This Past Weekend with Theo Von - #589 - Roman Empire Expert Mike Duncan

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00:00:55.240 Today's guest is a historian, an author, and a podcaster.

00:01:00.460 He created the very popular History of Rome podcast, which spanned more than 175 episodes

00:01:07.720 over five years.

00:01:09.320 I'm really grateful for this walk through history, learning about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire with today's guest, Mr. Mike Duncan.

00:01:19.860 Shine on me.

00:01:24.140 And I will find a song.

00:01:27.540 I've been singing.

00:01:28.520 I love you.

00:01:29.080 I love you.

00:01:29.140 I love you.

00:01:29.680 I love you.

00:01:30.320 Mike Duncan.

00:01:39.800 I'm here.

00:01:40.580 That's you.

00:01:41.240 Yeah.

00:01:41.720 Thank you for having me.

00:01:42.900 Thank you for joining me, man.

00:01:44.020 I appreciate it.

00:01:44.740 You have a famous series called The History of Rome that is on YouTube.

00:01:49.260 Yeah.

00:01:49.920 Yeah.

00:01:50.200 And available where all fine podcasts are found.

00:01:53.600 You can get it on Spotify.

00:01:54.820 You can get it on Apple.

00:01:55.940 You can get it anywhere.

00:01:57.080 How extensive is it?

00:01:58.920 It took me five years to write, and it is 189 episodes long, and it will take you through the complete history of the Empire, at least through the fall of the West.

00:02:10.720 It starts with Aeneas' arrival in Italy, which is sort of a precursor to the founding of Rome, the legendary founding of Rome, and then takes you through 1,000 years' worth of history all through to the end of the 400s when the Western Empire collapses.

00:02:23.220 It's one of the few things on YouTube right here that people will go back, like, at certain points in their lives, like, or years later and be like, okay, I'm starting again.

00:02:32.900 Yes.

00:02:33.260 You know?

00:02:33.540 There's a lot of re-listenability in the history of Rome, and I've definitely heard that from people that are, you know, I've listened to this 10, 15 times, and I'm like, I listened to it, like, twice, you know, because I, like, record an episode, and then I listened to the episode, and then one time I kind of went back through it to, like, remember what I had written.

00:02:50.040 But, yeah, people who get into it and like it, they really love it, and they go back to it, and, you know, it reminds them of the time in their life when they listened to it for the first time.

00:03:00.160 So it enters, like, this sort of, like, emotional connection beyond just, like, what they're learning about Roman history.

00:03:06.440 Well, yeah, I think that's something that certainly happened recently.

00:03:09.140 There was, like, a lot of social media.

00:03:10.940 There was this buzz that happened a few months ago.

00:03:12.980 It was, like, women asking men how often they think about the Roman Empire.

00:03:16.800 Yeah, yeah.

00:03:18.420 And right when I saw that, I was like, oh, my God, I think about the Roman Empire all the time.

00:03:24.760 Right.

00:03:25.160 Where do you think the Roman Empire can, why does, why was that so popular, that meme?

00:03:30.920 I mean, when people would ask me that, they're like, do you think about the Roman Empire every day?

00:03:34.520 I'm like, yeah, I've thought about the Roman Empire every day for, like, 25 years.

00:03:37.220 I'm writing a book about the Roman Empire as we speak.

00:03:40.040 Like, I'll probably think about Rome once a day for the rest of my life.

00:03:43.840 But I'm on, like, a very extreme edge of all this, and I am a sicko for Roman history.

00:03:49.500 Like, other people can be more casual about it, but I'm a sicko for this stuff. 0.92

00:03:53.380 You're like the Marilyn Manson of Rome. 0.67

00:03:55.020 Yeah, I am.

00:03:56.060 I'm really, really into it.

00:03:57.780 But I think, you know, Rome is always going to have, like, a hold on our collective consciousness

00:04:04.580 because we're living in a post-Roman society.

00:04:07.240 Most of the, you know, cultures, nations, countries, whatever that we think of sort of in the West

00:04:14.220 have roots in Roman history or at least have a phase in their own history where this is, like, the Roman period.

00:04:21.040 Because the Romans, you know, eventually expanded to control the entire Mediterranean basin,

00:04:26.440 like, all of North Africa, like, all of, you know, what we now consider the Middle East,

00:04:30.240 and then they're up into, like, France and Britain.

00:04:32.340 And this is a single unified state that has never been repeated in history.

00:04:37.260 Like, you look at a map of, you know, Europe and the Mediterranean today, you know, it's 30, 35 different countries.

00:04:42.780 And once upon a time, this entire thing was the Roman Empire.

00:04:46.580 And so their culture, their modes of doing thing, their laws, their language, right?

00:04:54.060 I mean, French, Spanish, Italian, these are all, like, post-Roman languages.

00:04:57.760 These are all Romance languages.

00:04:59.420 And so I think that because there is this, like, point at which they were just everything for, like, a –

00:05:07.400 I mean, not for a thousand – they didn't run the Mediterranean for a thousand years.

00:05:10.300 But that they were just this thing that we all come from, I think it's going to be very difficult to ever, like, purge the Roman Empire from the collective consciousness.

00:05:19.520 And I really don't think we should do that.

00:05:21.180 Even hearing you say that, I didn't realize that Romance comes from Rome.

00:05:26.340 Yeah, it's – yeah, it's all linked to it.

00:05:28.660 And –

00:05:28.840 But even just that word, right?

00:05:30.180 I never thought about that.

00:05:31.120 It was like – or does it come from –

00:05:32.240 Oh, man, I don't – yeah, I don't know about that.

00:05:34.580 I actually don't know about the etymology of Romance versus, like, the city of Rome.

00:05:39.140 The word Romance originates from the Latin word romanticus, meaning –

00:05:43.140 Of a Roman style.

00:05:43.900 Or in the Roman style.

00:05:45.640 It's just so funny because we all kind of romanticize it that it's that present, right?

00:05:49.780 That it's that present.

00:05:51.020 We don't even notice when it's in a term that we use to describe how we feel about it.

00:05:55.320 Yeah, it's everywhere.

00:05:56.600 It's in tons of invisible ways.

00:05:58.840 How long was the Roman rule, like, just in years, just a blanket – like, including, like, the Republic, the Roman Empire?

00:06:07.960 So, okay, there's many different ways we can answer that question.

00:06:10.860 Okay.

00:06:11.080 So, like, in terms of, like, the legendary origins of the city, it's founded in 753 BC.

00:06:17.300 This is when Romulus kills Remus and they found this city in the, you know, the legendary seven hills.

00:06:24.700 And it goes in the west through 476 AD.

00:06:28.020 So, that right there is, you know, 750 plus another 500.

00:06:33.400 So, we're, like, at 1,200, 1,300 years.

00:06:35.400 Pretty close.

00:06:35.680 And then we only here talk about sort of the Western Empire.

00:06:40.280 That's sort of what it captured the European imagination because they're in a post-Western society.

00:06:44.920 But the Eastern Empire just transformed seamlessly into what we now call the Byzantine Empire.

00:06:49.900 And that lasted for another 1,000 years after that.

00:06:52.040 So, if you say that there is a continuum between Romulus founding Rome in 753 and the final fall of Byzantium in the 1400s, you know, now we are over 2,000 years.

00:07:05.780 You hear the fable about Romulus and Remus, right?

00:07:09.460 Can you tell me that fable of how Rome was founded?

00:07:11.680 This is, like, kind of a mythological fable.

00:07:13.940 Do you know what I'm talking about?

00:07:14.580 Oh, yeah, for sure.

00:07:15.640 And it is one of those, like, these are archetypical mythos, right?

00:07:21.740 And what it is is we have a couple of babies who were put into, like, a little, like, manger thing and sent down a river.

00:07:29.540 They had to be purged because there was a king who was afraid of them.

00:07:32.800 These are very standard stories.

00:07:34.560 I mean, these are biblical stories in the same way.

00:07:36.760 And they allegedly, you know, wash up into some reeds and then a wolf comes along and they suckle.

00:07:43.280 Yes, there it is.

00:07:43.960 They suckle at the teat of the wolf.

00:07:46.280 And then they grow up big and strong and they wind up, you know, they do overthrow the king who was afraid of them and found their own city.

00:07:53.620 And I was actually just talking about this with some friends the other day because there's a great bit in Livy who's one of the great, you know, Latin historians who was writing.

00:08:02.300 L-I-V-V-Y? 0.82

00:08:03.220 L-I-V-Y. 0.98

00:08:04.900 L-I-V-Y. 0.98

00:08:05.600 Yeah, and he was around during, like, the age of Augustus.

00:08:10.080 So he's writing about stuff, like, this is 750 years later.

00:08:13.700 Like, he's talking about this.

00:08:15.680 And he's like, well, you know, it doesn't really seem plausible that it was a wolf.

00:08:20.160 So I'm thinking that maybe it was, like, a corruption of language and that there was, like, a local prostitute whose name was wolf and she was the one who got it.

00:08:29.260 So it's really funny, like, watching him sort of wrestle with the mythos of Rome, like, even trying to make this, like, a true story.

00:08:36.580 At that time.

00:08:37.160 At that, even at that time.

00:08:38.540 And because he's 750 years beyond all that.

00:08:41.520 Like, we go back 750 years from now.

00:08:43.620 Like, we're, you know, we're like in Robin Hood days.

00:08:45.700 That's how far away Livy was from the origin of his own city.

00:08:49.140 So the myth isn't true.

00:08:51.980 But how did it actually begin?

00:08:53.860 In my opinion, right, and I think in the opinion of, like, if I was going to offer, like, sort of the most generalized and acceptable explanation for this, it's basically that at the Tiber River, which Rome is adjacent to and sort of runs through Rome, there was a bend in it.

00:09:12.040 So there was an easy place to cross the river, to ford the river.

00:09:15.680 And right next to that is a couple of prominent hills.

00:09:18.580 And if you're a very, very early society and you're looking for a place to build a settlement, you know, it's very nice to have some hills around because you can build a little fortification on top of it.

00:09:27.340 And if anybody comes around to mess with you, you have a really nice defensible position.

00:09:32.600 So it really seems like there were just some early people who, you know, come across these hills, who recognize that there's this nice ford in the river.

00:09:41.580 And now they're sort of on the trade routes that are running, like, up from southern Italy into Etroria and then, you know, deeper into the European interior and stuff that's coming down from the interior and out through southern Italy.

00:09:53.480 So location, location, location.

00:09:54.920 Location.

00:09:55.340 And then, you know, the soil around Rome and in that whole, you know, swath of Italy is very fertile.

00:10:02.600 So, you know, they plop themselves down.

00:10:04.900 They've got some good farms going.

00:10:06.560 They've got trade routes coming through.

00:10:07.760 They have a defensible position.

00:10:09.020 And, you know, they've actually done archaeological excavations, you know, especially around the Capitoline Hill and the Palatine Hill, which is where all of this stuff got going.

00:10:17.840 And, you know, the earliest things that they find are not too far off of, like, this, you know, alleged 753.

00:10:25.220 And these are some of the early findings there on Palatine Hill excavation?

00:10:29.260 Wow.

00:10:30.040 Yeah, and there's just layers and layers and layers because, you know, they built on top of what had come before them.

00:10:36.160 And so do you think we've found a lot of the stuff that's there?

00:10:38.700 Or do you think there's still a lot to be found?

00:10:40.520 There's always more to be found.

00:10:42.660 And actually, an interesting thing about just sort of archaeological theory is that some of these places that you go to, they know that there is stuff that is buried, that they are intentionally not excavating.

00:10:55.840 Because what we have right now, the tools that we have right now for archaeology, it's inherently destructive.

00:11:01.180 Like, you're going to wind up destroying things in order to get at what you're looking for.

00:11:05.720 Destroying things in the ground.

00:11:06.940 Yeah, destroying things in the ground.

