1: the bounds of what would have even been considered possible
2:08:41
Speaker 1: 10 years earlier, 20 years earlier? Because We don't have
2:08:44
Speaker 1: to worry about the communists anymore. We won. Everything is
2:08:47
Speaker 1: great from here. And kind of ever since then, there's
2:08:50
Speaker 1: been vague attempts to like who's going to be the
2:08:52
Speaker 1: new enemy that unifies us. And nothing has really done
2:08:55
Speaker 1: it the way that the Cold War did. Terrorists– like
2:08:59
Speaker 1: it was terrorists for a while, but that never really
2:09:02
Speaker 1: did it. People try to– demonize China and try to
2:09:06
Speaker 1: turn them into something. But it doesn't take the same
2:09:08
Speaker 1: way because it's not really the same thing. So you
2:09:12
Speaker 1: lose that external threat and now you start having the
2:09:15
Speaker 1: political ruling class being willing to turn on each other.
2:09:18
Speaker 1: And yeah, the political environment right now is absolutely toxic.
2:09:24
Speaker 1: Absolutely toxic. And it's because people I don't think are
2:09:28
Speaker 1: afraid of the consequences of pushing things all the way
2:09:31
Speaker 1: to civil war. Yeah.
2:09:34
Speaker 2: I think some people you start to feel like what
2:09:38
Speaker 2: I say doesn't matter. What I feel doesn't matter. I
2:09:40
Speaker 2: don't even know if my vote counts because we don't
2:09:43
Speaker 2: even know if they're being tabulated fairly or not. I mean,
2:09:46
Speaker 2: you just don't know, you know, and there's so much misinformation.
2:09:48
Speaker 1: You don't know.
2:09:49
Speaker 2: Um, there's never been such wealth in the power of
2:09:54
Speaker 2: such few. Um, and you start to feel like, I mean,
2:09:58
Speaker 2: we talk all the time on here about, we just
2:10:00
Speaker 2: had Mike Rowe on and we're talking about, um, having purpose,
2:10:04
Speaker 2: like having a job, what it means to you to
2:10:06
Speaker 2: have a job and to do something and to make
2:10:08
Speaker 2: something and be a part of something. And once you
2:10:10
Speaker 2: don't have a purpose anymore, you'll kind of fall for,
2:10:13
Speaker 2: you'll find anything. You'll find a purpose. It just sometimes
2:10:17
Speaker 2: can be kind of on the darker side of things.
2:10:19
Speaker 2: But I think in the end, it's for some sort
2:10:21
Speaker 2: of form of self-preservation. So I don't know what that
2:10:25
Speaker 2: looks like. I wonder if there would be a civil war.
2:10:27
Speaker 2: Where do we meet up if there is? That's my
2:10:29
Speaker 2: big question.
2:10:30
Speaker 1: Where do we meet up? Like you and me? I
2:10:32
Speaker 1: mean- Oh, man. Where's a good place to meet up?
2:10:36
Speaker 1: I think Denver.
2:10:38
Speaker 2: Denver?
2:10:38
Speaker 1: Okay. Should we go to the Rockies? Here's the thing.
2:10:41
Speaker 1: You already said you got to get a place with
2:10:43
Speaker 1: some elevation. You got to get some elevation. Absolutely true.
2:10:47
Speaker 2: I just don't want it to come that day and
2:10:49
Speaker 2: say it hits on a Thursday night and you've already
2:10:51
Speaker 2: had a long week and you're like, fuck. Yep. You know,
2:10:53
Speaker 2: because you had the weekend off or whatever, but now
2:10:55
Speaker 2: you have to do Civil War or whatever. And then
2:10:58
Speaker 2: you're like, where do I go? I do not want that.
2:11:00
Speaker 2: Because you're not going to be able to text and
2:11:01
Speaker 2: find out.
2:11:02
Speaker 1: No, it's, no, it'll, if it comes, it'll be a
2:11:05
Speaker 1: huge mess. And Civil Wars are like the worst, just
2:11:11
Speaker 1: the worst thing. They're just the worst thing. Oh, yeah.
2:11:15
Speaker 1: Nobody wants to do, you know. Even if they're fought
2:11:17
Speaker 1: for a good reason, right? Like you're only destroying people.
2:11:21
Speaker 1: You're only destroying your own infrastructure. It's on your own
2:11:25
Speaker 1: front yard a lot of times. Yeah, the English Civil Wars,
2:11:27
Speaker 1: which happened, you know, this like Cromwell era, like Stuart England,
2:11:32
Speaker 1: you know, they called those civil wars a war without
2:11:34
Speaker 1: an enemy, you know, like, because that's a lot of
2:11:37
Speaker 1: what it is. And so we should definitely try to
2:11:41
Speaker 1: avoid civil war. But also there are things that, you know,
2:11:45
Speaker 1: if things get pushed too far and we're also, we're
2:11:49
Speaker 1: allowed to have values. We're allowed to care about things.
