FREEMIUM: Epochs #250 | The History of Epochs
Episode Stats
Length
2 hours and 16 minutes
Words per Minute
170.67874
Summary
It's the 250th episode of Epochs, and I thought it'd be a good idea to do a retrospective of the history of the show to mark the occasion. It's a bit different to any other episode I've done before, but it's a one-off and I hope it goes down well.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hello and welcome to Epochs. This is a very special episode, an entirely different thing actually.
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So I thought we would mark it with something a little bit different, a retrospective basically.
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If you've tuned in this week like a good fan of Epochs, expecting a story all about history, you're not going to get it.
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What I'm going to do this time, just a one-off, I might do it again for like the 500th episode if I ever get to 500 episodes.
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I might do something similar at that point, so it really is a one-off.
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And I'm just going to talk about Epochs, do a history of Epochs, just to mark the 250th episode of it.
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So there you go, I'm in the first studio with the special bespoke Epochs video wall.
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And hopefully this is for fans of Epochs, like the people that really do watch it, you know, every single one.
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This is for you guys, if you want to know a little bit about behind the scenes, and a little bit of the history, my thoughts and feelings about it.
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And any little tidbits, the story of Epochs, if you like.
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So it's very different to any other episode I've ever done, and it really is a one-off.
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So I hope you like it, I hope it goes down well.
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But after this week, I'll be going back to talking about history again.
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Alright, so it started very nearly five years ago now.
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So episode 256 will be the five-year anniversary of it.
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I'm quite proud of that record, my attendance record effectively.
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There was one week, one week in five years, where the Epochs didn't go out until the Monday.
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It was all recorded, and all edited, and everything was fine.
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And then there was some technical hitch on Sunday.
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Some computers fell over, or I don't even know.
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I don't really deal with that side of things, of posting it on YouTube, and posting it on the website.
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But something happened on the Sunday, and it didn't go out on the Sunday.
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But I'd done my job, everything was fine, and it went out on the Monday.
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Other than that one week, I think that's the only time.
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Other than that one week, it's always gone out on a Sunday for five years straight.
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Despite illness, despite COVID, despite anything and everything.
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You get a long-form bit of history from your history bro, Bo Dade.
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It'll be archived somewhere or other for a long, long time.
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So, I'm proud of it, and I'm grateful to you guys.
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Very, very nearly, five years ago, Mr. Cole Benjamin, that Sargon of a Cadfella,
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he employs me to be sort of a presenter and a writer.
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He used to do a lot more writing of articles on the website.
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But mainly to be the history person, to make quality, the idea is to be quality behind
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the paywall content, and I'd be the history-themed person that does that.
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And so, when I first turned up, week one, this is what Carl always does with new employees,
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is a little bit drops you in the deep end in your first week.
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Just to see how you sort of deal with it a bit.
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But I was fine, because just talking about history and a long-form content was already
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So, the idea of just being asked to just sit down and do an hour or more of talking about
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Now, I thought, where me and Carl had made history-themed content before, again, for
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my channel, History Bro, for some reason, I had it in my mind.
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I had it in my mind, for some reason, I remember clearly, we were going to talk about Alexander,
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If you go over to my channel, History Bro, you can find two videos of two and a half hours
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a piece, so five hours, of me and Carl talking about Alexander the Great.
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With full references from, you know, Arian and Plutarch and Curtius.
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Five hours of me and Carl talking about Alexander.
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And for some reason, I thought we were going to sort of recreate that and do that for Epochs
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And have a quick conversation, because it was always going to be in conversation with
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The first whole bunch of them, one and a half of them, are in conversation with Carl.
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Some of them are with other people, and some of them are on my own.
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So to begin with, they were all in conversation with Carl.
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So I thought we were going to do Alexander, and he's like, no, I want to do Hanno the Navigator.
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So there you can see, it's episode one, Epochs, episode one, Hanno the Navigator.
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Anyone who's not familiar with this format, this is our new website, by the way.
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We're reworking, rejigging the entire Lotus Eaters website to actually make it good and
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We've got loads of web devs, been working on that for quite a long time.
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Spent quite a lot of money and energy and time on that.
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So this is the beta version of it, if it looks a bit different, if you're used to the website.
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This is what it should look like going forward.
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But Carl says on week one, no, I want to do Hanno the Navigator.
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And I was like, in my mind, I was like, okay, that just came out of left field to me.
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I was like, okay, okay, I know of Hanno the Navigator.
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I'm aware of who that is and what they were and early Carthage and all that stuff.
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But it's been a long, long time since I've read the small accounts, the small amount
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of literature we've actually got on Hanno the Navigator.
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Give me a day or two just to reread it and read around it a bit.
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It really came out of nowhere that Carl said that.