00:11:09.440 And so there are definitely places where it's like, we know that there's stuff there.

00:11:12.960 We're not going to touch it because, who knows, maybe in 20 years or 30 years or 50 years, we'll have better technology.

00:11:17.700 And we can analyze this stuff and dig into, like, maybe literally dig into this stuff without damaging as much as we know that we would damage it today.

00:11:26.500 That's pretty amazing forethought, you know.

00:11:28.400 So when you look, so going back just to that fable of Remus and Romulus, right?

00:11:33.820 And Romulus, Rome, that was how the name comes through, through the fable.

00:11:38.740 Like, how big was myth and fable at the time when Rome began?

00:11:43.080 Very big.

00:11:44.040 I mean, this is, you know, early human societies have all had myths and legends about their own origins.

00:11:51.520 Like, this is one of, like, the most basic things that you will find in, like, every society, you know, indigenous tribes in North America, indigenous tribes in Siberia, you know, the Romans.

00:12:01.480 Native Americans.

00:12:01.920 Native Americans.

00:12:02.800 We have our own origin myths here in the United States of America right now.

00:12:07.160 We've got, you know, George Washington, like, never telling a lie.

00:12:10.420 Like, these are myths that we, you know, tell ourselves.

00:12:13.200 Christopher Columbus in Thanksgiving, whether there's truth to it or not, but it's still, these are myths that we tell ourselves.

00:12:16.920 Yeah, and so this is a very common thing to just all human societies.

00:12:20.920 And so, yeah, them telling this story.

00:12:23.240 And it helps you, you know, and it becomes less about telling an accurate story of where we came from as opposed to telling a story about what kind of society we want to be right now.

00:12:35.720 What are our values?

00:12:37.220 What are our morals?

00:12:38.380 What is it that we take seriously?

00:12:40.160 What is it that we think you should do or not do?

00:12:42.340 And a lot of early Roman history, like most of the stuff that we read today to try to glean factual information from Livy, from Polybius, from Plutarch, whatever, those guys were using the past to tell moral stories for their own contemporaneous audience to get certain things across to people.

00:13:00.680 Like, Marius had an issue with ambition.

00:13:03.360 Let's explore that.

00:13:04.580 Let's talk about that.

00:13:05.660 And that was really for them the purpose of history was to tell these moral stories.

00:13:10.940 And that's, you know, that's a very common thing in all societies.

00:13:15.140 And it was certainly true for the Romans in a really big way. 0.99

00:13:17.100 Dude, having an issue with ambition, what an interesting thing.

00:13:21.000 Ambition's a dangerous thing, man.

00:13:23.020 Like, for, you know, we can't do anything without ambition.

00:13:26.720 Like, nobody can do anything without ambition.

00:13:28.340 I would not have done what I did without ambition.

00:13:30.560 You would not be sitting here without a little bit of ambition to go.

00:13:33.560 For sure.

00:13:33.860 For sure.

00:13:34.260 You want to go think about it.

00:13:35.280 Yeah, you want to go do stuff.

00:13:36.500 But it's like it's anything.

00:13:38.100 It's everything in moderation.

00:13:39.300 If you indulge too much in ambition, now you're willing to do anything and break anybody, do, you know, whatever it takes to get ahead.

00:13:47.780 And now you're into hubris, and now the gods are going to punish you.

00:13:50.460 And nobody wants to be in the land of hubris where the gods are like, we have to show this person who's actually in charge.

00:13:59.200 And it's not him.

00:14:00.560 It's the gods.

00:14:01.720 Yeah, it's fascinating, man.

00:14:02.940 Where did we get all of the information we have on Rome?

00:14:06.780 There's many different places.

00:14:08.300 Okay.

00:14:08.360 I think we could start by talking about what are called the literary sources, which is collections of either Latin histories or Greek histories that were written at the time.

00:14:19.900 And again, like when I say at the time, and I'll just keep going back to Livy.

00:14:24.120 Livy was writing at the time, but he's telling us about events from 200 years earlier, 400 years earlier, 600 years earlier.

00:14:30.140 So it's not really a contemporary history, but, you know, he's a huge source of information.

00:14:35.940 Sorry to interrupt you, but why weren't there histories at the time?

00:14:38.940 Some of them were.

00:14:40.140 And the ones that we like a lot are the ones that are written very close to events.

00:14:44.920 Like there's a guy called Solace who wrote a couple of histories where he is writing about events very near to his own lifetime, where he is able to talk to people who were there at the time.

00:14:55.360 And he himself was a political actor.

00:14:57.100 He was in Caesar's faction during the wars.

00:14:59.340 And so some of what he's writing about happened at the time.

00:15:02.820 Polybius definitely gets into stuff that happened in his own lifetime.

00:15:06.280 And then sort of off of Rome, you know, there's a great history of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, who's one of the main sort of architects of what we think of as history.

00:15:14.960 And he was definitely like, you can't write about history if you can't talk to people who were there.

00:15:19.180 Like that was his theory.

00:15:20.080 So there is sort of two branches of the literary sources.

00:15:24.680 Most of the literary sources that existed have been lost.

00:15:27.720 We are dealing with a microscopic fraction of what actually existed at the time.

00:15:32.740 And the thing that is very frustrating is like we know that there were these great histories that were written that are referenced by other historians.

00:15:40.320 And you're like, God, if we could just get a hold of that.

00:15:43.000 Oh, my God.

00:15:43.840 I mean, the great white whale is the emperor Claudius wrote.

00:15:49.360 And he comes from the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

00:15:51.660 And he wrote a history of the civil wars that put the Julio-Claudian dynasty in power.

00:15:57.200 Wow.

00:15:57.500 That was allegedly subsequently destroyed.

00:16:01.260 For what reason?

00:16:02.740 Because it was too honest.

00:16:04.560 And it was too truthful.

00:16:06.020 And so like, oh, man, Claudius's history of how the Julio-Claudians got into power, like I would love to have a piece of that.

00:16:13.560 But so we only have like a microscopic amount.

00:16:16.480 And this stuff is like, you know, how did it get to us?

00:16:19.040 It's like it's stuff that winds up in like monasteries.

00:16:22.280 You know, like monks are copying this stuff down and forwarding it along.

00:16:26.600 Things are just like found randomly in libraries.

00:16:30.320 So those are the literary sources.

00:16:31.600 And then we supplement that with a lot of archaeology and like analysis of material culture because there are limits to what the literary sources can tell us.

00:16:41.700 And this is how we know more about how they lived like on a daily basis, you know, because we've got pottery, we've got, you know, different – how did their furnaces run?

00:16:51.720 Like how did their ovens run?

00:16:52.840 Like all of this stuff is coming from archaeology.

00:16:57.080 In Roman history in particular, we also do a lot of study of coins because they were constantly pumping out coins.

00:17:03.860 And coins were a means of sort of universalizing – you could call it propaganda, but like messages that the emperor or the state wanted to put out there.

00:17:14.300 And –

00:17:14.560 Like that was a big thing.

00:17:15.280 If you started to get some control, you'd have a coin almost.

00:17:17.700 It was –

00:17:18.220 The thing – like you could almost say that like what did it mean to be the Roman emperor?

00:17:23.280 And there are lots of different sort of things that that means.

00:17:26.780 The main thing it means is that your face is on the money and your face goes on the money.

00:17:32.020 And when we talk about like people rising up and trying to usurp like rival emperors, like there's always this point where they start minting their own coins with their own face on it.

00:17:41.320 And that's – okay, now we've got a viable dude here because he's got control of a mint.

00:17:46.260 Right.

00:17:46.440 Instead of show me the money, it's like show the money me.

00:17:48.480 Show the money to the people.

00:17:50.100 And it's always stuff like I love the army.

00:17:53.520 And then they bump out all these coins and then the army is like, oh, he loves us.

00:17:58.060 Maybe we should support him.

00:17:59.040 Oh, they would put little slogans on them?

00:18:00.320 Yeah, yeah.

00:18:00.900 Yeah, and they had all this like shorthand for like what different symbols meant and they would recognize these things.

00:18:06.660 Like Romans would recognize these things at the time where these days you've got to be an expert to really like decode what's going on on these coins.

00:18:13.860 But they had slang at the time almost.

00:18:16.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:18:16.100 Or like almost emoji – not emojis, but –

00:18:18.080 I mean emojis isn't far gone.

00:18:19.540 I mean it's iconography and emojis are just iconography.

00:18:23.240 And there's also changes in like sort of how the faces are depicted depending on what era of Roman history we're into.

00:18:31.200 And so people can spend their entire lives just studying like Roman coinage.

00:18:35.420 But those are roughly like the three main pillars of then how we know things about the Roman Empire.

00:18:42.820 So did people at the time keep diaries?

00:18:45.520 Did they think about like writing about their own lives at the time like we do, like recording ourselves as much or that wasn't –

00:18:52.820 I think for most people, they're illiterate.

00:18:56.520 That's – I mean mass illiteracy is definitely a thing.

00:19:00.380 So when we are talking about like what was it like for the Romans like on a daily basis, I think the first thing to say is, well, it depends on what era because we're talking about thousands of years here and it does change over time.

00:19:13.620 But in the main, the ancient world was largely rural and agrarian.

00:19:19.940 Most people were doing farming.

00:19:21.960 Most people were doing either subsistence farming or maybe they've got a surplus that they can sell into the market.

00:19:28.180 And so you are living and working on farms in those little communities.

00:19:31.300 And it's kind of the same way that we think about rural agrarian communities at any time and place.

00:19:37.660 You're kind of circumscribed.

00:19:39.160 You're probably not going within 50 miles of where you grew up.

00:19:44.240 You're living and dying.

00:19:45.200 Going further than you mean.

00:19:46.100 Yeah, yeah.

00:19:46.640 Excuse me.

00:19:47.320 For sure.

00:19:47.780 Very similar still to a lot of places today.

00:19:49.700 It's very similar.

00:19:50.660 These are very human things.

00:19:52.620 Like people don't go far from home.

00:19:55.120 And so that's their life is they are living a life of rural agrarian work, which is either nice or not depending on if you like the work.

00:20:07.300 If, you know, when it's going good, it's going good.

00:20:10.000 If there's a drought and there's – and, you know, then famine is sweeping through and that's not so good.

00:20:14.700 And then – but we also do have at this point the rise of like major urban centers.

00:20:21.160 So there is a major urban society that is happening inside Rome.

00:20:25.180 When you say a major urban society, like what does that mean?

00:20:27.680 I'm talking metropolises.

00:20:29.740 Okay.

00:20:30.420 Cities in the way we think about cities.

00:20:32.540 Okay.

00:20:32.760 And Rome, for example, was the first city in history to go over a million people.

00:20:37.840 That's how big it was at its height.

00:20:39.880 You know, there's a million people there.

00:20:41.660 Let's, you know –

00:20:42.640 That's as big as Tucson.

00:20:43.480 I think how many people are in Tucson, Arizona?

00:20:46.620 I bet that's about the same.

00:20:48.720 Oh, Tucson only has 542,000.

00:20:52.100 Try Milwaukee.

00:20:53.580 Milwaukee is probably like 500,000.

00:20:55.340 Yeah, I bet it's close to you.

00:20:56.240 Look at that.

00:20:57.180 So the size of Milwaukee and Tucson combined.

00:20:59.480 Yeah, yeah.

00:21:00.180 Just to give you an idea.

00:21:00.620 Double the size of Milwaukee.

00:21:01.880 I love Milwaukee.

00:21:02.820 I do too.

00:21:03.800 Yeah, Milwaukee is a great little city.

00:21:05.200 Dude, Milwaukee is – we've been touring for like years, but one of my – one of the

00:21:10.780 places I found that surprised me the most was Milwaukee.

00:21:13.340 It's got like really cool old architecture.