2:11:52
Speaker 1: And if literally every single thing that you believe in
2:11:55
Speaker 1: has to be sacrificed to avoid a civil war, right?
2:11:58
Speaker 1: Like everything I believe in will no longer exist, but
2:12:02
Speaker 1: at least we won't have a civil war. Is that
2:12:05
Speaker 1: civil war worse than fighting for the things that you
2:12:08
Speaker 1: believe in? I think at a certain point you choose
2:12:10
Speaker 1: to fight. I feel like. I think so too. You know,
2:12:13
Speaker 1: I really believe that. And I'm saying that as somebody
2:12:15
Speaker 1: who like, I've studied civil wars. I don't want any
2:12:18
Speaker 1: part of a civil war. And I don't like people
2:12:20
Speaker 1: who play fast and loose with talking about civil wars. No.
2:12:23
Speaker 2: I agree, man.
2:12:23
Speaker 1: I don't like people who romanticize it. I don't like
2:12:25
Speaker 1: people who talk about it because it is an awful, awful,
2:12:28
Speaker 1: awful thing. Sometimes, though, yeah. Yeah.
2:12:32
Speaker 2: Well, it's a thought of like, well, how did that happen, right?
2:12:36
Speaker 2: Because I'm sure if you'd asked people 100 years earlier,
2:12:38
Speaker 2: that would never happen, right? And how do you get
2:12:42
Speaker 2: to things like that? And then, yeah, I don't want
2:12:44
Speaker 2: to not have some place to meet up. I do
2:12:47
Speaker 2: not want to not have– and look, I'll even do–
2:12:51
Speaker 2: we'll do Milwaukee, dude, if we want to have two
2:12:53
Speaker 2: places to meet up.
2:12:54
Speaker 1: Because– I got some property out in rural Wisconsin. OK.
2:12:57
Speaker 1: You're just going to Denver is far though for everybody. Yeah.
2:13:00
Speaker 2: So you don't want people having to go to freaking–
2:13:02
Speaker 2: trying to think of one other spot.
2:13:05
Speaker 1: Well, I'll tell you this. Like if there's actually going
2:13:07
Speaker 1: to– the shape of the second American Civil War has
2:13:10
Speaker 1: less to do with territory in that way, like these
2:13:15
Speaker 1: states versus these states, it's gonna be very rural versus urban.
2:13:19
Speaker 1: And that's one of the main political divides, I think,
2:13:22
Speaker 1: right now. And so cities are one thing, and sort
2:13:26
Speaker 1: of the surrounding environs are a different thing. And that
2:13:29
Speaker 1: will be the shape of things. There will be 50
2:13:34
Speaker 1: regional simultaneous conflicts between people in the rural areas and
2:13:39
Speaker 1: people in the cities. And that's, I think, how it
2:13:42
Speaker 1: would go. Dang.
2:13:45
Speaker 2: Mikey D.
2:13:48
Speaker 1: Which I don't want any part of that either. I
2:13:51
Speaker 1: was just joking that I was raising my son to
2:13:53
Speaker 1: be John Connor to fight AI when it tries to
2:13:58
Speaker 1: take over. I'm just like, why do you think I'm
2:14:00
Speaker 1: trying to teach you these things, man? Anyway, let's go
2:14:02
Speaker 1: back to lock picking. John Connor for Columbus, we're going
2:14:05
Speaker 1: to call him, dude. somebody's got to go into ai
2:14:08
Speaker 1: and save us yeah i mean i showed them the
2:14:10
Speaker 1: terminator movies i'm like this is what we this is
2:14:11
Speaker 1: what we got to avoid man what i'm talking about
2:14:13
Speaker 1: it's up to you because because i i can't do
2:14:16
Speaker 1: it you.
2:14:17
Speaker 2: Know where will we find our allies at those times
2:14:19
Speaker 2: if that were ever to happen what do you think
2:14:20
Speaker 2: people find an ally in them like how do you
2:14:22
Speaker 2: how would you say this person is my ally in
2:14:25
Speaker 2: a civil war you think.
2:14:27
Speaker 1: There i mean there are ways to do it, right?
2:14:31
Speaker 1: Like you're going to, you're in an area that has
2:14:34
Speaker 1: a lot of like-minded people. We all have our own
2:14:35
Speaker 1: social networks that already exist, you know? And like, yeah,
2:14:39
Speaker 1: I mean, my existing social network, like I'm pretty sure
2:14:43
Speaker 1: would all be on one side of a civil war. Um,
2:14:47
Speaker 1: and I, and I would be on that same side
2:14:49
Speaker 1: as them. And that's a lot of how, you know,
2:14:51
Speaker 1: people wind up joining these things. They, they join, they
2:14:54
Speaker 1: join in groups. They're, you know, a lot of, A
2:14:57
Speaker 1: lot of companies are sort of like self-raised from some
2:15:00
Speaker 1: local area. And so those kinds of things, it is
2:15:04
Speaker 1: that kind of like personal trust that goes a lot
2:15:07
Speaker 1: into it. But of course, it's also difficult because there
2:15:09
Speaker 1: are people who are intentionally trying to trick you into
2:15:11
Speaker 1: thinking that they're on your side, but they're not really.