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And I don't know why particularly he wanted to do Hanno the Navigator for episode one,
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A lot of them, most of them are my choice, purely what I want to do.
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But especially in the early days, it was more like 50-50, Carl would pick the topic or I
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And slowly that petered out where Carl picked the topic less and less a bit.
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And anyway, nowadays, or for a long time, it's been just me picking it.
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But to begin with, often they were Carl's picks.
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Okay, and it's sort of like a baptism of fire a bit, isn't it, whenever you start doing
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Again, I wasn't entirely new to the idea of sitting down and making long-form history-themed
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Still, it's the first one in a new job and everything.
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But Carl's a great conversationalist, isn't he?
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Even his worst attractors will admit that he's at a professional level of holding a conversation.
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I've got more talking points than I could get through.
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So just sit down, enjoy it, and just have a conversation about early Carthage and Hanno
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Got a few of the quotes in front of you on a laptop or on a screen or whatever.
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One thing I do remember from that first episode, it was in the old studio.
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And there was the old table there, if anyone remembers it.
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And just the way that studio was set up is that out of sight, just out of sight, effectively
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kind of behind you, three quarters behind you, was a settee in that space, in that studio
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And I remember at the end of the recording, or very, very near the recording, I turned
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And he'd obviously been sitting there the whole time.
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And I remember turning around and going, oh, oh, you sit there.
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Because usually no one would sit in that settee.
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Occasionally, if a guest came in, I remember one time Alex Stein came in, primetime, 99,
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He came in, and he brought his girlfriend, and she sat on the settee while they're recording.
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But usually, other members of Lotus Eaters wouldn't just sit in the studio, just sit
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And I remember turning around and being a bit shocked that Callum was sort of observing.
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If I'd known, it might have put me off slightly, but I didn't.
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After that, I thought, okay, maybe I'd like to start with something like, or start doing
00:09:22.300
epochs more with things like, what did I have in mind?
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I had in mind that I wanted to do Gilgamesh or the Iliad.
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Now, ever since then, I still haven't done the Iliad.
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I've been threatening to do a long series all about the Iliad for five years now.
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And I will do it at some point, but it still hasn't happened.
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Eventually, me, Carl, and Stelios sat down and did a very, very long form, like three
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or four hours worth of a single video, three or four hours, one of the longest Lotus Eaters
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And I think that was either just a one-off type piece of content, or maybe it was on Stelios'
00:10:05.840
But nevertheless, there is hours of me, Carl and Stelios, talking about Gilgamesh, almost
00:10:10.900
line by line, not quite line by line, but quite a deep textual analysis of Gilgamesh.
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So that is out there, but I haven't done Gilgamesh on epochs.
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But Carl was like, no, let me reread the Iliad before we do that, and then we'll do that.
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Just get a few more under your belt, get the thread of it going, get used to it, and then
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we'll do the big ones, like Gilgamesh and the Iliad.
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And I wanted to do ancient history because, again, sort of start at the beginning, if
00:10:51.100
you like, and my background is ancient history.
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So that's really my wheelhouse is the more ancient world.
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And when we'd done Hanno the Navigator, I thought, okay, I'll do something that sort
00:11:01.400
of kind of leads on from that or is in kind of the same vein as that.
00:11:07.580
So anyway, it's a great book I've had for a long time, got for Christmas many, many,
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many years ago, 20, 25 years ago, about Pythias.
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Pythias the Greek, the person from the ancient Greek world, the classical Greek world, who
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according to his own account, whether you can believe it or not, sailed all the way
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up around the bottom of Spain through, what's it called, the Gibraltar, all the way up the
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Bay of Biscay to Britain, maybe all the way to the top of Britain, maybe as far as Iceland.
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But he certainly went on some sort of extraordinary voyage, like Hanno the Navigator.
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And it's just a fantastic story, if you believe the accounts.
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One of Carl's favorite figures is Alcibiades from the latter half of the Peloponnesian War,
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It's a great and incredible figure, larger than life figure, jumps out from ancient history,
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It's like when you read about it, when you know about it, it's like, oh, he's sort of
00:12:19.980
undeniably a sort of a crazy, interesting Chad type person, right?
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Then it was part of the idea from inception, really, to have guests sometimes.
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So from quite early on, Carl wanted us to have guests.
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And I'm happy to have a guest, speak to some other people, you know, change it up a bit,
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And I was a big fan, or am still, a big fan of Critical Drinker.
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There's a long-form bit on History Bro where we talk about our favorite war films.
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I've done a few bits and bobs with Will, the Critical Drinker.
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They've made content all over the place over the years.
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And where Lotus Eaters as a whole were still just trying to get off the ground,
00:13:24.100
Carl and everyone was sort of trying to call in a few favors, you know, can you help out?
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Because Critical Drinker by this point, five years ago, was already massive.