00:21:15.440 It's right there on this bay and it has like this whole like –

00:21:18.400 Yeah, I'm about like, I don't know, 90 minutes west of Milwaukee and so I'll get over

00:21:22.500 there a couple times a year.

00:21:23.540 Wisconsin.

00:21:23.780 Usually for a Brewers game and then I'll like stick around.

00:21:27.520 Wisconsin's amazing, man.

00:21:28.680 La Crosse was one of the other favorite places that I've found.

00:21:31.300 La Crosse.

00:21:31.780 Yeah.

00:21:32.040 All right.

00:21:33.520 That's a deep cut.

00:21:34.620 Just a perfect –

00:21:35.860 Right.

00:21:36.340 Yeah.

00:21:36.660 It's a B side.

00:21:37.560 I've been through La Crosse.

00:21:38.640 Yeah.

00:21:39.000 But anyway, but getting back to it.

00:21:40.400 So Rome actually is like a huge city and there are other cities that are over 100,000 people.

00:21:47.840 This is big for the ancient world.

00:21:50.080 And inside of those cities, you do have sort of – this is when you have a different life

00:21:56.560 depending on what era of Roman history you're actually talking about, whether you're there

00:22:00.740 as a wage worker, whether you're an artisan, whether you're one of the elite and whether

00:22:06.320 you're involved in the law.

00:22:07.320 Like there's this whole like stratification of like professions that you can have.

00:22:12.800 And then we get into later sort of like the bread and circuses aspect of Roman civilization

00:22:17.860 where the empire itself became so rich and so powerful and all – like the wealth of

00:22:22.700 the entire Mediterranean world is like flowing into this city.

00:22:26.080 And this is what's causing people to like move there and come into Rome.

00:22:30.020 And then we do need to feed these people and so you start getting like grain doles and

00:22:35.840 then circuses and games were always a huge, huge part of Roman society.

00:22:41.380 And so they would throw these spectacles for people.

00:22:43.340 And there is a book about daily life in ancient Rome that at the height of the empire, a lot

00:22:48.560 of what you were doing is kind of like bouncing around from patron to patron, picking up a few

00:22:52.460 coins from this guy, picking up a few coins from that guy, getting through your day and

00:22:56.060 then getting up the next morning and doing it all over again and you didn't really

00:22:59.200 have a profession, you were able to just kind of like bum around.

00:23:03.200 Figure out your hustle a little bit.

00:23:04.460 Mm-hmm.

00:23:05.220 And what was the religion at the time?

00:23:07.480 Like did things start to change from mythology into actual religion during Rome?

00:23:12.700 I think those two things are very linked.

00:23:15.460 The Romans are very religious people.

00:23:19.100 They were very into ritual and sacrifice and they took it really, really seriously.

00:23:25.060 And when we look at the myths that they told about themselves, the first king of Rome is

00:23:34.040 Romulus.

00:23:34.900 And what was Romulus?

00:23:35.860 Romulus was a warrior above all.

00:23:38.020 And this is actually like what the Romans are above all.

00:23:40.540 They are the children of Mars.

00:23:42.040 They do war. 0.66

00:23:43.220 They're really good at it.

00:23:44.600 That's why they conquer the entire Mediterranean world.

00:23:47.860 They're better at it than just about anybody else.

00:23:49.660 So it's a very masculine society?

00:23:51.320 Oh, yeah.

00:23:51.980 I mean, it's the patriarchy like to the max.

00:23:56.240 And they were very martial society and they're sort of-

00:23:59.580 Martial society? 0.99

00:23:59.900 Martial society. 0.91

00:24:01.020 And like their political institutions are mirroring their military institutions.

00:24:06.280 And the consul and their leaders are simultaneously, you know, they're the political leader, but

00:24:11.260 also the leader of the armed forces.

00:24:13.700 This is actually what their job is.

00:24:15.260 Wow.

00:24:15.820 The other role of the consul, however-

00:24:18.540 The consul.

00:24:19.020 The consul, right, which is, you know, one of the key leaders in the Republican era is

00:24:23.380 overseeing these critical sacrifices and critical rituals that the Romans felt that

00:24:28.460 they had to perform and needed to do in order to stay on the right side of the gods.

00:24:33.380 And that was the job of the political leadership was to defend the city using the armies and

00:24:38.820 to make sure that the gods were happy by making the proper sacrifices.

00:24:42.680 And so the second king of Rome, this guy called Numa, he was all about religion. 0.86

00:24:47.820 And so when they tell the story, they're like, the first guy is war.

00:24:50.760 And then the second guy comes in and he's like, we need religion to like guide this in

00:24:55.540 like an ethical way.

00:24:56.640 And like to make sure that we're not just like insane barbarians, that we actually like

00:25:00.760 have an ethical and moral structure to our society.

00:25:03.620 And those are the two things.

00:25:04.920 And then the next, there's legendarily like seven kings of Rome, like there's seven hills,

00:25:08.820 there's seven kings of Rome.

00:25:09.720 Like, you know, seven's a lucky number.

00:25:11.140 It kind of always has been.

00:25:12.000 And so when you, when we talk about the seven kings of Rome, there's like, it goes like

00:25:15.640 warrior, religious guy, warrior, religious guy, warrior, you know, religious guy in

00:25:20.340 because those two things go hand in hand.

00:25:23.000 Like one side, the other, one side, the other.

00:25:24.740 So even that's even still today in our society, it kind of seems like it's like there's two

00:25:27.960 parties sort of, and it's one, it's one side, the other, one way, the other.

00:25:31.060 Yeah.

00:25:31.340 And, and then, and what those sides and what they are change and their values change over

00:25:34.800 time.

00:25:35.120 Yeah.

00:25:35.480 And, and when we talk about them being a religious people, you know, this is, this is a sort

00:25:41.980 of pagan polytheistic religion.

00:25:44.640 And there, so there were different gods, right?

00:25:46.960 And we, and we know these gods, a lot of them were borrowed from, from the Greeks.

00:25:50.100 So it's, you know, it's Jupiter is, is Zeus and there's, you know, Minerva and there's,

00:25:55.040 you know, Bacchus and, and all of these, you know, different gods that are out there.

00:25:58.820 So they didn't have religion in the sense of like, there was one thing that everybody

00:26:04.260 did and was a part of, and, and everybody went to church on Sundays.

00:26:08.000 There were just, there were different temples in different places.

00:26:10.720 And like one city, their patron would be Apollo.

00:26:12.780 Another city, their patron would be Diana.

00:26:15.420 Right.

00:26:15.800 And so it would, it would change from time to place.

00:26:18.120 And so they had this very open-mindedness towards religion and how you practiced religion.

00:26:25.660 When they, when they would come across a new society and by come across, I mean conquer,

00:26:30.320 they would often incorporate those religions or they would, or they would make sort of

00:26:35.060 what they were doing, their religious sacrifices, their gods.

00:26:37.500 And they would be like, oh, this is analogous to our thing over here.

00:26:40.400 It's probably two aspects of the same God that we're talking about.

00:26:43.420 And it would all just be integrated into one thing.

00:26:46.440 And how were they able to master that control, but just because their army was so powerful?

00:26:51.080 At its base, the legions do a lot to keep people in line.

00:26:56.580 Um, so the political leaders were often also the leaders on the battlefield.

00:27:01.420 They were.

00:27:02.100 Wow.

00:27:02.660 They were.

00:27:03.160 That's what, that's literally what they were there to do.

00:27:05.880 Wow.

00:27:06.360 Yeah.

00:27:06.540 So that's as if James Carville would actually would also then have a military, he would

00:27:12.680 have to be a politician or, uh, Fetterman, you know, the laid back, uh, warriors.

00:27:18.360 Um, but anybody or the casual dressed down Friday warriors, you know, which I think would

00:27:23.600 be, I'm sure they would love it.

00:27:25.160 Great.

00:27:25.300 I'm sure they would love it.

00:27:26.620 But those people also, if I love the fact that if they made rules for people, they also

00:27:31.440 would have to get out on the battlefield and at some way they have to put their money where

00:27:36.020 they're, they have to put their blood where their mouth is. 0.99

00:27:37.920 A hundred percent.

00:27:38.560 And it actually goes deeper than that.

00:27:40.340 So yeah, if, if you're running, if you're running for console and you want to be console,

00:27:43.740 the thing that you want for yourself and expect for yourself is to be the leader of the

00:27:47.540 legion and then go out and defeat something or someone, uh, on behalf of Rome and then come

00:27:52.620 back and have a triumph.

00:27:53.820 And the triumph is you getting to parade through Rome and show off the spoils of your conflict.

00:27:58.540 And, um, sometimes there were actual wars to fight.

00:28:02.580 And sometimes there's, there's this very funny thing that's called triumph hunting, which

00:28:06.280 is when a console becomes, comes into power and he's like, there's nobody to fight.

00:28:09.860 And so he'll just pick some random tribe and attack them and be like, oh, I defeated such 0.83

00:28:14.380 and such a people so he can have his triumph.

00:28:16.640 Um, which we still do today in different ways.

00:28:18.800 Yeah.

00:28:20.080 But create enemies.

00:28:21.340 I mean, yeah, yeah.

00:28:22.220 We, we do invent enemies and then go fight them.

00:28:24.180 Don't we?

00:28:24.480 Um, but, but there is, but there is a thing like in, in early Roman society, um, really

00:28:31.380 through almost to the end of the Republic, there was a property qualification to serve

00:28:36.200 in the legions because you had to have enough money.

00:28:39.980 You had to have enough land to participate in the legions.

00:28:43.680 Their assumption, their, their sort of cultural assumption was that the people who constitute

00:28:48.400 this society that we are in are fundamentally like the, the landowners.

00:28:52.700 And if, so if you own a plot of land, then you're a part of the society.

00:28:56.280 You're the people who go and fight for this society and defend this society.

00:29:00.720 If you are, uh, you know, if you're in poverty, if you don't have land, you don't qualify for

00:29:05.460 service in the legion because in their mind, you're not actually really truly a part of this

00:29:09.980 thing that we are trying to defend.

00:29:11.580 Right.

00:29:11.660 So how can you put that you're, you're all into it?

00:29:13.920 If you don't have something, you don't have a vested interest almost.

00:29:16.780 Yeah.

00:29:17.020 And, and then the leaders, and then, and then, yeah, the higher you go, the more you are out

00:29:21.220 there now, granted, like they're in the command tent.

00:29:24.240 Uh, you know, they're, you're not like on a horse, like literally leading the charge,

00:29:28.380 but you were expected to be out there and an active military leader and everybody who

00:29:34.880 had a stake in that society.

00:29:36.460 That meant that you also had to be there.

00:29:38.840 The richest people in society went off to war.

00:29:40.860 The poorest people stayed behind and we have kind of, uh, flip that.

00:29:44.640 Yeah.

00:29:45.420 God, that's fascinating.

00:29:46.880 I can't even imagine, but it sounds like, you know, you always hear like, oh, I wish

00:29:51.640 all of these, um, you know, if these politicians had to have, have their children go off to

00:29:56.140 war, they would feel totally different about the things that they send children off to war

00:29:59.760 to do.

00:30:00.220 Yeah.

00:30:00.380 They're called chicken hawks.

00:30:01.500 Yeah.

00:30:02.140 Wow.

00:30:02.920 I didn't know that that was the term it is.

00:30:04.560 Yeah.

00:30:04.900 Yeah.

00:30:05.340 Chicken hawks.

00:30:06.060 Yeah.

00:30:06.240 We've had chicken hawks all throughout history.

00:30:08.040 The people who will bang the drums of war and then send other people off to die.

00:30:12.940 Wow.

00:30:13.620 A chicken hawk has go back up to the top.

00:30:15.520 Sorry.

00:30:16.060 Has multiple meanings and bird names.

00:30:17.680 It refers to three hawk species, coopers, sharp shined and red tailed in gay slang.

00:30:23.640 It's used to describe an older man who prefers younger males.

00:30:27.040 Okay.