2:15:13
Speaker 1: And then you got to have internal secret police and
2:15:16
Speaker 1: purges and executions. And now you're living the worst life
2:15:19
Speaker 1: you can possibly think of. So let's just not do it, America. Yeah.
2:15:23
Speaker 1: Let's just not do it. Okay, Mike.
2:15:25
Speaker 2: Okay. I hear you there.
2:15:26
Speaker 1: Great.
2:15:27
Speaker 2: We'll have to talk about that another time. We'll talk
2:15:29
Speaker 2: about some revolutions and things like that. I would love
2:15:31
Speaker 2: to get into another conversation about it, man. How did
2:15:34
Speaker 2: people say Rome fell? Some people say it's just kind of,
2:15:38
Speaker 2: it's kind of just took on different, like it became
2:15:40
Speaker 2: the Byzantine empire. Some people say different things, right? What
2:15:44
Speaker 2: is kind of classified as the fall of Rome? How
2:15:46
Speaker 2: did it fall, hypothetically?
2:15:48
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, I mean, if you buy into the framing,
2:15:51
Speaker 1: it's a lot of the central state stops being able
2:15:56
Speaker 1: to draw on the wealth of its own society. Some
2:16:00
Speaker 1: of this is the result of civil wars and ongoing
2:16:03
Speaker 1: civil wars. Some of it is the result of migrations
2:16:07
Speaker 1: and population pressures where the Romans used to be very
2:16:10
Speaker 1: good at fighting wars and battles beyond their own frontiers,
2:16:14
Speaker 1: they would expand, right? So you're never fighting on your
2:16:17
Speaker 1: own territory. You're fighting on their territory, then you're beating them.
2:16:19
Speaker 1: And then you're moving on to the next territory beyond that.
2:16:22
Speaker 1: And by the third century and by the fourth century,
2:16:25
Speaker 1: the Romans are fighting wars on their own territory. And
2:16:28
Speaker 1: so you're not getting the spoils of war. You're not
2:16:31
Speaker 1: getting booty. You're not getting- You're getting spoiled. Even if
2:16:34
Speaker 1: you win, you lose. Yep.
2:16:36
Speaker 3: Yep.
2:16:36
Speaker 1: Things are getting trashed. And so there is a long-term
2:16:41
Speaker 1: degradation in sort of the military and political and economic
2:16:45
Speaker 1: strength of the empire, such that on the other side,
2:16:49
Speaker 1: like on the other side of the Rhine and on
2:16:50
Speaker 1: the other side of the Danube, you have all these
2:16:52
Speaker 1: like Germanic tribes who at one time were smaller and disconnected.
2:16:59
Speaker 1: And so it was very easy for the Romans to
2:17:01
Speaker 1: do like divide and conquer. We'll give this chief a
2:17:04
Speaker 1: bunch of money and he will be our ally and
2:17:06
Speaker 1: you'll be our representative there. And then these guys won't.
2:17:09
Speaker 1: But this guy will always be our friend because he
2:17:11
Speaker 1: knows that his local power is backed entirely by Roman gold.
2:17:14
Speaker 1: So he's with us. And the Romans could keep these
2:17:18
Speaker 1: groups kind of disunited. This is classic divide and conquer. Eventually,
2:17:23
Speaker 1: those groups become larger and larger and they form their
2:17:26
Speaker 1: own like larger and larger confederations such that they're able
2:17:29
Speaker 1: to build up manpower weaponry strength that can go toe
2:17:35
Speaker 1: to toe with the legions in a straight fight. And
2:17:38
Speaker 1: then the Romans are also saying to themselves, you know,
2:17:42
Speaker 1: we don't have the manpower that we used to have.
2:17:45
Speaker 1: And so if we want to win wars, we need
2:17:47
Speaker 1: to kind of outsource some of our fighting to these groups.
2:17:51
Speaker 1: And this becomes an incredibly– there's a couple hundred years
2:17:54
Speaker 1: of incredibly complicated political and military– sort of maneuverings between
2:17:59
Speaker 1: the Romans and these groups where Alaric and the Goths,
2:18:03
Speaker 1: this is the people who sack Rome, right? Which is
2:18:06
Speaker 1: sort of one of the big moments that we point
2:18:09
Speaker 1: to and say like, gosh, that was a big deal.