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And so I was thinking, who's sort of the biggest person within reason we could get on?
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On the show, on Epoch, to sort of help us out, you know, boost it.
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You know, Critical Drinker, you can only ask, right?
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So anyway, on Discord or something or other, I asked Will,
00:13:57.720
would you come on and talk about history a little bit with me?
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And anyway, because it had to be sort of a history-based thing,
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and because he's a movie, TV, culture guy, critic,
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And of course, we can talk about the film itself,
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and we can talk about the real history of the Battle of Waterloo and everything.
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Next one, Carl wasn't done with the Alcibiades thing.
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It's Thucydides is the main thing, main account.
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Yeah, the next couple are, again, about Alcibiades.
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The Sicilian expedition, that's Alcibiades' expedition.
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Next one, we tried to get another, well, we got another guest.
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You know, well, Mooler's like the EFAP chaps, isn't he?
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But, you know, there's that clique of, like, nerd-rotic, drinker, Mooler,
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And they're all sort of adjacent to us, friends with Carl and, you know,
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sort of on our side of the aisle, politically speaking, vaguely, one way or another.
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And so, once again, Mooler was just on Carl's Discord.
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But once again, he was gracious enough, generous enough to say yes.
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I said, let's talk about a history film, just like we did with Drinker a couple of weeks back.
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Of course, it's historically, ridiculously inaccurate.
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And I've watched that, like, four or five times.
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It's like Quentin Tarantino reimagining history rather than anything else.
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Famous-ish book written in the ancient world, if I recall.
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And me and Carl both love military history and the Romans, the ancient world.
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One of my favorite humans is Apostolic Majesty.
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I like people that are extremely knowledgeable.
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There's some people where, if you come across as a know-it-all, it gets their back up.
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If you're sort of too knowledgeable or intelligent or clever or whatever, some people hate that.
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They think you're like condescending or something, even if you're not.
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When there's someone, a talking head, that knows their stuff inside out, and you know that their knowledge base is gigantic, you can ask them almost anything and they'll know, within reason, of course.
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Ask them to drill down into something they just said and explain it, and they can, because they know they're onions.
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If you scratch the surface, there's nothing there.
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Don't want to come across as too much of a sycophant for Apostolic Majesty.
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But he's probably my favourite history YouTuber.
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We had a discussion there about Justinian I, you know, and all the Nikkei riots and the whole thing.
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Just everything about it is just, it's just fantastic.
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So that's after Nero died, committed suicide, forced to commit suicide.
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After that happened, there was four emperors in a year.
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The Year of the Four Emperors, a classic bit of, it's like Rome, first century Rome, distilled down into an even more concentrated version of the insanity of, like, the first few generations of Caesars.
00:20:13.240
The Year of the Four Emperors, the Year of the Four Emperors, that's one of my, that's one of the best ones, one of the more interesting ones, I think.
00:20:20.880
I mean, I think they're nearly all good, all worthy of re-listening to, but that one particularly, I think it's a great story, the Year of the Four Emperors.
00:20:38.260
So Herodotus is like a staple of ancient history, isn't it?
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If you want to be, if you're into ancient history, I want to say that you know about ancient history, you're going to have to read Herodotus.
00:20:53.540
Anyway, he talks about one particular people, the Scythians, and there's whole books written about the Scythians.
00:20:58.120
Scythians, people from sort of the Central Asian steppe.
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I mean, whether they're from places like modern-day Ukraine, or from much more Central Asia.
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I think that was, I think that was Carl's pick.
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And again, I think that was Carl's pick, but it might have been mine.
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Again, just straight up sort of military history, nerding out about military history.
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You do a bit of reading, especially for the ancient world.
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Even if you've got to read all of Thucydides, you can do that in a week relatively easily.
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But usually it's just a few passages from something.
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If you know enough around it, where you can just riff on anything.
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And then just go and have a conversation for an hour, hour and a half.
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An English historian writing at the end of the 18th century.
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And also, what, Sir Atonius talks about Domitian.
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He's like, he's up there with Nero, Caligula, Elabagulus, Commodus.
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You know, he's one of the most sadistic sort of evil ones.
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And yeah, I think The Crimes of Domitian is, again, that's probably one of the more interesting ones, I think, in my humble opinion.
00:23:14.440
Okay, the next one was definitely one of Carl's picks.
00:23:21.020
Well, we're talking all about the First Punic War.
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That's where Rome and Carthage went to war with each other over Sicily.
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And one thing in there was a giant naval battle.
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Some sets won the biggest naval battles of all time, including the modern world.
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Surely it's not as big as Guadalcanal in the Pacific in World War II, but...
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280,000 men were lost, killed in the naval engagement during the First Punic War.
00:23:58.400
And yeah, this is where I was in conversation with Josh.