00:30:28.160 And politically it can describe someone who supports war, but avoids military service.

00:30:33.540 Ah, like draft dodgers kind of.

00:30:35.880 Yeah.

00:30:36.240 Similar to that.

00:30:37.300 Hmm.

00:30:37.520 Yeah.

00:30:37.700 And we've had a whole run of them as presidents, you know, Clinton got out of it.

00:30:40.740 Bush got out of it.

00:30:41.580 Trump got out of it.

00:30:42.560 Oh yeah.

00:30:43.060 Um, you know, Obama, I don't think had the opportunity to, um, but yeah, we certainly

00:30:48.220 have not followed that same steed where the people who are writing the rules are the

00:30:52.420 same one who have to go out there and make sure it's not, uh, make sure it's their own

00:30:56.700 blood.

00:30:57.000 That's providing the ink.

00:30:58.000 Yep.

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00:33:24.640 Have you ever taken this on tour, Mike? Do you ever think about that?

00:33:29.160 So I go, I go on book tours. Okay. And I do that. I did two years ago. I went, I wrote a 75 minute

00:33:35.900 monologue. It's just me like at a table talking for 75 minutes and took that around. And that was

00:33:41.560 moderately successful. Um, there was sort of like a big, you know, meta, not analysis, but like

00:33:49.220 meta take on history and how we tell stories and what the stories of history mean to us. And, and it's,

00:33:54.520 it is like a lot of what I just said, how we shape our present societies, the stories we tell about the

00:33:59.380 past. You, I could see this being a fascinating tour. I don't know exactly how you do it, but I

00:34:05.440 just, I, you got to do a tour of this. I could see this. I want to talk at the end about what it would

00:34:09.680 be like if we had a tour that you went on, like with some visual effects. We're actively planning

00:34:14.260 this now. Great. Good. This is how things happen. Yes, it is. Because we both got a little bit of

00:34:19.220 ambition, don't we? Yes, we do. That is fascinating. And the fact that if, if, if a

00:34:24.900 government found a way to curtail people's ambition, wow, how fascinating that is. Cause

00:34:29.740 you never even think that that could be happening to you. You know, were they curtailing people's

00:34:33.940 ambition during Rome? Um, well, I mean, certainly a slave, a slave was encouraged to not think that

00:34:40.700 there was anything else that they could do, but be a slave. A woman was encouraged to believe that 0.96

00:34:44.340 there was not anything that she could do, but be a woman who was mostly there to make little Roman 1.00

00:34:49.960 boys. Um, so yeah, there, there was an elite that was allowed to have these kinds of ambitions,

00:34:55.020 but a lot of other people were supposed to know their place. Got it. And so it was a caste system

00:34:59.020 pretty much. Yeah. And, and, you know, like stoicism, there, there's lots of great stuff about

00:35:03.980 stoicism as, you know, one of the, you know, main sort of philosophies that comes out of the ancient

00:35:08.780 world. Um, but one of the sort of, I think negative things about stoicism is it encouraged

00:35:13.960 people to just do the best they could with whatever they were meant to be. And so, yeah,

00:35:19.060 if you're a slave, you were just told, well, be the best slave that you can be. Uh, that's not

00:35:23.560 really a great message. And Mar and Marcus Aurelius, who's one of the, you know, great, you know,

00:35:28.140 voices and stoicism would be like, you know, we all have our role to play in this and I should be

00:35:32.180 the best emperor that I can be. And you should be the best soldier you can be, and you should be the

00:35:35.360 best slave you can be in. And aren't my burdens the same as, as that of the slave. And it's like,

00:35:39.920 well, Marcus Aurelius, I'm not actually sure that's true. Um, it's a nice thought. And I do

00:35:45.300 understand that there are burdens to being emperor, but it's easier for you to say that. Yeah. It's

00:35:49.020 pretty easy for you to say that. Um, uh, less, less so for the slave. What did people wear during

00:35:55.100 the time? Like what was some common garb kind of, well, I am not an expert on, on what they were

00:36:02.540 wearing around for sure. Um, but you know, the, our, I can say this, the sort of the togas that we

00:36:10.080 all imagine them wearing, this is very, this is very upper crust where the toga was, you know,

00:36:15.800 practically a tuxedo. Like you would clock that in Roman society is like, this person's walking 0.81

00:36:20.920 around in something very fancy. Um, and it's something that the senatorial class would wear

00:36:26.020 around. So like most people are not bumming around in daily life wearing a toga. They, and those

00:36:31.140 were actually like, they're very cumbersome, right. To wear around. It was, it was a, it was a

00:36:35.320 cumbersome piece of clothing. Yeah. It's almost like you're playing hide and go seek in your own

00:36:38.520 clothing. It's very, you know, cause you think it's going to be easy and you got to keep this end

00:36:42.300 up. It's like, people was like, yeah, I'm a ghost or whatever. But, and you probably had a nice piece

00:36:47.860 of fabric from somewhere, which was something only wealthy people would have. Yeah. Yeah. And when you

00:36:52.180 get into sort of like, what, what are the fruits of having this kind of empire and having, uh, trade

00:36:57.500 routes that are now reaching to China? Yeah. They, yeah. They've got silks coming in. They've

00:37:01.640 got other kinds of like fancy finery that they get to wear, but like most people are, are in rough

00:37:06.640 tunics, you know, and like some sandals. Um, and that's about what they're wearing. Yeah. That's

00:37:12.820 yeah. You didn't have any air force ones or anything. Did they have, um, what were people eating at the

00:37:18.680 time? If you are just a peasant, you're eating whatever's around, you know, barley, millet,

00:37:28.020 you know, like, like parts of beer. Yeah. Bar, yeah. It's, there's a lot of barley and millet,

00:37:34.500 you know, that's got, that's going around. Um, you know, if you're on the coast, you know,

00:37:38.000 you've got fish coming in and you've got, uh, you know, you know, different kinds of, you know,

00:37:41.980 the, the fruits of the, the, the, the flu, the mail, right. In French, which is the fruits of the

00:37:46.780 sea, which is seafood. Um, there's some, you know, there's meat, there is red meat that people are

00:37:52.920 eating, but it's, you know, in, in far less quantities than we eat today. And then, you know,

00:37:58.240 you can get Roman cookbooks today where people go through like different recipes that we sort of knew

00:38:03.560 that they had. And like, you know, door mice always seem to show up as one of the things that

00:38:08.600 people like to eat. Um, a little door mouse, a little, a little door mouse action. You're, you're,

00:38:13.380 we always, we always got to do that when we do Roman food. Um, there's a great sort of like fish

00:38:18.800 sauce called garum that they were all, you know, that they were wild for, which is actually the

00:38:23.400 principal export of Pompeii, uh, before they was garum. Yeah. Before they, yeah, they were, yeah, 0.95

00:38:28.120 they're famous, famous for their fish sauce. Um, and then, you know, and then what are they drinking?

00:38:33.200 They're, they're drinking wine and you know, there's a lot of wine being consumed, uh, in the ancient

00:38:39.660 world. And they would, they would make this like, it was, it was very, it was a very thick wine.

00:38:44.760 And so you, so a port almost. Yeah. But so much so that like you would cut it with water. And so

00:38:49.760 it was, it was almost like concentrate, right? And the way it's like cool, like Kool-Aid.

00:38:54.240 I remember we used to have like that. They used to have the cell that, uh, orange juice concentrate,

00:38:58.080 like in the frozen block. Oh yeah. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And put that into something.

00:39:02.520 So it's, but yeah, it's basically that. And that's, that's a lot of what their wine was.

00:39:05.380 So a lot of their wine was a concentrate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then people would splash,

00:39:08.820 would cut it with water and then have themselves a bit. And, and there would be, um, you know,

00:39:13.740 there would be sort of like, you know, if, if somebody was really, you know, had a problem

00:39:18.640 with alcohol, you would say that they drank it without cutting it. You know, that was,

00:39:22.400 that was like a thing that would get passed around. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. He just, he would

00:39:26.560 just drink it straight. That's not so good. Oh, Ricky's drinking it straight. Oh, he's not

00:39:30.820 doing well. No, he's not doing well. We need to have an intervention. Yeah. Um, could a peasant rise 1.00

00:39:36.880 up in society at the time. Was there any chance that like, cause you always, there's this,

00:39:41.960 I think there's this idea, right. That like, you're the peasant in the, at the, on the parade

00:39:47.820 route and you see the princess go by and you catch her eye and then you have a chance to

00:39:53.220 be her boyfriend or whatever spouse or whatever, you know, you have, I think that's every like

00:39:58.180 poor kid's dream, you know, like certainly when I was growing up, you would think like some

00:40:02.960 rich girl would see you and then her dad would think you were nice. And then you would have a

00:40:07.360 chance to help run his car dealership one day. Right. That's, and that's the dream. Um,

00:40:13.600 or coin carwash too. We had this hottie at our school, dude named Emily, dude. And her dad had 0.85

00:40:19.700 two coin car washes. Great bro. Yeah. Oh, aspirate aspirations of a lifetime. Oh man. Yeah. And that's

00:40:27.880 what you could have been doing. And instead you're stuck here doing this. I bet that what,

00:40:32.000 what an awful turn of events, but you could have had two coin operated car dealerships and instead

00:40:38.160 you just have a very successful career in podcasting. But you know, it's funny. There's

00:40:42.120 a part of me that's still just, you just still want to be picked by her to be the inheritee of

00:40:48.560 those two coin op car washes. God, they were nice boy. And I still, man, that just the idea that still

00:40:54.640 just pressure washes my soul, you know? So, um, to answer your question, um, you know,

00:41:00.640 social mobility in the ancient world ain't great. Um, you know, if you, if you were born a peasant,

00:41:06.860 you're almost certainly going to die a peasant. There are, you know, once we move along through 0.91

00:41:12.060 the empire, sort of the Republic has fallen. We are now into the Imperial age. Um, there's certainly

00:41:19.340 like commoners who are elevated a little bit in the way that you're talking about. They become a

00:41:24.820 favorite of the emperor. And then there's a lot of like griping, like, who is this guy? Why does he,

00:41:29.740 why does he get, you know, access to the emperor when we don't, this is all very embarrassing,

00:41:33.920 um, that we have this commoner around. Um, and, and that'll happen, you know, sporadically over

00:41:40.560 hundreds of years. It didn't happen very often. Um, when you get into sort of like the second and

00:41:45.840 third centuries, um, we, there is a phenomenon of being able to enter the army and having that be

00:41:53.880 the main sort of avenue of social mobility. And, and this is actually, you know, now that I think

00:41:59.120 about it, this is actually true for most of the empire, at least once the legions become

00:42:02.780 professionalized is how, how do you, how do you move up in the world? The legions. And when you

00:42:06.400 say those are the bad, the, those are the, just the armies, the armies. We're just talking about

00:42:10.960 when they become professionalized, when they become professionalized. So when people start to see

00:42:14.240 that as a way to move up rank. And if you're, if you're a provincial and there is a, what does

00:42:18.760 provincial mean to see a provincial is somebody who is, uh, lives in the province, lives in a

00:42:25.340 province of the Roman empire who is not themselves a Roman citizen. Okay. Okay. So this, these are the

00:42:30.580 provincials and a provincial could become a citizen through service in the army. And that, and if you

00:42:38.300 somehow managed to make it through 20 years of service, you would be discharged with citizenship

00:42:42.800 papers. And there, there are tablets, they're called resumes. Um, you can find them in museums

00:42:47.140 that then you would carry that around. Like for the rest of your life, it was like the most precious

00:42:51.840 thing in your possession, right? If you had one of these things, because then wherever you went,

00:42:56.360 you're like, you have to treat me differently because I have citizenship. You can't mess with me.

00:43:01.000 And so these, these, yeah, these are very, very important things that people would have.