2:18:11
Speaker 1: Rome had not been sacked in like 800 years. That
2:18:14
Speaker 1: was a big deal. It's not the case that this
2:18:17
Speaker 1: was Alaric and the Goths marauding into Italy and mindlessly
2:18:23
Speaker 1: destroying Rome and looting it of its wealth. Alaric had
2:18:26
Speaker 1: been off and on allies and auxiliary and a general
2:18:29
Speaker 1: who commanded armies for Rome for like 20 years. So
2:18:33
Speaker 1: he'd been a contractor for a long time. Long time,
2:18:35
Speaker 1: long time. And was actually a vital component of the
2:18:38
Speaker 1: Roman national security state, if you could call it that,
2:18:42
Speaker 1: at the time. And he was just looking- Alaric the Ambitious?
2:18:45
Speaker 1: Alaric the Ambitious. Is that his name? No. Is it?
2:18:47
Speaker 1: Is that what they call him? I don't call him that.
2:18:50
Speaker 1: I call him Alaric the Goth. But He was trying
2:18:54
Speaker 1: to get what was owed to him by the emperors.
2:18:57
Speaker 1: They had promised him, they had made promises to him.
2:19:00
Speaker 1: And what he really wanted was to be more formally
2:19:04
Speaker 1: integrated into the society, to not just be a mere auxiliary,
2:19:07
Speaker 1: but to be entered into a society Into the fabric
2:19:11
Speaker 1: of Roman society. And they wouldn't let him? Which by
2:19:14
Speaker 1: this point, they're hiding in Ravenna because it's like behind
2:19:16
Speaker 1: a swamp. And like, yeah, no, they didn't let him
2:19:18
Speaker 1: because of prejudice, partly because of ethnic prejudice against him.
2:19:22
Speaker 1: And he said, look, if you don't follow through on
2:19:24
Speaker 1: your promises, you got nothing protecting your most important city.
2:19:28
Speaker 1: I can just do this if I want. Anytime I want,
2:19:30
Speaker 1: I can just go and do it. So follow through
2:19:32
Speaker 1: on your promises to me and I won't do it.
2:19:34
Speaker 1: It's pretty simple. They didn't follow through on their promises.
2:19:36
Speaker 1: So he said, fine, I'll go do it. I didn't
2:19:38
Speaker 1: want to. but I'm going to. So that sack is
2:19:42
Speaker 1: a very sort of calculated political move on his part.
2:19:47
Speaker 1: And that's part of the story about how Rome doesn't
2:19:50
Speaker 1: just fall. It's transforming into something else. It's not just
2:19:54
Speaker 1: mindless barbarians destroying civilized life. Like in that sense, I
2:19:59
Speaker 1: think that Alaric was acting in a more civilized way
2:20:02
Speaker 1: than the emperors in Ravenna were acting. Because they were
2:20:04
Speaker 1: acting like petulant little liars. And Alaric was trying to
2:20:08
Speaker 1: do something. What is it? Is it greed? Yeah, greed, prejudice,
2:20:16
Speaker 1: just sheer myopia. What does myopia mean? Myopia means an
2:20:19
Speaker 1: inability to see outside of your own little narrow circumscribed world.
2:20:23
Speaker 1: And by that point, like I said, like the political
2:20:26
Speaker 1: powers that be had left Rome. Like for a while,
2:20:30
Speaker 1: Milan was the capital of the empire because it was
2:20:33
Speaker 1: closer to the Alps, which put them closer to the borders,
2:20:37
Speaker 1: which allowed them to like, run things better. Rome is
2:20:39
Speaker 1: kind of deep in the Italian peninsula. And then when
2:20:42
Speaker 1: things really started getting bad, they moved over to Ravenna
2:20:45
Speaker 1: because Ravenna is on the coast. And so you can
2:20:46
Speaker 1: supply it really easy. It's difficult to besiege. And then
2:20:49
Speaker 1: also it was surrounded by swamps. So it's difficult for
2:20:51
Speaker 1: a land army to get in there. And so now
2:20:53
Speaker 1: you've got like the imperial court planted like in the
2:20:56
Speaker 1: middle of a swamp, just disconnected from everyone and everything.
2:21:00
Speaker 1: And they didn't know what was going on. It's like
2:21:02
Speaker 1: we got child emperors who have no idea what's actually
2:21:07
Speaker 1: happening out there in the world. And so the story
2:21:12
Speaker 1: of the collapse of Roman civilization has a lot to
2:21:15
Speaker 1: do then with like really poor leadership and poor leadership. Disorganization. Yeah,
2:21:19
Speaker 1: poor leadership decisions on top of all the material reasons
2:21:23
Speaker 1: why it collapses.
2:21:25
Speaker 2: Who was one of the most gangster, like children emperors
2:21:28
Speaker 2: that they have gangster of the children emperors? Who was
2:21:32
Speaker 2: somebody that was like, Oh, this dude should not be
2:21:35
Speaker 2: in there.