00:24:10.240
Like in the office, I'll say, oh, I might do it on my own, usually in conversation with Carl, but might have an outside guest.
00:24:17.800
Or if any of you guys, the other cast of the Lotus Eaters, the other presenters of the Lotus Eaters, if there's anything you ever want to do or interested in, we'll go on each other's shows, right?
00:24:29.640
So I went on Contemplations with Josh a whole bunch.
00:24:35.720
I went on Symposium with Stelios a whole bunch.
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Helped Luca these days do some literature content, whatever it is, you know.
00:24:46.960
So anyway, this was the first time Big Josh Firm wanted to talk about, was interested in Roman Britain.
00:24:55.700
Now I know Roman Britain inside out, literally studied it at undergrad and after undergrad, just, well, as an Englishman, right?
00:25:08.700
As a history nerd and an Englishman, it's your bread and butter on some level, right?
00:25:12.980
But if you're a history, an Englishman and a history fan, you're going to know about the Duke of Wellington or Nelson, Admiral Lord Nelson, or Roman Britain.
00:25:20.620
So having actually formally properly studied it, done written essays in it and sitting exams about it, and then half a lifetime on top of that of reading around it.
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Could talk about Roman Britain for, no exaggeration, for hours upon hours upon hours upon hours.
00:25:37.060
But we only did, what was it, a two-part series?
00:25:40.620
Oh no, not even that, so, okay, we talked about Caesar's expedition, so that's the first Roman expedition.
00:25:52.800
Tacitus wrote a book, other than the Annals and the Histories, he also wrote the Germania and the Agricola.
00:26:04.980
Then when I was still in that vein, got into a Tacitus, reading Tacitus, and the Agricola's very short, and also the Germania is very, very short.
00:26:15.600
So when I'd done the Agricola, I thought, oh, it kind of makes sense to do the Germania, back with Carl, in conversation with Carl.
00:26:22.020
That's a very, they're all interesting, but I think that's another very good one, another particularly good one, the Germania.
00:26:35.540
What would that, okay, this is one of the first ones where I don't really remember it all that well, okay.
00:26:40.940
Would that have been, I don't even remember that that well.
00:26:46.360
Okay, this is the first one where my memory's failing me ever so slightly.
00:26:58.900
Should I have a quick click on it and see what the description says?
00:27:10.640
Okay, yeah, so that's the first Punic War again.
00:27:12.900
So I imagine it would have been Carl who picked that one.
00:27:22.760
You know, whether it was, you know, the questioning, the mystery of who exactly the Sea People were.
00:27:35.040
Although Carl insisted he knows exactly who it is.
00:27:37.160
And various historians now think they know who it really is.
00:27:44.500
Okay, and then I wanted, and then I had picked a thing about Sir Francis Drake.
00:27:54.880
And Sir Francis Drake obviously connected to Plymouth and the Royal Navy and all that sort of thing.
00:27:59.900
And I made a whole bunch of content about Drake before on History Bro, on my channel History Bro.
00:28:05.420
So I know Sir Francis Drake inside out, his life and career.
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Or at least, if not a full series, episodes that lead one into another.
00:28:31.060
So here's one about the Battle of Cressy, i.e. a smashing victory for the English in the 14th century.
00:28:44.840
Sort of England maxing, talking about when we win.
00:29:08.560
Or half a generation later, or whatever it was.
00:29:15.440
So three great victories in the Hundred Years' War.
00:29:17.820
The Battle of Agincourt is much later, but it's still within the Hundred Years' War.
00:29:29.980
So usually I haven't ever revisited anything in Epochs.
00:29:34.580
If you've already done something, it seems a bit of a waste to talk about it again.
00:29:40.280
So this is the first time I talked about Agincourt.
00:29:52.140
There's a few things in history that I know really inside out.
00:29:55.400
I've kind of kept reading about it over and over again throughout my whole adult life.
00:30:10.280
On Henry V since I was about, I don't know, 13 or 14 or something.
00:30:21.220
So of course early on I want to talk about Agincourt.
00:30:28.480
Okay, so the next episode is just beyond Agincourt.
00:30:33.800
When we finish the story of the Battle of Agincourt, I just want to keep going with the narrative.
00:30:37.940
And then beyond that, the end of the Hundred Years' War after Henry dies and Henry VI, his baby son, takes over.
00:30:46.580
And England ends up losing the Hundred Years' War effectively, finally.
00:30:52.860
So I just couldn't stop myself just continuing the story, continuing the narrative.
00:30:57.360
Okay, then me and Cole, I think, jointly decided.
00:31:00.800
At this point, I remember us sitting down saying, it's all very well to have sort of a scattergun.
00:31:06.920
Why don't we have, like, plan a few ahead and, like, plan it a bit more.