00:43:05.980 When, when the empire starts to run into troubles militarily, socially, politically,

00:43:11.180 like in the second and third and third century, there is a run of emperors in the third century

00:43:16.380 who, who become emperors because they had risen through the ranks from the lowest rank all the

00:43:22.080 way up. Because when you're in a crisis, there's kind of two paths in front of you. You can either

00:43:28.200 cling to the leadership that had been leading you before. And in fact, like probably created this

00:43:33.360 crisis, or you allow talent to rise up and you're like, okay, let's, let's have the people who know

00:43:38.340 what they're doing, wherever they come from, like, who cares? Let's have them be in charge.

00:43:42.960 And so there's this run of, of emperors from Illyria who, when we look at their biographies,

00:43:47.800 it's always like they can't, they, they, and they were peasants. They were commoners. They enter

00:43:52.100 in the lowest possible rank. And then they rise up through, through talent and through will and

00:43:56.560 through merit to become generals. And then that's the transition point into becoming an emperor.

00:44:01.920 But like, when you actually dig into it, there, there's this way of like, if you're really rich

00:44:08.120 and you're like, oh, that person came from nothing. A lot of the times they're just talking

00:44:12.900 about like a regular middle-class kid, not like, not really somebody who grew up in poverty. It's

00:44:17.580 just somebody who grew up without like insane amounts of wealth. And so sometimes when they're

00:44:21.740 like, oh, this, this future emperor came from nothing, it was very possible that they were like

00:44:26.280 a well-to-do local family who rise up. Right. They just weren't royalty. They just,

00:44:31.220 yeah, they just weren't royalty. So it's, so it's kind of difficult to tell, but there is,

00:44:34.480 but, but in general, that's how you're going to go from being what you were, which is nothing to

00:44:38.980 maybe being something is it's the army that's going to do it for you. Wow. And it was, but it's been

00:44:43.900 that way for a long time in America. So I don't feel like, I don't know if it's that way as much now,

00:44:47.820 but I certainly felt like it used to be that way more. Yeah. I mean, like America's experience with

00:44:53.540 armies is, is different, but very similar to what it was, you know, kind of in the early days of

00:45:01.100 Rome where it's, it's not so much like only rich people would go off and serve in, in war. But

00:45:05.660 when, when we did have broad-based conscription for like World War II and for the Korean War and for

00:45:10.980 World War I, like all of society is kind of going off and, and being a part of the army. And then you

00:45:17.140 come back and yeah, maybe you have, like you rose up the rank and now you're a captain. And then when

00:45:21.480 you come back to civilian society, now you've got some stature, you know, you've, you know,

00:45:25.100 you've, you've proven yourself and now your resume looks quite a bit better for sure.

00:45:29.100 Oh yeah. I remember. Yeah. When military guys would come to visit your school or something,

00:45:32.280 I mean, it felt like it meant something, you know, it's certainly when I was a child.

00:45:36.120 And not that it still doesn't. I just think there was probably more combat then or coming off of more

00:45:41.860 combat or you had more friends, dads who had gone into heavy combat. And so you would,

00:45:46.560 those stories were more plentiful probably in society at the time. That's why I say that.

00:45:50.120 Um, what were women regarded like at that time? Did they, cause there were female gods, 0.99

00:45:57.800 goddesses. Sure. So obviously there was a, and it was a war society and you had like Athena,

00:46:03.880 the God of war, Athena. Um, but you had female goddesses that were powerful. How, how were women 0.99

00:46:10.560 viewed in society during Roman times? So it's a strongly patriarchal society and the head of the

00:46:16.880 household is invariably a man and they are in charge of everything. And so if you're a woman 1.00

00:46:24.300 in one respect, you don't really have rights at all. Like who you marry, what happens to you,

00:46:29.860 where you go, like most of these things are completely out of your hand. Wow. And what

00:46:34.400 you're really there to do, the most important thing that you can do is make babies to fill the 0.96

00:46:40.900 legions so that we can continue to be this strong military society that we are. But all of that said,

00:46:47.580 the Romans also did have written into law. Actually there, there did become spaces for women to own 1.00

00:46:55.000 property in their own right, to be able to manage some of their own affairs financially. Um, a lot of

00:47:02.520 early Christianity, for example, is bankrolled by wealthy widows because they had, they had had a 0.81

00:47:08.460 husband, they had had a family, that husband dies, they don't remarry. There is, there is legal space

00:47:14.320 for them to exist as a widow who's unconnected to a man who controls her own money. And when we, 0.99

00:47:20.420 the, the story of early Christianity, like who was, um, who was patron, who was a patron of this,

00:47:25.060 like who was patronizing these early Christian groups, a lot of it is like wealthy widows is where

00:47:30.280 the money is coming from. So it's, it's a mixed bag, but I would say like in the main, if you were a

00:47:36.420 woman in Roman society, uh, you do not have a ton of rights at all. Were there, what did they do? 1.00

00:47:43.560 Like if children were born with disabilities, handicaps and stuff like that, how were people

00:47:47.120 treated like that? Not great. You know, exposure is a thing, you know? And what does it mean?

00:47:52.980 Exposure? Like put them out on a trash pile. Really? Yeah. That's crazy, dude. What did people

00:47:59.500 think of life at the time? Did they value their life? Did it mean as much to them as it feels,

00:48:04.100 seems like it does to us today in America. Does that make sense to you?

00:48:07.780 It does. And I think it did. I think their lives did matter to them a lot. And even though,

00:48:14.120 you know, we were just talking about like exposing babies because they couldn't live,

00:48:17.180 right. That was like a difficult choice that they would make. But we often today, because we have all

00:48:24.140 this advanced medical technology and because we have vaccines and because we've basically eradicated

00:48:28.540 childhood diseases, which is one of the biggest killers in world history, like childhood vaccines

00:48:35.280 is one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of human civilization, right? Prior to the

00:48:41.020 20th century, the mortality rates for children were appalling. And this is why you had to have six,

00:48:47.280 seven kids because three or four of them might not live to adulthood.

00:48:50.280 Wow. Bring that up. And so we think these days that like, oh, because of that, because there was

00:48:55.840 that much death surrounding them at all times, because loved ones were dropping dead left and

00:49:00.580 right, that they must've been more callous. They can't possibly have cared about each other as much

00:49:05.600 if they're just going to die. And I have in all of the historical studies that I have done, I just

00:49:10.780 don't find that to be true. People loved their children. We love our children as human beings,

00:49:17.440 right? It wasn't different for them. If a woman gives birth to a child, she loves that child. And

00:49:22.420 if that child dies at the age of 18 months, that is a devastating tragedy. It is the worst thing that

00:49:28.380 can happen to a person is the death of a child, full stop. Nothing else even comes close. It affected

00:49:34.160 them in that way. They cared about each other in that way. They tried to protect each other and save

00:49:38.420 each other. We always, we are always fighting for life and we are always fighting to save people that we

00:49:43.600 love. And so it is absolutely not the case that they were more callous or more hard hearted.

00:49:50.000 Why do we get that idea then? Cause I see what you're saying. Cause yeah,

00:49:52.700 God, I can only imagine.

00:49:54.940 Because we, cause we can't conceive of what that must've been like.

00:49:58.440 Because if, you know, if I had five kids, I mean, if, if either one of my kids died, I'd be,

00:50:04.920 that's it. I'm, I'm a wreck. Like I don't even know how to recover from that.

00:50:08.700 Yeah. We just had a guy on Kevin Von Erich and he law, um, he has a famous movie. We

00:50:14.120 has a famous life. His five of his brothers died. Okay. They were professional wrestlers

00:50:21.040 in the eighties, seventies and eighties in Texas. And five of them died from suicides and different.

00:50:26.180 And he said that he's just a remarkable man. He said, I lost all my brothers. He goes,

00:50:34.320 but I could not imagine losing one of my children. And it was just fascinating. Not

00:50:40.880 fascinating to hear that. Of course you get that, but you know, yeah, it's interesting to think that,

00:50:44.980 that, that, that the weight of that would be, it's interesting to have some quantifiable weight

00:50:49.960 of that, um, coming from someone like him and hearing it from you. Let me see in ancient room,

00:50:54.340 infant mortality was significantly higher than today with estimates suggesting that about 25 to 30%

00:50:58.560 of children died in their first year of life. Wow. That's every single one of those deaths mattered.

00:51:03.920 Right. Every single one of them mattered. You almost had to have three children to get two

00:51:10.440 children. Yep. God, it's hard. It's hard, man. And that's why, that's why vaccines are so great.

00:51:17.700 That's why it's so important that they exist because what was, what was killing these kids?

00:51:21.320 It was early childhood diseases. Yeah. Bring up the, bring up. How did vaccines change the life

00:51:26.300 expectancy of children? Just so we know that we've never looked at that. You hear everybody talk about

00:51:32.380 vaccines. We've talked about, we've listened a lot about it in here. Let me see. Child immunity

00:51:37.380 specifically started with Edward Jenner's successful smallpox vaccination in 1796. Yeah. Yeah. The

00:51:43.020 practice of vaccination, including for smallpox, gained traction throughout the 19th century with

00:51:46.500 Massachusetts being the first state to require it for school children in 1853. Yeah. Great. Dude,

00:51:51.840 they should require it in Massachusetts just for that, uh, accent. You know what I'm saying?

00:51:56.980 But I mean, this is obviously something that has been at the forefront of like scientific

00:52:02.080 investigation forever. The fact that they, that it was such a problem that they were losing this

00:52:06.120 many children, that it was like, this is something we have to figure out. If we can figure this out

00:52:10.440 and stop this, let's do it. Because every one of those deaths, it's not just like we've lost that

00:52:15.640 person. Like every person who was connected to that kid is now traumatized by that. So you, so you have

00:52:20.580 these societies that just everybody is walking around, not hard hearted, not caring about these

00:52:26.100 things, but basically victims of trauma. They've all been traumatized. And that is, that does inform,

00:52:32.380 uh, what previous societies were like, um, that had a lot more to do with the fact that we care about

00:52:38.580 each other than the fact that we did not care about each other. Wow. And I bet care was almost at a

00:52:43.480 different depth then because it moments probably meant something more because you, there was, I mean,

00:52:48.680 it was literally in the trash pile of your, like the morning was on the curb of not only of your

00:52:57.160 heart, but of your home. Oh, I can't even imagine that. It's a hard thing to imagine. Yeah. And God,

00:53:03.600 I think, imagine how much more light, how real it was. And we are one, I guess it's a blessing that

00:53:09.980 we have today is how we're able to kind of hide things from our own reality in a way. Um, if that

00:53:16.080 makes any sense, kind of, especially visually, you know, we're, we're able to, uh, you know,

00:53:21.460 one thing I always, that I thought was neat about being like, cause we grew up in like a really poor

00:53:26.180 area and you couldn't hide anything. Like if somebody was getting a butt whooping, if somebody

00:53:31.740 was, if parents were fighting every day, it was all right there. Right. And it was a blessing and a

00:53:36.560 curse. It was like, it was too much information for a kid, but then also it was like, this is real.

00:53:42.960 Oh, I'm involved in a fucking show. Right. Like we're, nobody's talking anybody in the nightlight 0.99

00:53:48.720 in my room gave up two years ago. He moved to fucking Minneapolis. It's like, you know, 1.00

00:53:53.920 just, I don't know if there was something real about it. And then when you have some money,

00:53:57.220 you got like, you can get hedges and you get a fence and you get to, you get an attorney,

00:54:00.880 you get things to hide behind. Well, I, I mean, I grew up in, you know, the affluent suburbs of

00:54:05.500 Seattle, Washington. Right. So I, so I'm, I'm from the suburbs of the eighties and nineties. And so,

00:54:10.400 yes, it was very much not that it was, everybody's fine. Everything is great. We all go to our little,

00:54:15.720 you know, single standing houses and, and every family is doing great. And then, you know, and

00:54:21.280 then, you know, behind closed doors and underneath all that. Yeah. Yeah. Of course I listened to

00:54:25.940 Nirvana. I was, I was 11, man. I like when, yeah. When, when smells like teen spirit came out,

00:54:30.580 like, Oh, I was 11 years old. So like, I was, I was just deep in the scene. Of course I was.