2:21:35
Speaker 1: Oh, I don't, I mean, I mean, one of the
2:21:37
Speaker 1: great lessons of the history of Rome is don't give
2:21:39
Speaker 1: teenagers power. Like, don't do that. Right. Like no, like
2:21:45
Speaker 1: no bad, but you know, like Honorius. Oh yeah. Who
2:21:49
Speaker 1: are the, who are the other guys that were, oh yeah.
2:21:51
Speaker 1: These are the classics. Gordian III was pretty good. Gordian III?
2:21:54
Speaker 3: Yeah.
2:21:55
Speaker 1: Gordian III was actually pretty good. I'll give, I'll give
2:21:57
Speaker 1: a shout out to Gordian III. Emperor at age of 13. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
2:22:02
Speaker 1: Which he, he, he emerges from the year of the
2:22:05
Speaker 1: six emperors. in case you're wondering how crazy things got
2:22:08
Speaker 1: during the crisis of the third century.
2:22:10
Speaker 2: In one year?
2:22:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the year of the six emperors. And Gordian
2:22:14
Speaker 1: emerges as the last of them because the Praetorian Guard
2:22:19
Speaker 1: supported him and liked him. And actually the people of
2:22:21
Speaker 1: Rome supported and liked him. And what were his vibes?
2:22:23
Speaker 1: Did he have a pretty good vibe or what was
2:22:24
Speaker 1: it like? I think he did have a pretty good vibe. Yeah,
2:22:27
Speaker 1: he had a really great advisor. who was with him
2:22:29
Speaker 1: for like four years, this particular guy who I'm not
2:22:32
Speaker 1: even gonna attempt to pronounce his name because every time
2:22:35
Speaker 1: I try, I completely fail. But he had good advisors, right?
2:22:39
Speaker 1: And he had good people around him. And he seemed
2:22:42
Speaker 1: to be sort of educated and chill enough that he
2:22:44
Speaker 1: wasn't just like, I'm here to just use this power
2:22:48
Speaker 1: that I've been given any way that I see fit.
2:22:51
Speaker 1: Like there did seem to be some sense of like,
2:22:54
Speaker 1: I have a civic duty and my role as an
2:22:56
Speaker 1: emperor matters. And I think that was true with him.
2:22:59
Speaker 1: And I think that was true of, um, this guy,
2:23:00
Speaker 1: Alexander Severus too. And who was a psycho? Any of them? Well,
2:23:05
Speaker 1: if just like, you know, just, uh, self-absorbed. Yeah. I mean,
2:23:09
Speaker 1: the list, the list is Carcalla, Nero, Alagabalus, um, uh, Caligula.
2:23:15
Speaker 1: And then those guys at the end, uh, Honorius, they're just,
2:23:21
Speaker 1: they're just completely out to lunch. So they're just completely
2:23:24
Speaker 1: out to lunch. And, you know, and my, you know,
2:23:25
Speaker 1: my big theory is that as they are, um, You know,
2:23:29
Speaker 1: as Rome is falling into disrepair, and they are resisting
2:23:35
Speaker 1: fully incorporating the Goths into Roman society, that it was
2:23:40
Speaker 1: that resistance to incorporating the Goths that is what meant
2:23:45
Speaker 1: that the power of the Roman Empire just ceased to matter.
2:23:48
Speaker 1: You know, like the people who would come along who
2:23:50
Speaker 1: were heirs to the Roman Empire were often still acting
2:23:55
Speaker 1: unfairly under the auspices of like the emperor back in
2:23:58
Speaker 1: the East that like, like the guys who come along
2:24:00
Speaker 1: after it, like, oh, I'm doing this because so-and-so told
2:24:02
Speaker 1: me that, that I could be in charge over here.
2:24:04
Speaker 1: They were still referencing the power of the emperors. Um,
2:24:08
Speaker 1: but if you're going to, if you're going to keep
2:24:10
Speaker 1: all your, all your generals and the people who are
2:24:12
Speaker 1: actually running your society on the outside and not giving
2:24:15
Speaker 1: them any real political power, eventually they're just going to
2:24:17
Speaker 1: stop caring because force is power. Force is what underlies power. Everything,
2:24:24
Speaker 1: every society, all political power is rooted in brute force.
2:24:28
Speaker 1: And if you can't command brute force and they can,
2:24:32
Speaker 1: they're going to take over. And so what the Goths
2:24:35
Speaker 1: wanted was to be fully integrated, which the Romans had
2:24:38
Speaker 1: been so good at. It's one of their greatest strengths.
2:24:42
Speaker 2: Like you said in the beginning, they would take over lands,
2:24:43
Speaker 2: they would incorporate the people, incorporate the religions, everything.
2:24:45
Speaker 1: Yep. And if they weren't an inventive people, but if
2:24:48
Speaker 1: they find a better sword that you were making, they're
2:24:50
Speaker 1: going to take that along. If you have a better
2:24:52
Speaker 1: way to build an aqueduct, they're going to copy that.