00:31:12.740
And so somehow we jointly decided we was going to talk about Byzantium for a while, for a few episodes.
00:31:21.360
So we do the Nikkei riots, which, again, is Justinian I, right?
00:31:25.680
I already did a bit of a conversation, didn't I, with Apostolic Majesty about Justinian.
00:31:32.440
But so we return to it there, specifically in the Nikkei riots.
00:31:35.960
Like, this whole episode is just the few days that is the Nikkei riots.
00:31:45.440
That's Justinian's general who ended, put down the Nikkei riots and then went on to reconquer the entire Western Roman world on behalf of Justinian.
00:31:56.240
So it's part one, part two, and Belisarius part three.
00:32:01.620
Yeah, reconquering the West, and then Belisarius' final downfall.
00:32:07.620
Me and Cole were just talking about Belisarius.
00:32:09.760
Again, one of the greatest generals of antiquity, late antiquity.
00:32:15.600
All right, after that, we did Gordon of Cartoon.
00:32:19.720
Again, the reconquest of the Sudan or that whole story.
00:32:25.840
I wanted to do a little, a few episodes about sort of Victorian times or late Georgian Victorian times.
00:32:32.880
The 19th century, sort of great, the height of the British Empire and some of the great heroes the British Empire had.
00:32:39.520
And so one of those is Gordon of Cartoon, or Gordon of China, as he was known before he was killed.
00:32:53.620
Again, if you like that sort of thing, very good episode.
00:32:56.840
If that's your bag, if that's your wheelhouse, then a good one.
00:33:05.780
Again, just a great Victorian hero, effectively.
00:33:13.960
And those lives where he was just involved in everything.
00:33:20.900
Most people, even a lot of history nerds, may not really know, and might have heard the name, but probably don't know about his career in any real detail.
00:33:35.260
All right, then we went on to this, yeah, with Josh again.
00:33:57.320
Then it was Christmastime, so I did a bit of history-themed content about Christmas.
00:34:01.300
You'll see that most years, I think, we do something or other around Christmas.
00:34:04.360
Talked about the Saturnalia, which is not exactly the Roman Christmas, but it was the type of holiday the Romans had around that time of year.
00:34:12.100
With gift-giving and various things that are similar-ish to Christmas.
00:34:20.900
The ancient Roman Christmas isn't really accurate.
00:34:23.720
But nonetheless, there are loads of sorts of parallels.
00:34:25.800
So, at Christmastime in 2021, I did an episode all about Saturnalia there.
00:34:32.080
Okay, then we went through, me and Cole decided we'd go through a bit of a phase of some of the great semi-mythical, semi-legendary, if not entirely legendary, ancient Greek people from the lives of Plutarch.
00:34:53.400
So, we did Theseus of Athens, Lycurgus of Sparta, some of these great figures, got to read Plutarch.
00:35:02.760
We quote heavily from Plutarch and all that sort of thing, you know, doing a proper deep dive.
00:35:16.140
We did a few of those in a row and then something different.
00:35:22.080
I talked to him for many an hour, so many, it was one recording, I believe, if I recall, but it was so long we split it into two episodes.
00:35:38.480
Maybe it was recorded over two recording periods.
00:35:40.940
But anyway, the next four episodes are talking with Apostolic Majesty all about the origins of World War I.
00:35:48.160
And again, you can't, again, you can't fake or half-ass having that much knowledge.
00:36:03.020
Well, you can talk about, you can just talk about it endlessly for hour after hour after hour.
00:36:08.360
Anything I say, any question I ask, he knows the answer to.
00:36:20.120
So, we talked all about that for quite a few hours, if you want, about the origins of World War I.
00:36:38.680
One of the first episodes where it's different.
00:36:45.700
Got Mark on, because he's very good friends with Carl.
00:36:55.020
And, I had a conversation with him, because I'm a fan of his stuff as well.
00:37:02.200
And, he's got his own, as well as doing just current affairs and politics type stuff.
00:37:13.620
Which is sort of, it's sort of history themed, essentially, isn't it?
00:37:18.160
A lot of it's modern, and maybe it's something that's a bit comical.
00:37:22.780
Alright, it's not sort of, like, much ancient history stuff.
00:37:26.240
Although, there is one or two bits of ancient history.
00:37:30.660
Got him on, and I talked to him all about, a bit like this episode, about Epochs.
00:37:40.240
Like, let's talk a little bit in detail about this person that you did in detail.
00:37:45.600
And, just have a conversation with Dank all about it.
00:37:51.600
Slight warning for any kiddies that's laden with expletives, that episode.
00:37:56.780
Because Dank, like any good Scotsman, throws out F-bombs like there's no tomorrow.