00:54:35.000 Yeah. Oh, those early mosh pits, dude. Every one of my friends, older brothers was in a horrible 0.96

00:54:41.620 band. Sure. That would play, it would be like a pet store. They would move all the cages into the

00:54:45.860 back and they would have a little mosh pit in there. Cause, cause Eddie Vedder showed everybody

00:54:49.860 that you could sing with a kind of deep voice, which we can all kind of do. Yeah. And so it was

00:54:54.380 like, Oh my God, this is the thing that we can do now. And like, and so they're because we can all do

00:54:59.260 that. Whereas before that it was all the glam metal guys with these like registers that were just

00:55:03.440 like, I don't even know how you do that. Like, I can't even hear that. Yeah. Like Vince Neil,

00:55:06.980 those guys. Exactly. Yeah. Like I can't, I can't emulate that, but Eddie Vedder, I can do. And

00:55:10.760 like, you know, screaming into him. I come from punk, right? That was sort of my, like skinny puppy,

00:55:16.060 that type of stuff. Oh no. Like, you know, like nineties third wave stuff. Um, you know,

00:55:20.260 like rancid and bad religion and no effects. Acid bath. No, not acid bath. Okay. Sorry. It's okay. 0.99

00:55:25.780 Yeah. All right. Slipknot. Gas huffer. Yeah. Uh, well, no slipknot is like now we're, that's metal,

00:55:30.640 right. We're getting into metal. And I like, I'm not a metal guy. Um, I do not, but I do not,

00:55:35.500 uh, believe that there is a split between metal and punk. I think we have far more in common with

00:55:39.540 each other than we don't. And so I will always be a peacemaker and an ambassador between metal and,

00:55:44.600 and punk because I don't want us to fight. I want us to be on the same side because we're all

00:55:48.060 probably throwing shows at the same crappy little place. I love that. And if there's ever a treaty to be

00:55:52.600 signed, I would love for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Metal, metal and punk, right. We need to stand in

00:55:57.440 solidarity with each other. But that said, I do not listen to metal at all. I think it's,

00:56:01.240 I think it's overblown and ridiculous. I want three chords and some incoherent yelling. Yeah. 0.95

00:56:05.760 That's, that's what I, that's what I want out of music. Dude, that's so cool, man. Um,

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00:57:45.640 Thank you. What did the kings and the royalty live like? Were they living – was it just like a – what was it like

00:57:52.080 over there? Could you just knock on the drawbridge? How did you even get over there?

00:57:57.200 Well, for one thing about the Romans is they did not have kings anymore. And this is an important part of their

00:58:02.880 political ideology. Once they kicked the kings out in the legendary day to 509 BC, there aren't kings anymore.

00:58:09.640 Okay. And why did they kick the kings out? For a variety of reasons, most especially like it was

00:58:15.940 immediately caused by the aristocrats, most of the senatorial class, not liking the last king of Rome. 0.92

00:58:23.860 And it's actually a story that he raped the daughter of a prominent senator. And so that's what 0.77

00:58:29.100 precipitated the overthrow of the last Tarquin king.

00:58:33.240 And that was the – that was in the Roman – that's how the Roman Republic started?

00:58:38.040 Yeah. Yeah, because like if you go back, like Romulus allegedly founds Rome 753 and then they're

00:58:42.860 kings of Rome for like 250 years. And then around 500, that's when the Republic gets going.

00:58:48.140 And what started the Republic again? Take me through that story.

00:58:50.920 Like the legendary story is that there's a last king who was – the local senatorial elite in Rome did

00:58:58.960 not like him very much.

00:59:00.180 What was his name?

00:59:01.220 Tarquin.

00:59:01.800 Okay.

00:59:02.220 And the Tarquin family comes from – yeah, yeah, Tarquinian Supervis. But they were an Etrurian 0.99

00:59:07.800 family. And Etruria is north of Rome, not Roman. So it was a foreign monarchy that had come –

00:59:13.820 So there were provincials?

00:59:15.320 The Romans were being ruled – yeah, the Romans were being ruled by a king who came from someplace

00:59:19.880 else. That's all it is. It's a foreign monarch, which is something that is common throughout history.

00:59:25.140 And so they don't like the foreign monarch. And this is all trying to like sort of capture how the

00:59:28.940 Romans get out from under the cultural hegemony of Etruria at the time because the Etruscans were 1.00

00:59:33.860 quite a bit better at things earlier than the Romans were. And then the Romans come along and 0.94

00:59:38.860 supplant them. But to your question of – which is really like the high aristocracy, the senatorial

00:59:45.340 class, and then ultimately the emperors. Like how are they living? Well –

00:59:49.720 Oh, and wait. Did we finish the story of what happened? Oh, you told us about the story,

00:59:52.480 but what happened with the –

00:59:53.580 Oh, yeah. According to the story, Tarquin rapes the daughter of a prominent senator in Rome. And

00:59:59.000 that guy goes and he rallies all of his brothers and his allies and his friends and they overthrow

01:00:03.660 the king and they kick him out. And then they say, we're not doing kings anymore.

01:00:06.920 Wow.

01:00:07.200 We are going to do a like job rotation system and set up proto-democratic assemblies. And

01:00:15.180 then that's how they ran themselves for like 500 years.

01:00:17.480 And is that how democracy began?

01:00:19.600 Well, democracy – I mean it's one of the places. Like, yeah. I mean democracy is coming

01:00:23.020 from like Greece, right? They're taking cultural cues from what's happening over in Greece because

01:00:29.220 like just as – and there is debate about when the Roman Republic was actually founded because

01:00:36.300 you do get sort of Solon coming over to Athens and being like the great lawgiver of Athens and

01:00:41.560 sort of the like – I'm going to get this date wrong, but it's like around 470 is when

01:00:46.480 he's the lawgiver of Athens. And this is when you start getting sort of like what we

01:00:50.000 think of as democratic government. And it's entirely possible that later Roman historians

01:00:54.540 went and backdated, like they retconned their own history so that they would come along like

01:00:58.520 30 years before that because everybody knew about what was going on in Athens. And they

01:01:02.080 were like, actually, we got there 30 years earlier, which is just them doing a little

01:01:06.120 light revision of their own history in order to make sure that they were always the super

01:01:10.720 bus.

01:01:11.180 It's like an Instagram filter.

01:01:12.220 It's like an Instagram filter.

01:01:13.000 Exactly.

01:01:13.780 Full of Jakarta. 0.95

01:01:14.760 Yeah. But if you're a senator –

01:01:18.080 So now we have the Republic going on.

01:01:19.660 Yeah.

01:01:19.800 This is where the Republic of Rome – this is the second of kind of three of the – this

01:01:24.660 is the second of kind of the three main parts of Rome. Then we get into the Roman Empire.

01:01:27.960 Exactly.

01:01:28.360 Okay.

01:01:28.780 Yeah.

01:01:29.420 So now we no longer have kings.

01:01:31.000 No longer have kings. Kings bad. You cannot be a king. In fact, if anybody tries to be a

01:01:35.880 king, if anybody tries to become a king, any Roman citizen can kill that person. 0.98

01:01:40.020 Oh, yeah. 1.00

01:01:40.680 Kill the kings. 1.00

01:01:41.560 Oh, yeah. 1.00

01:01:42.040 No kings.

01:01:42.380 Sacramento kings even.

01:01:43.160 No kings. There is a reason why the emperors are not kings because kings are verboten, right?

01:01:49.000 You are not ever going to be a king. And every Roman senator ultimately thought that they were

01:01:53.380 superior to any king. And there were kings throughout the Mediterranean world who would be like clients

01:01:58.220 of the Roman Empire. And any Roman senator considered themselves socially, morally, politically

01:02:05.420 above a mere king.

01:02:07.160 So you have the Republic now and the counselors of the Republic, the rich guys. How were they living

01:02:14.040 at the time?

01:02:15.200 Those – the people who were sort of the aristocrats, which is synonymous with the senatorial class,

01:02:22.220 they are the major landowners of Rome. And so they do not have occupations. They are living off of

01:02:32.360 the rents of their land. They're living off of the produce of the peasants who are living on their

01:02:37.460 land and then ultimately the slaves who are living on their land. That's where their income is coming 0.94

01:02:41.920 from. That's where their wealth is coming from. They themselves don't have to do anything. They

01:02:46.260 don't have to have a profession. They don't have to have a job. And in their minds, this is what made

01:02:51.200 them the perfect people to lead the Republic because they were the only people who had the leisure time

01:02:57.200 to like be literate, to read things about history, to learn things about how to actually do statecraft,

01:03:03.660 to have the time to engage in all of those pursuits. And that made them like uniquely able.

01:03:09.480 And then if you say like, well, hey, maybe we should educate everyone then. And then like we can

01:03:14.200 have all of these. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want to go that far because

01:03:17.140 really they just wanted to be in charge. But there is sort of a self-justifying

01:03:22.540 like ideological project there, which is, which is like, we're the ones who have the time to do

01:03:28.320 this. And so we will be the ones who do it. And so, you know, they had, they had, they would have

01:03:32.300 country villas. They would usually have like a place in the city. A lot of them clustered on the

01:03:36.820 Palatine Hill. That's, I mean, to this very day, you know, jockeying for a house in the best

01:03:41.540 neighborhood. This is, I mean, this is a tale as old as time. This is what was going on on the Palatine

01:03:45.940 Hill. You know, you wanted to be in a good house and a bigger house.

01:03:49.660 Um, amongst the other people who are thinking and making decisions. But at this time, even

01:03:54.700 literacy was kind of a, uh, delicacy. Yeah. Yeah. Literacy was a, was a very rarefied

01:04:01.340 thing. Um, and did they have like prostitutes and stuff like that? What was that? Was that 1.00

01:04:06.320 going on? Oh, sure, man. That's, I mean, that's the world's oldest profession. So yeah, dude.

01:04:11.300 Yeah, absolutely. PLM, bro. Yeah, absolutely. There were there. Yeah. There were sex workers 0.99

01:04:14.600 for sure. Um, and then, you know, they would do whatever they wanted to do, but they're,

01:04:22.400 you know, they're living off the best food. Um, they have household slaves who are doing 0.71

01:04:26.620 all the manual labor for them, you know, up to and including, you know, at certain points,

01:04:30.360 like literally hand feeding them, you know, you can really, you could have them do it. I mean,

01:04:35.020 would people get kind of exorbitant at that time? How did, how strange did it get? Do you feel

01:04:38.540 like, uh, well, you know, it probably got pretty freaky. Um, there is definitely, there's,

01:04:46.380 there's some, uh, there's some like satires that were written. There were some humorous,

01:04:50.060 uh, sort of satires that were written about the life of the aristocracy. Um, and these are

01:04:56.080 very much like, Oh yeah, there, yeah. What was going on behind closed doors was quite, you

01:05:01.580 know, we would consider it taboo. Like, well, like, was it perverted? Like, was it like, uh, I

01:05:05.780 mean, I know like, was it like pedophilia type stuff? No, no, no, nothing. No, I don't think

01:05:10.320 it's anything like that. Although in some times and places, yeah, for sure. Um, because that's

01:05:15.020 always been something that's been with us, unfortunately. Um, but yeah, you know, there's,

01:05:19.140 there's orgies, there's drinking parties, there's, you know, they're putting on, you know,

01:05:23.280 theatrical plays and, you know, it's, it's body, it's rivaled, you know, all that.

01:05:28.680 Bacchanalia. Yeah. Yeah. Bacchanalia. I mean, that's, that's where this stuff comes from.