2:24:55
Speaker 1: And the book I'm writing right now is about the
2:24:58
Speaker 1: crisis of the third century when the Roman Empire nearly fell,
2:25:01
Speaker 1: but did not. Who saves the empire? It's a bunch
2:25:04
Speaker 1: of guys from Illyria, which is the Balkans, right? It's
2:25:07
Speaker 1: a bunch of dudes from Croatia and Bosnia. who are
2:25:09
Speaker 1: the ones who saved the empire because they had been
2:25:12
Speaker 1: fully integrated into the system and they believed in Rome
2:25:15
Speaker 1: and Roman-ness. There was never an ethnic component to Rome,
2:25:18
Speaker 1: not really. And certainly it's not the case that when
2:25:22
Speaker 1: Rome stopped being, you know, like fully pure blood Italian,
2:25:26
Speaker 1: that that's when things started to go wrong. Actually, like
2:25:30
Speaker 1: in many cases, the thing that stopped things from going
2:25:33
Speaker 1: wrong was that we weren't listening to the full-blooded Italians anymore.
2:25:36
Speaker 1: We were giving power and authority to people who would
2:25:39
Speaker 1: not have traditionally been in power, but because of the
2:25:43
Speaker 1: way that Roman society worked, could now be in power.
2:25:46
Speaker 1: And to have not done that at the end with
2:25:48
Speaker 1: the Goths, like, I think there is a moment when
2:25:52
Speaker 1: there is a sister of the emperor and a brother
2:25:56
Speaker 1: of the chieftain, it's Alaric's brother, they get married and
2:25:59
Speaker 1: they have a kid. And if that kid, that kid
2:26:02
Speaker 1: died because kids die in the past, right? We've talked
2:26:05
Speaker 1: about this. And if that kid had lived and gone
2:26:08
Speaker 1: on to become emperor and integrated the Goths into Roman society.
2:26:13
Speaker 1: I think, I think that buys them a couple hundred years.
2:26:15
Speaker 2: Wow. Easy.
2:26:17
Speaker 1: Man. But that's, but that's my own, that's my own
2:26:19
Speaker 1: little pet theory. Yeah. Which, which I came across by
2:26:22
Speaker 1: studying the, the collapse of Roman civilization on, on a
2:26:25
Speaker 1: practically on like a day by day level. And just
2:26:28
Speaker 1: being like, yeah, you guys fucking blew this one, didn't you?
2:26:31
Speaker 1: You didn't have to, but you did. It just shows
2:26:35
Speaker 1: you every day counts, huh? Yep.
2:26:37
Speaker 2: Every day counts. You have a series that you're working
2:26:40
Speaker 2: on now about.
2:26:43
Speaker 1: In the future. Yeah. Yes. Yes. We'll radically bounce 2,000
2:26:50
Speaker 1: years into the future. Yeah. So the other show that
2:26:54
Speaker 1: I have done is Revolutions, which each season of Revolutions
2:26:59
Speaker 1: covers a different great political revolution in history. And It
2:27:04
Speaker 1: is the case. I have found that a lot of
2:27:06
Speaker 1: revolutions do follow like a similar trajectory. There's an Ancien
2:27:10
Speaker 1: Regime that's falling apart. There's discontentment among the elite. There's
2:27:13
Speaker 1: new ideas that have been entered. And then there's like
2:27:15
Speaker 1: a liberal nobility. There's pissed off lawyers and journalists. Like
2:27:18
Speaker 1: a lot of these things are similar. There's a first
2:27:20
Speaker 1: wave of the revolution. And then there's a second wave
2:27:23
Speaker 1: of the revolution that often throws out the people who
2:27:25
Speaker 1: started the revolution. This is kind of how the French
2:27:27
Speaker 1: revolution goes and the Russian revolution goes. It is where
2:27:31
Speaker 1: like the Jacobins come from and And then there's always
2:27:34
Speaker 1: a war, there's always a civil war. So these things,
2:27:38
Speaker 1: these large structural beats of the story of a revolution,
2:27:41
Speaker 1: there's a lot of similarities. And so what I have
2:27:44
Speaker 1: done is I have taken those structural beats and I'm
2:27:48
Speaker 1: writing a completely fictitious future history of a revolution on
2:27:53
Speaker 1: Mars in 2247. and I walk it through day by
2:27:58
Speaker 1: day and I'm 20, I am 23 episodes into it.
2:28:04
Speaker 1: I love it. I love it. What is that? Where
2:28:07
Speaker 1: are you getting that from? That's, that's fan art. That's
2:28:10
Speaker 1: not me. Well, it's still nice. Pretty nice.
2:28:14
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:28:14
Speaker 1: It's nice fan art. Yeah. My fans are good. Wow.
2:28:19
Speaker 2: I just think it's so fascinating because you have to
2:28:20
Speaker 2: take such a breadth of history and information and, And
2:28:25
Speaker 2: then put it into something that's like so imaginative, you know?
2:28:34
Speaker 2: But also quickly coming with the future.