00:38:05.580
If you're an adult, and you play this in the room where there might be kids,
00:38:20.740
It didn't start off necessarily, we didn't do the first episode to have it in mind that we do a long series.
00:38:26.980
But we just talked about, we talked about the French Revolution, first of all, first and foremost.
00:38:32.040
It was going to be just a one-off episode about the French Revolution.
00:38:36.560
And then we thought, well, it just leads perfectly into Napoleon.
00:38:55.120
So we thought, well, we did a thing about the Revolution and how it ended, i.e. Napoleon firing grapeshot into Parisian crowds.
00:39:02.000
Well, let's just continue the story, the narrative, start talking about Napoleon.
00:39:09.460
Look, part one, part two, part three, part four, five, six, seven, eight.
00:39:19.780
Or a nine-part series, if you include the first one about the French Revolution.
00:39:22.740
We ended up just retroactively calling it Part Zero.
00:39:26.940
So it's an eight-nine-part series all about Napoleon.
00:39:29.600
And we do it in, as you can imagine, each one of these episodes is like, you know, an hour.
00:39:35.880
It's nearly always an hour, more like an hour and a half.
00:39:41.000
But in that ballpark, an hour, an hour and a half usually.
00:39:43.820
So there you can see, eight-nine-part series on that.
00:39:47.060
A small audiobook level of detail all about Napoleon.
00:39:51.580
If you want to hear me and Carl chatting about Napoleon for hours on end, that's there for you.
00:40:01.420
It's possibly my favourite episode in terms of how much fun I had researching and recording it.
00:40:11.440
Thomas Dowling was an employee at Lotus Eaters relatively briefly.
00:40:16.340
I can't remember how long he worked here, but it was a few months.
00:40:33.460
If you watch this Thomas Dowling, I'll check in with you.
00:40:38.020
So, an employee that was at Lotus Eaters for a while.
00:40:44.080
And at that time, again, I'd like to throw it out to anyone in the office.
00:40:48.240
Anyone want to talk about anything particular in history?
00:40:50.540
Help me make a bit of content this week, sort of thing.
00:40:52.500
Turns out, me and Thomas Dowling shared a love.
00:41:00.040
So, I thought, let's do something a bit different.
00:41:12.480
And I wanted to do something a bit different, sort of market.
00:41:20.200
So, I decided, right, I'm not going to do something like Solon or Napoleon.
00:41:35.180
A lot of people actively don't care about racing or Formula One.
00:41:39.000
There are one or two anomalies in the list, in the back catalogue of epochs.
00:41:45.060
And we talk about it from the beginning, from the earliest, from like the early racing,
00:41:49.620
pre-World War II racing, all the way through to modern times.
00:42:01.620
It's one of the later Roman emperors, Byzantine emperors.
00:42:04.880
And there's a book that survives, a short book.
00:42:06.920
It tells all about the strategies, how to beat different armies.
00:42:10.500
Again, it's sort of classic military history fair.
00:42:24.840
There's another employee, if you remember John Wheatley.
00:42:27.920
Again, he worked for Lotus Eaters relatively briefly.
00:42:47.100
we decided we could do a conversation all about the Wars of the Roses and Henry VI.
00:42:59.720
Then I decided I wanted to go on a bit of a Rome kick at that point.
00:43:08.660
I wanted to talk about the age of Julius Caesar and Augustus,
00:43:15.900
I think it might have been originally Carl suggested it,
00:43:34.760
And Carl came in and said, how about doing Pompey?
00:43:41.960
Or thinking he meant next week or some point in the future.
00:43:51.600
But I'll just spend between now and when we start recording,
00:44:12.980
So we had a slightly different take on how much we would stan for Pompey Magnus.
00:44:24.140
Again, one of the better ones, I would have thought.
00:44:32.480
The Marcus Antonius, who goes to war with Augustus and marries Cleopatra.
00:44:44.260
Again, I'm sort of working around Augustus and Caesar here, really.
00:44:49.780
I'm sort of talking about the people around them.
00:44:52.540
Marcus Agrippa, who is, you know, Augustus' right-hand man.
00:44:59.500
You know, the life of Mark Antony and Agrippa are sort of entwined a bit.
00:45:05.840
Then I started looking at doing things all about the English monarchy.
00:45:11.040
Sort of medieval, early medieval, higher medieval, English monarchy type stuff.
00:45:20.280
One of my favourite people from all of history.
00:45:36.580
And then even he was the ward of, what, Henry III.
00:45:45.920
And went from basically a nobody to regent of England.
00:45:58.040
They all decided to do the life of Alfred the Great.
00:46:05.660
Yeah, then we went on a kick of quite a few episodes of talking about just carrying on the story.
00:46:16.780
I did an episode there that's just a general overview.
00:46:19.480
Kind of a general overview of Anglo-Saxon Britain.