01:05:32.640 Yeah. I grew up in New Orleans area. So it's like we would, you know,

01:05:35.080 you'd see the float, you know, you'd, the different parades. I mean, the list we put

01:05:38.720 up earlier, that was, that's 80% of the names of all the, uh, all the different parade groups

01:05:44.560 that are there. Yeah. Um, so the rich were living it up. They were enjoying themselves.

01:05:50.360 They were the ones who were getting together and thinking they were the ones that were

01:05:53.940 strategizing. Are they still the ones that are going out into the battlefields too?

01:05:57.800 Yeah. Yeah. For, for, you know, centuries. Absolutely. You know, and, and, you know,

01:06:02.940 whether they liked it or not, Cicero famously, you know, complained about having to do military

01:06:07.760 service because he wasn't a soldier. He didn't consider himself a soldier. He wanted to, you

01:06:11.920 know, he was engaged in the law. He didn't have to be like, Cicero could have just sat

01:06:15.160 around and done nothing for sure if he wanted to, but, but he does get, you know, involved

01:06:19.080 in, you know, basically having a legal career and, but he had to go do his service in order

01:06:23.420 to qualify to be a consul, even though he wasn't, you know, uh, a soldier at all. And also,

01:06:28.940 you know, there, there's a very famous or famous inside the, you know, the Roman historian

01:06:33.600 world, uh, where a buddy of his is writing to him. And it's like, you know, how do you

01:06:37.420 feel about being a consul and, and having to be in charge of all of these like religious

01:06:41.200 things when you're like an atheist? And he's like, well, yeah, I'm an atheist. I don't

01:06:44.860 believe any of it, not necessarily, but we go through the motions, don't we? Um, how did,

01:06:51.920 how did people, uh, what was plumbing like waste management? How did people wash their

01:06:58.400 clothes? Okay. Um, these are not areas I'm an expert in. Okay. So, but I can, you know,

01:07:05.040 I can, I can tell you some things because the Romans were very good about aqueducts and sort

01:07:13.260 of having running water in different places, but you know, yeah, they've, they've got pipes,

01:07:19.500 they've got public latrines. Um, but sometimes you've also just got chamber pots that you're

01:07:24.620 filling up and throwing out the window when you're done with it. You know, the, one of the

01:07:29.380 things about the past is that it probably stunk to high heaven everywhere you go. Yeah. Yeah. Like

01:07:36.260 I, like when you read about the way people live, like, yeah, like, like, oh, when you go back to

01:07:41.160 the past, like, oh, it'd be so great. It's like, yeah, he's been like, this smells gross. You know,

01:07:45.980 cause I've done a lot of work like in, um, in French history too. And like in the Louvre,

01:07:50.400 which used to be like the palace of the King, you know, they would talk about, this is up through

01:07:55.340 like the 15, 1600s, just like princes and nobles. Like if they had to go to the bathroom, they would

01:08:00.140 just literally go pee in the corner of a room. This is what they were doing. No way. And, and this

01:08:04.800 is, this is something that is really sick app or whatever. Yeah. Like, okay. Um, because we've,

01:08:10.000 we've gotten very used today to the, to the glories of, of indoor plumbing and what it can do for us.

01:08:15.520 It's kind of cool that it'd just be like, uh, keep talking. You just turn your back and

01:08:20.200 just piss the other way. Or somebody comes by with a little piss head and you piss in there and 0.96

01:08:24.260 they run off with it or, or whatever. I don't even know what they would do with it. Would they

01:08:28.200 recycle the urine at all? Did they need like fluids that bad back then? So not fluids, but what they

01:08:34.780 did need was like the, um, like the, the chemicals that are in human urine, like to actually this ties

01:08:41.680 directly into your point of like, how did they do laundry? Um, those chemicals that could be

01:08:46.280 extracted from human urine was great for washing clothes. Yeah. This is, um, really Romans clean 1.00

01:08:52.660 their clothes using a mixture of water, alkali, often urine and fuller's earth. The urine provided

01:08:59.020 ammonia, a natural detergent while the fuller's earth acted as an abrasive to remove dirt. The

01:09:04.860 process involved washing the clothes in vats, often with the fullers or their slaves treading 1.00

01:09:10.500 on them to agitate the clothes. After washing, the clothes were rinsed and dried. That's kind of

01:09:16.180 crazy to think that you would use urine and earth to clean something. And who figured that one out?

01:09:25.820 Some. There's, you know, it's like, there's like the thing, the bravest man who ever lived was the

01:09:29.580 first person to eat an oyster. You know, there's like, there's those little things. It's like,

01:09:33.740 okay, there was a guy who figured out that if you peed on clothes, you could get them clean.

01:09:38.320 Yeah. Who was that guy? What was that guy's story? Cause we have no idea who it was.

01:09:43.880 Yeah. And it'd be, yeah, it'd be tough to convince somebody that today. Um,

01:09:47.920 what were their news sources? Like, how did they get information?

01:09:52.300 So information is going to be passed through like traders. Okay. So that's one way that you're

01:10:01.140 going to find out what is happening throughout the world. And so like, obviously if you live in a port

01:10:06.100 of some kind, you're going to be more hip to like what's going on in Egypt or North Africa than if

01:10:12.440 you're just like somebody who's living on some, uh, living in some little village in the interior of

01:10:18.980 Gaul, which you have no idea what's going on. Yeah. Um, the Romans do develop an incredibly 1.00

01:10:25.220 extensive network of roads, like an insanely extensive network of roads. This is like one of

01:10:29.560 also their greatest accomplishments. And a lot of these Roman roads, like basically still exist.

01:10:33.800 A lot of what we use today are, or, you know, this is where the Roman road used to be. And so

01:10:39.680 especially among the upper classes, there's extensive correspondence that is going on between

01:10:45.440 people in the upper classes. And like, if somebody goes off to a posting someplace, they're, they're

01:10:49.360 writing back. There's, there's exchanges of letters and, and, um, and correspondence that is

01:10:53.160 happening all the time. And then the government itself has agents. And then ultimately like bureaucrats

01:10:59.040 who are producing material and sending it back to the center and passing information amongst each

01:11:04.200 other. And all of that is being done, you know, via these road networks or like, you know, people,

01:11:10.100 people who are traveling from here to there, like, like tell you, Oh, well, this is what was happening

01:11:13.980 down there. And then this was happening down there. Would they spread misinformation too? Would

01:11:17.620 they send false information out? Like, was that a thing then? Oh, I'm sure. Like, I mean, not on,

01:11:22.920 not on the regular. Um, definitely is there bad information? Yeah. Cause it's like a telephone

01:11:28.500 game. Right. And by the time you get to the other side, you're like monkey banana raffle. That does

01:11:32.040 not mean anything to me. And it started out with like, there's a war in Egypt. And it's like,

01:11:36.020 by the time it gets to Gaul, it's like monkey banana raffle. You're like, I do not know what that

01:11:40.040 means, sir. Um, but yeah, I mean, they, they were, they were, when you were engaged in a war,

01:11:45.280 they were definitely intelligent enough. You know, I can't think of any anecdotes right off the top of my

01:11:49.060 head, but like to try to trick people into thinking things. And, you know, like the,

01:11:53.720 the sort of like the hidden army trick is always a thing. Um, you know, Hannibal managed to slip,

01:11:58.780 Hannibal managed to slip, uh, the, the Romans at one point in the second Punic war by like tying

01:12:04.100 torches to, to some oxen and sending them off in the middle of the night. And then the Romans were 0.77

01:12:08.360 like, Oh, the army's leaving. And then, you know, it's just a bunch of oxen. In the Roman empire,

01:12:12.740 Octavian used coins as a tool for spreading fake news. He had slogans and messages printed on them to

01:12:16.880 discredit his political opponent, Marcus Antony. This strategy of using easily distributed small

01:12:22.060 items like coins to spread political messages is an early example of using medium for propaganda.

01:12:27.020 Just like you said earlier, the coins, how that was such a big thing. Exactly. And to think, Oh,

01:12:30.900 nobody would take a coin and make it fake to create a bad message. And that guy did. Absolutely. Yeah.

01:12:35.420 And, and I mean, and what Octavian was doing just then is making Mark Antony out to be no longer a

01:12:41.260 true Roman, because at this point, Antony has gone East and he's now hooked up with Cleopatra. And

01:12:46.820 the, and the Romans had this like very, uh, sort of like, I would not standoffish attitude towards

01:12:52.940 the East, but they were very much like, Oh, that's the like a feat, like a feminine, you know, 1.00

01:12:58.100 this like orientalized part of, you know, they're just into luxury and, and, and old, the old Roman 0.99

01:13:04.480 conservative guard was always trying to like protect Rome from like these Eastern ideals. Um, this is

01:13:10.340 sort of like what's rattling around in their heads. And Octavian uses this to great advantage because he

01:13:14.640 starts painting Mark Antony as somebody who is no longer truly a Roman. He's not, he's been,

01:13:19.540 he's been Easternized. He's been Orientalized. He's gone native over there with Cleopatra. Um, 0.98

01:13:24.700 you know, which was a little bit true. So propaganda was, there was propaganda then for sure.

01:13:28.760 Propaganda is relentless. Yeah, of course. Um, were they, you know, I'm sure they were probably

01:13:34.700 doing the equivalent of Photoshopping stuff too. Did regular people live in fear at the time? Did

01:13:39.800 they, because if you were just a peasant, it's a regular person was a lot of your life dictated

01:13:45.260 by what your gut, not, I guess. Yeah. Your, what your government chose kind of for you.

01:13:49.880 A lot of people who are just living their lives don't encounter the government at all. Right?

01:13:58.280 Like when we think about, especially like the high empire, the, the interaction between even the

01:14:04.960 imperial bureaucracy, let alone the emperor themselves, and really like these peasant

01:14:11.060 communities in Spain or in Gaul or in Syria or whatever, almost certainly you're not encountering

01:14:17.000 the Romans and, and Roman bureaucratic administrative anything at all. You're, you're going to encounter

01:14:22.880 your local elites because they're going to come around and ask you for taxes. And that's like,

01:14:27.160 that's the main thing is like, are you paying your taxes? Are the taxes of your community being

01:14:31.460 generated? Most of that work that was being done either by private contractors, which they had an

01:14:36.100 extensive private contracting operation to do tax, to do tax collection. Or it was the local elites

01:14:42.840 like who are doing this. So mostly you are just going about your own daily life. You, you're not

01:14:50.720 really thinking about the wider world at all. You're certainly not encountering the Romans in any real 0.71

01:14:57.600 way. And when we talk about sort of the tyrannical emperors, like the worst emperors,

01:15:01.120 like Nero and Caligula. And we hear these stories about how horrible they were to people. All of

01:15:08.540 that was being done to the senatorial class, right? The senatorial class were the people who were

01:15:13.180 actually in the orbit of the emperor, such that the emperor and the emperor's power could touch them

01:15:18.420 immediately. You could be arrested and you could be executed by a mad emperor at like at any time,

01:15:23.440 but that's not happening to peasants. It was, it was not about like the oppression of the people.

01:15:28.520 And in fact, if you want to, if we, if we really went back through it and really started doing like

01:15:33.820 revisions of what we think about things, there's definitely a revisionist case to be made for

01:15:37.320 Caligula. There's a revisionist case to be made for Nero that they were actually, if you talk to

01:15:43.360 regular people, they were like, we, we loved him. That guy was great. Um, he, he looked out for us.