2:28:37
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then a lot of the things that are
2:28:38
Speaker 1: happening in The Martian Revolution, if you listen to it,
2:28:41
Speaker 1: you'll be like, oh, I see he's also commenting on
2:28:44
Speaker 1: present society and where we are. Because all good science
2:28:46
Speaker 1: fiction is not actually about the future. It's about the present.
2:28:51
Speaker 1: And so The Martian Revolution is that too. But it's
2:28:53
Speaker 1: a pretty– you know, when all is said and done,
2:28:55
Speaker 1: it's going to be 125,000 words that I wound up
2:28:58
Speaker 1: writing in like six months to crank out this massive
2:29:02
Speaker 1: epic history of a science fiction revolution, which if you're
2:29:06
Speaker 1: into that kind of thing, come along for a ride.
2:29:08
Speaker 1: It's pretty fun. And every part of it, you know,
2:29:11
Speaker 1: is like constructing like a mosaic where sort of every
2:29:15
Speaker 1: constituent part like has a reference point in history somewhere.
2:29:19
Speaker 1: Like I'm trying to tie all of these different things
2:29:21
Speaker 1: together and like oh, this is an element from the
2:29:23
Speaker 1: Mexican Revolution combined with an element of the Russian Revolution
2:29:25
Speaker 1: combined with an element of the French Revolution and then
2:29:29
Speaker 1: moving on to the next thing. And oh, I'm going
2:29:30
Speaker 1: to take this thing from the Haitian Revolution and I'm
2:29:32
Speaker 1: going to take this thing from the English Civil Wars.
2:29:35
Speaker 1: And we just go through it. And I've got six
2:29:38
Speaker 1: episodes left. By the time this thing airs, there'll be
2:29:40
Speaker 1: like three probably left. Congratulations, man. Yeah, I'm coming down
2:29:45
Speaker 1: the barrel of it. It's gone really well. All right.
2:29:47
Speaker 1: I've really enjoyed writing it.
2:29:49
Speaker 2: Well, it's just fascinating, man. It's interesting to talk to
2:29:51
Speaker 2: a historian. It's interesting to talk to someone with so
2:29:52
Speaker 2: much knowledge. Yeah, I'd love to talk about revolution sometime.
2:29:56
Speaker 2: I appreciate it, man. Thanks for taking this. Yeah, it's
2:29:59
Speaker 2: just interesting to be like– because you always fantasize in
2:30:01
Speaker 2: your head like, oh, I think about.
2:30:03
Speaker 1: The Roman Empire, man.
2:30:04
Speaker 2: I could have been– and you always fantasize yourself as–
2:30:09
Speaker 2: I never fantasize myself as one of like the slaves
2:30:13
Speaker 2: or anything like that.
2:30:14
Speaker 1: Of course not.
2:30:15
Speaker 2: You always kind of fantasize yourself at least somewhere in
2:30:17
Speaker 2: the middle or upper echelon, you know?
2:30:20
Speaker 1: Yes. Why does our brain do that, I wonder? Because
2:30:23
Speaker 1: we want to be safe and protected. And so we
2:30:25
Speaker 1: put ourselves in a safe and protected environment where the
2:30:28
Speaker 1: society is working for us rather than us working for
2:30:31
Speaker 1: the society. Nobody wants to imagine themselves as a slave.
2:30:34
Speaker 1: And so, yeah, when people fantasize about being in the
2:30:37
Speaker 1: Roman Empire and they're like, oh, it would have been
2:30:39
Speaker 1: so great. It's like, yeah, for like 27 guys, you know?
2:30:43
Speaker 1: like for the emperor and some people around him, everybody else,
2:30:47
Speaker 1: it was kind of rough going. And there's a very
2:30:49
Speaker 1: good chance you died at the age of three. And
2:30:52
Speaker 1: if you didn't die at the age of three, there's
2:30:53
Speaker 1: a very good chance you died at the age of seven.
2:30:55
Speaker 1: And if you didn't die at the age of seven,
2:30:56
Speaker 1: there's a very good chance you died at the age
2:30:58
Speaker 1: of eight, right? Like you're, you're probably not living very long.
2:31:04
Speaker 1: So was it that great? So like as a historian,
2:31:08
Speaker 1: and sometimes people are like, would you want to go
2:31:10
Speaker 1: back and live in some period in the past? And
2:31:13
Speaker 1: Mostly I'm really, I really like modern medical technology and
2:31:17
Speaker 1: a lot of the things that we have, like I
2:31:19
Speaker 1: am pampered that way. Like if I get sick, I
2:31:22
Speaker 1: want antibiotics. I don't want to just die of some
2:31:24
Speaker 1: like festering wound because we don't have antibiotics yet. Like
2:31:27
Speaker 1: I love all those things where I would really go
2:31:29
Speaker 1: if I had like a time machine, I could go anywhere.