00:46:23.320
And then the next one is sort of drilling down a bit more into the life of Apple Stan.
00:46:35.520
And then talk about sort of the end of the Anglo...
00:46:48.760
It's not long before you've got King Harold and then Norman...
00:46:55.160
So a few episodes there about the Anglo-Saxon period.
00:46:59.280
Yeah, the other bit of episode I did with John Wheatley.
00:47:13.500
Even knowing all about their medieval history and things in detail.
00:47:17.000
And we did a parallel between English medieval history and Japanese medieval history.
00:47:22.960
And it's a very, very interesting bit of content, I thought.
00:47:30.120
In fact, that's one I might even go back and re-watch.
00:47:32.720
I don't really re-watch my own content very much.
00:47:40.660
And two, if I'm doing the post-production on it at all...
00:47:43.320
I've had to re-listen to it a number of times...
00:47:48.200
So the last thing I want to do is just listen to it again.
00:47:51.960
And I want to listen to my own voice all that much.
00:47:55.180
So I usually, very rarely, to be honest, go back and watch them myself.
00:48:02.480
Once or twice my own bit of Epoch has popped up in my YouTube feed or something.
00:48:12.180
Because I don't remember it that well other than the feeling that it was good.
00:48:20.200
When you're making a bit of content, you sort of know.
00:48:26.300
Is this going to be fun for anyone to listen to?
00:48:30.520
And I remember the impression of that was that that was good.
00:48:48.180
Then I did a mini-series all about, with Josh it would have been.
00:48:57.840
And the book A Bridge Too Far by Cornelius Ryan.
00:49:01.140
But then there's the real history of Operation Market Garden.
00:49:04.560
I.e. the Allies attempt to liberate Holland in World War II.
00:49:09.840
And get a bridgehead across the Ryan to be able to bounce into Germany and win the war.
00:49:19.600
But I'm fascinated by the book and the film and the real history.
00:49:35.740
So there's four parts all about Operation Market Garden there.
00:50:04.720
We're getting into like the, you know, closer and closer to the conquest.
00:50:17.600
And getting himself killed in Northern England.
00:50:20.820
So much more is interesting about the life and career of Harold Hardrada.
00:50:25.500
Then we did the, just the early life of William the Conqueror.
00:50:31.760
Then we did a whole one just on the Battle of Hastings.
00:50:45.320
What happens sort of fairly immediate, immediately after the Battle of Hastings.
00:50:49.060
So we're drilling down into it in fair amount of detail here.
00:50:55.040
What happened directly after the Battle of Hastings.
00:51:02.460
Because he didn't just win the Battle of Hastings.
00:51:13.840
Because he lives for like 20 years after the Battle of Hastings or more.
00:51:19.540
So here what happened towards the end of his life and all the various events.
00:51:22.500
His life was filled with events all the way to the end.
00:51:41.780
I don't think any of my Epochs content is boring.
00:51:46.540
I wouldn't make it and I certainly wouldn't put it out if I thought it was boring.
00:51:50.840
But that's one of the only episodes that I can recall where I saw any comments where people said this is dull, this is boring.
00:52:05.400
And it's one of the only episodes where I've seen that at all.
00:52:08.960
Basically never get people saying this is dull, this is boring.
00:52:39.380
I wouldn't make content if I didn't think it was interesting.
00:53:13.720
Look, it was actually published on the 11th of November.
00:53:16.780
So me and Cole did a conversation about the armistice.
00:53:20.220
And about the very, very end of World War I, like 1918.
00:53:24.840
All the events leading up to the Germans finally signing an armistice in 1918.
00:53:34.200
that it was going to go out naturally on a Sunday.
00:53:40.280
So we did a bit of content for that, basically.
00:53:48.920
What became now a long-standing and still-continuing set of series about the English monarchy.
00:53:56.520
So remember, we went all the way back to Alfred the Great.
00:53:59.220
Went all the way through people like Athelstan and Canute.
00:54:53.260
Because Chinese history isn't particularly my thing.
00:55:01.420
The way I can sort of at least mildly claim that.
00:56:06.660
This was one of my very very favourites to record.
00:56:13.420
I was in email correspondence with the quartering.
00:56:32.700
Would you come on and talk to me about history sometime.
00:56:36.500
I've noticed you've said before a few times on your.
00:57:19.580
I'm just going to make a bit of content about Doc Holliday anyway.
00:57:24.320
So it's really me telling Carl the story from scratch.
00:57:38.440
Then I decided I'd go back to sort of English heroes.
00:57:45.320
If you're a fan of England and English history.
00:57:50.100
If you haven't got a chip on your shoulder about it.
00:57:59.820
It was interrupted with something about Calvin Robinson.
00:58:03.760
There's two episodes about the Battle of Kursk there.
00:58:27.940
Where I got any sort of significant kickback from fans.
00:58:44.580
And my knowledge just wasn't really up to snuff.
00:59:18.500
Because that's what the story is really all about.
01:04:48.120
I can't remember if me or Carl decided to do it.
01:06:15.100
Where we both just know a fair bit about Gobekli Tepe.
01:07:30.160
I've been talking to Carl about this ever since day one.
01:07:35.100
I wanted to do an episode about Sargon of Akkad.
01:07:55.040
He wouldn't have chosen that name if he didn't.
01:08:27.340
We've been talking about this since day one as well.
01:08:50.440
But Carl wanted to carry on talking about after Sargon.
01:09:00.420
If you want to call yourself an ancient history nerd.
01:09:26.160
Oh this one was purely on the Wall Street crash.
01:09:28.520
Looking at the Wall Street crash in real detail.
01:09:59.980
And I think only one I've ever done with Harry.
01:12:20.980
There was one person who had been asking for day one.
01:12:29.600
When Britain and Holland went to war with each other.
01:13:12.200
I made more content with him about literature stuff.
01:13:15.300
Made one about the film Labyrinth with David Bowie.
01:17:56.800
And I tried to drill into it in loads of detail.
01:18:34.760
Again if your thing is medieval English history.
01:18:52.060
Sometimes Carl wouldn't want to do it every single week.
01:20:19.920
Then continued the narrative going forward from there.
01:20:32.240
Really need to know about the War of the Spanish Succession.
01:20:39.400
If you're interested in political history or English history at all.
01:20:51.080
Arguably one of the greatest statesmen Britain ever had.
01:21:02.000
Then we decided for whatever reason to go back and talk about Rome.
01:22:19.140
You've got to come on to Lotus Eaters at some point.
01:23:18.260
You've got to know a bit about Frederick the Great.
01:24:14.780
It's not as big as everything that happened in.
01:26:59.280
He knows the people that are in the red arrows.
01:28:40.500
It's what I did for History Bro before I even worked here.
01:28:47.500
This was one of the only ones where I got a tiny bit of pushback as well.
01:28:50.180
I've mispronounced a couple of things quite embarrassingly.
01:29:03.880
Very, very, very mildly embarrassed about in that one.
01:29:23.240
But me and Carl decided we were going to finally.
01:29:33.220
We decided finally we was going to do Arthur Wellersley.
01:29:45.240
Where I've really had sort of butterflies in my stomach.
01:29:57.420
I'm perfectly comfortable and happy with all my research.
01:30:36.380
I think only two or three times ever have I had that.
01:31:23.300
It's like talking to someone you really really look up to.
01:31:31.560
How many episodes was on the Duke of Wellington?
01:31:40.560
And the later years when he was Prime Minister.
01:31:48.400
Got the extreme privilege of chatting to one Mr. Godfrey Bloom.
01:32:09.920
Just sit there and chat to you for hours and hours and hours and hours.
01:37:49.280
Because I'd been doing it for a fair few months.
01:38:02.500
Because we're knocking the third year into it now.
01:41:22.600
And talking about it in even more detail than he did.
01:41:34.400
I decided to continue the story of sort of the Italian Renaissance.
01:42:07.500
I would like to think that even if you don't particularly care about the Italian.
01:42:17.060
Even if you don't particularly care about that period.
01:45:43.320
Says anything you particularly want to talk about.
01:46:11.960
Crassus is involved and lived at the time of the Catiline conspiracy.
01:47:01.680
I've even more interesting than Crassus I would say.
01:47:15.640
Lucky enough to speak to Mr. Godfrey Bloom again.
01:47:26.620
I think you'll find that very very interesting conversation.
01:48:23.460
I'd have to do a long form bit of conversation with him.
01:52:52.700
The only other time I've ever returned to something.
01:54:02.040
Ever since I've ever had conversations with Luca.
01:54:47.680
Was it my first conversation I had with Alex Masters?
01:54:58.740
That can't be the first time I spoke to Alex Masters.
01:59:20.660
A little bit of a back story on this Verdun thing.
02:01:09.840
That whole process didn't really work very well.
02:02:38.200
Finished putting off the Verdun thing for a while.
02:02:41.240
I think the only time I've ever really done that.
02:06:08.460
It would have been a few episodes worth of Epochs.
02:06:22.560
And then someone did a sweep to clear up some folders and rename stuff.
02:06:30.880
Because even though we've got massive amounts of space.
02:06:50.460
And when it came to time to edit it and make it into a proper thing.
02:07:08.120
But remember when you were on the other side of the world.
02:07:10.500
And you spent nearly a whole day talking to me.
02:15:34.500
I'll try and do something a little bit special.
02:15:49.480
So I'll do something a little bit different there.