2:31:31
Speaker 1: I'd go back to those primordial forests before humans were
2:31:35
Speaker 1: even a thing. I'm from the Pacific Northwest. It's beautiful
2:31:38
Speaker 1: up there. It's beautiful up there. And I would go
2:31:40
Speaker 1: to basically where Lake Washington is right now or the
2:31:44
Speaker 1: Puget Sound before humans were even a thing. Just these
2:31:47
Speaker 1: ancient primordial forests and just hang out there for a
2:31:50
Speaker 1: little bit. Get a nice little cabin.
2:31:53
Speaker 2: And hear the sounds that, and I bet animals made
2:31:55
Speaker 2: cooler sounds before we came around and started listening to them.
2:31:57
Speaker 1: They would certainly behave differently, you know, because right now,
2:32:00
Speaker 1: like there's no interacting with wildlife, not really because they
2:32:02
Speaker 1: all learned to stay away from humans. Yeah.
2:32:05
Speaker 2: And a lot of the parents have been locked up
2:32:06
Speaker 2: too in zoos or whatever. So I think a lot
2:32:09
Speaker 2: of them it's gotten.
2:32:10
Speaker 1: Yeah. So like, yeah, you go out to the Olympic
2:32:12
Speaker 1: peninsula and you kind of get a glimpse of what
2:32:15
Speaker 1: that stuff used to be. Or like when I was
2:32:17
Speaker 1: writing about Russia and, And like, you think about like
2:32:19
Speaker 1: these huge primordial forests that like stretched all the way
2:32:23
Speaker 1: from like Europe, all the way to China, just these amazing,
2:32:26
Speaker 1: you know, just this amazing number of trees and, you know,
2:32:29
Speaker 1: animals and plant life and stuff. Yeah. Just, just go
2:32:32
Speaker 1: chill with mother nature. And then once humans come along,
2:32:35
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, right. I'm going to, I'm going to
2:32:38
Speaker 1: head back to where I can go to the hospital.
2:32:40
Speaker 1: If I, you know, if, if things get really bad.
2:32:43
Speaker 2: Sometimes I wonder if we were helping things or hurting them. Um,
2:32:47
Speaker 2: Mike Duncan, thanks so much, man. I appreciate your time.
2:32:49
Speaker 2: And yeah, everyone can check out. If you want to
2:32:52
Speaker 2: hear more about Rome, you have two books. Your second book,
2:32:57
Speaker 2: the new book that you have out is?
2:32:59
Speaker 1: The book I'm writing right now, which is, I'm not
2:33:02
Speaker 1: turning the manuscript in until September, so it won't be
2:33:04
Speaker 1: out until 2026. But yeah, these are the ones like
2:33:06
Speaker 1: Storm Before the Storm, The Beginning of the End of
2:33:08
Speaker 1: the Roman Republic, which is a lot of what we
2:33:10
Speaker 1: talked about today. If you're interested in those sort of
2:33:12
Speaker 1: parallels between what kind of trajectory it feels like we're
2:33:16
Speaker 1: on as a society and what trajectory the Romans were on.
2:33:19
Speaker 1: That's my best stab at sort of talking about that.
2:33:22
Speaker 1: The storm before the storm. Yeah, storm before the storm.
2:33:25
Speaker 1: With the storm being like the civil wars that destroyed
2:33:27
Speaker 1: the republic. Yeah. And then out of, you know, outgrowth
2:33:30
Speaker 1: of my work in revolutions, I wrote a biography of
2:33:33
Speaker 1: the Marquis de Lafayette, who is a guy who had
2:33:36
Speaker 1: like a 50-year-long revolutionary career And we only ever think
2:33:40
Speaker 1: about him as this 19-year-old kid who hung out with
2:33:43
Speaker 1: George Washington for a few years, and we like him,
2:33:46
Speaker 1: because we all like a Frenchman in a uniform. But
2:33:48
Speaker 1: he actually lived this insane 50-year life in and out
2:33:52
Speaker 1: of revolutions. And as I was writing the show, I
2:33:55
Speaker 1: was like, God, this guy just keeps popping up. So
2:33:57
Speaker 1: I wound up writing a whole biography about him. He
2:34:00
Speaker 1: was a gangster, huh? Yeah. Yeah, there he is. There's
2:34:04
Speaker 1: my boy. Gilbert Dumontier, Marquis de Lafayette. There he is.
2:34:09
Speaker 2: Mike Duncan, thanks so much for your time, man. I
2:34:11
Speaker 2: appreciate it.
2:34:12
Speaker 1: Thank you very much for having me.
2:34:13
Speaker 2: Yep.
2:34:14
Speaker 3: Now I'm just floating on the breeze And I feel
2:34:17
Speaker 3: I'm falling like these leaves I must be cornerstone.
2:34:25
Speaker 1: Oh, but when I
2:34:26
Speaker 3: Reach that ground I'll share this peace of mind I
2:34:30
Speaker 3: found I can feel it in my bones