01:15:49.260 He, he gave us money. The only people who don't like him are the senators because he's abusing the

01:15:53.900 senators, but who writes the history, the senator, the senators write the history. And so now we,

01:15:58.660 we hear all the bad things about these guys because they were mostly bad to the senatorial

01:16:02.920 class. You know, maybe they get into the equites a little bit, but I still love that the effects of

01:16:08.140 things fell on the higher ups, like even the higher ups, like you're saying, had to go out and fight the

01:16:14.980 battles, like still, cause it seems like now more the effects of things, right? Because it's so

01:16:19.740 capitalistic now that the effects of things fall on the lower class, but even then the effects of

01:16:23.760 things fell on the higher class. What were things that Nero and Caligula were accused of for being

01:16:28.420 bad? Oh, well, I mean, a lot of it is sort of arbitrary arrest and execution. That's always going

01:16:34.080 to be a fear. That's, that's bad. Um, just arresting people for no reason or whatever. Yeah. And

01:16:39.380 them killed type of thing. Yeah. And, and, you know, uh, for bad information, seizing, you know,

01:16:44.000 seizing property is a big one. Um, and then, you know, it's sort of like, there's always this,

01:16:49.840 they they're living too luxuriously. They're like, they're all they're doing is throwing parties and

01:16:54.700 not actually paying attention to, uh, to state craft and this, you know, and then, you know,

01:16:59.540 that's a, that's a, you know, that's a fair hit on Nero. Nero, Nero wanted to be a musician and an

01:17:04.780 actor. He did not want to be like an emperor necessarily. Like his passion was, was the liar.

01:17:10.100 Yeah. It's hard to go to open mic night when you're the emperor. Yeah. Yeah. But, but he kind

01:17:14.020 of did. And it was very embarrassing to, uh, to the Roman aristocracy that he would, he would

01:17:20.020 debase himself and give these performances because in Roman society, absolutely not counting the

01:17:26.500 slaves. Um, but the absolute lowest rung on in the Roman social order was like actors and

01:17:32.780 musicians. They were the lowest of the low and like B and like being caught around. And of course,

01:17:39.760 and people would slum it. Like, of course they would, you'd go down and slum it and you'd hang

01:17:43.200 out with these people. And Sulla very famously, like spent a lot of time slumming it with actors,

01:17:47.740 but this is like a disreputable thing for them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Big time. And then this is

01:17:52.140 again, one of those things it's like, it's completely flipped because now musicians and actors are,

01:17:57.220 you know, that's, that's, that's S tier level celebrity for us. But for them,

01:18:02.380 it was like, no, you, these, this is the scum of the earth. You got to keep these people 1.00

01:18:06.700 separate. Why was it looked at so poorly? You feel like, I don't actually know. It was just like,

01:18:12.540 it, it certainly, it's not productive in any way, you know, it's not real probably for one. It's like

01:18:19.820 they're pantomiming things. They're reenacting things. I bet it probably didn't have as much

01:18:26.140 value at a time when it was like, you know, we, we want the real, you know, you know, the grad,

01:18:32.120 there's no real gravitas here maybe. Yeah. But at the same time, like there's theaters everywhere

01:18:37.060 that like theaters are like, are like the thing that we have a lot of the time that is like left

01:18:41.500 over. So like they cared about drama. They cared about performance. They just like on the, on a social

01:18:47.480 level, they were just treated as really, really second, second rate, second class. And so for somebody

01:18:53.580 like Nero to be doing these things is really like, oh my God, that is not what we want him to do.

01:18:59.100 So this is, so this is Nero. But the people probably thought he was pretty relatable.

01:19:02.840 Yeah. Well, and he also, you know, he also spread the money around. Right. And he was,

01:19:06.540 he was good at that. So this is him, you know, playing the liar when Rome burns, uh, like this is

01:19:11.800 not true. Like he didn't actually do this. Uh, and I think, you know, it's, it's been, it's been a

01:19:17.340 minute since I've gone through the exact details of this, but Nero definitely was trying to

01:19:21.600 organize a fire relief in Rome when, cause the fire is real. Like, like Rome, Rome, Rome would

01:19:28.000 burn periodically. Like, but the Rome was burning. You always hear that term, right? Rome was burning.

01:19:32.860 Yeah. Rome burned a lot. It's, you know, wood, wood, wood burns and they don't exactly have fire

01:19:38.980 codes at the time. And so, you know, any little thing could, could set off a blaze and poor and

01:19:44.880 portions of the city would burn. And in fact, like if you look at the, the, um, sort of the buildings

01:19:50.800 that they would live in, because they did have kind of like tenement buildings a lot of the time.

01:19:54.700 What does tenement mean? Uh, just, you know, just like a multi-story housing unit. Okay. Right.

01:19:59.000 In, inside the city itself. Um, and these days the, where, where do the rich people live in,

01:20:05.100 in a building? They live upstairs. They live upstairs. They live in the penthouse, right? Like

01:20:08.600 that's, that's the best place you can be. Uh, during Roman times, that was the absolute worst place

01:20:12.540 you could be. And so if you, if you had money, you were living like on the ground floor. Why? Because if

01:20:17.040 there was a fire, you could get out, get out first. And if you're on the seventh floor and a fire

01:20:20.180 breaks out, I'm sorry, you're dead. Yeah. Dang. How did they get up and down through stairs and 0.93

01:20:25.120 stuff? Wow. Yeah. Stairs, ladders. And then there's like, there's great stories about, um,

01:20:30.460 you know, how, how to combat fires. Right. And combating fires was often sort of like private

01:20:35.280 companies, like private, basically like privately organized things. And, and Crassus, who's, you know,

01:20:40.560 very famous in Roman history. He was connected to Pompey the Great and Caesar in this thing called the,

01:20:45.520 the triumvirate. And they are a major force in, you know, sort of collapsing the Republic and

01:20:51.080 turning it into an empire. Each one of them thought they were using the other two to advance their own

01:20:56.080 interests. And then only, and then Caesar is the one who winds up getting killed. It's like a

01:21:01.280 Spider-Man meme kind of like that. Did you ever do Game of Thrones? Yeah. Great. So there's a part in

01:21:06.840 Game of Thrones in the very first season where that guy gets like the molten gold, like poured down his,

01:21:11.600 okay. So that's Crassus. That's the death of Crassus. That's where that comes from.

01:21:15.180 And is that supposedly true? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's allegedly true because he goes off and tries

01:21:18.840 to conquer, uh, Syria and winds up, or he tries to conquer Parthia and winds up getting caught. And

01:21:25.040 Crassus was the richest man in Rome, right? This is a thing about like, Crassus is one of the richest

01:21:30.620 people who ever lived. He acquired most of his, you know, real estate portfolio during a thing called the

01:21:36.740 Sullen prescriptions when he was in charge of going around and finding the enemies of Sulla and killing

01:21:41.260 them. And he would often find that the enemies of Sulla were people who had really nice estates that

01:21:45.760 he would like to own. Right. And this is what he would do. And once he's, you know, sort of past

01:21:50.940 that phase, he had a little fire brigade and your house would be burning down. And this fire brigade

01:21:57.560 would come around and say like, well, give us money. We'll put it out. And if you don't, then we won't.

01:22:02.100 So like mafia style. Yep. And there's definitely, you know, stories that these fires were being started

01:22:07.720 on purpose. And then he would send his little fire brigades in, or he would say, sign over the

01:22:13.020 deed to this place and we'll put the fire out. Right. Then you can have your stuff, but I'm going

01:22:17.200 to own the property. That flame mafia. Yeah, man. And like this, and this is how, this is how you get

01:22:22.180 rich. There, there is, I mean, there is a thing like no great for like all great fortunes begin with a

01:22:27.000 crime. And that's, I've largely found that to be true. I think that that still is true today. Wow.

01:22:32.880 Wow. That's wild, dude. And crassus, that's where we get the term crass from?

01:22:37.420 That I do not know, actually. Where does that come from? Crass? Because people say that's so crass.

01:22:43.480 Crass, the only true punk. Late 15th century, in the sense, dense or coarse from Latin, crassus.

01:22:49.620 I'm solid or thick. Okay. I mean, it comes from the same word then.

01:22:52.380 So probably maybe not far off. Dense. Stupid, insensitive, blundering. I mean, yeah.

01:22:58.920 Who knows? But that's how he allegedly died. They poured that gold down him.

01:23:01.920 Yeah. Because he was captured. Really? So what, take me through that. What, what was that story?

01:23:06.100 Oh, well, like I said, if you wanted to be a major political player in Rome,

01:23:11.600 you needed to win battles, right? That was the currency. That was the currency of the realm in

01:23:16.800 terms of like your political influence. Caesar had gone off and conquered Gaul. You know,

01:23:21.400 he did some light genocide along the way, which is, you know, not so great. Yeah. But he was

01:23:26.040 definitely winning battles on behalf of Rome and conquering territory for Rome. That makes him huge.

01:23:30.920 Pompey the Great had a whole resume of battles that he could point to and say, like, I did this for

01:23:36.560 Rome and that for Rome. I conquered the pirates. I conquered all this territory in the East. And

01:23:40.060 that's why I'm Pompey the Great. And Crassus was rich and Crassus wanted in on political power. Of

01:23:46.400 course he did. But he didn't really have a great military victory to point to and say, this is what

01:23:52.860 I've done. Because when he was consul, the war that he had to fight was the war against Spartacus

01:23:58.200 and the slaves, which is not the same as going off and conquering, you know, some, some group of

01:24:04.820 people far away. Like you're just fighting slaves. Like, is that even really that big of a deal? So if

01:24:09.320 you watch Spartacus, right, the movie Spartacus, like Crassus. Michael Douglas. Yeah. Yeah. So, so

01:24:13.180 Crassus is, you know, are probably the main. With Kirk Douglas, sorry. Yeah. Kirk Douglas. Yeah. He's the

01:24:18.800 main antagonist. Like he's the one who's fighting against Spartacus. And so that wasn't

01:24:22.840 that great of a moment. And so he's still looking for, he's triumph hunting. He's still trying to

01:24:29.980 figure out what he can do. And so he, he, so he picks the Parthians were basically the heirs of 0.91

01:24:35.360 the Persian empire who then become the Sassanids is now basically like Iran who control things all 0.99

01:24:41.340 the way into Mesopotamia. And so Crassus is going to try to go in and take Mesopotamia and conquer that

01:24:46.800 for the Romans. And he was led astray and he made some mistakes and his legions were

01:24:52.840 defeated and he died. And then they tell this story about having gold poured down his throat,

01:24:57.460 which to tie this all the way back to what we were talking about at the beginning and how Roman

01:25:01.560 history was morality tales more than it was like a factual accounting of events. Look what happened

01:25:08.680 to the richest man in Rome. Look at what happened to the man who spent his entire life doing nothing

01:25:13.300 but trying to acquire money. He died in the desert having molten gold poured down his throat.

01:25:19.700 Right. Which is like, could you be happier? Your life's over. Here you go.

01:25:22.560 So what's the lesson to be learned from that? You know, maybe dial back the greed a little bit

01:25:27.120 and you won't die like that. You'll die like Caesar stabbed many times in the back by your best

01:25:32.220 friends. But still a little more respected. But maybe a little more of a respectable death. 0.98

01:25:37.620 What inventions or practices did they start in Rome that we still have today?

01:25:42.740 A lot of things that the Romans were doing, you know, are still around. Like they were,

01:25:47.780 they were great at aqueducts. They were brilliant at road building. I think like Roman concrete is

01:25:53.120 still like a legendary, a legendary mixture for, for keeping things together.

01:25:59.660 Yeah. Bring that up about concrete in Rome. That's fascinating.

01:26:02.080 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Roman concrete.

01:26:04.220 Ancient Roman concrete, a blend of volcanic ash, lime, and aggregate was a remarkable building material

01:26:10.020 that enabled the construction of massive, enduring structures like the Pantheon and Colosseum.

01:26:15.960 Its longevity stems from the interaction of lime, volcanic ash, and seawater, which promotes the

01:26:20.740 growth of minerals like tobermorite that seal cracks and strengthen the concrete. Modern concrete,

01:26:26.800 in contrast, often relies on Portland cement, which is more prone to degradation.

01:26:31.540 Yeah. I mean, Roman concrete was like better than what we have.

01:26:35.620 Oh, yeah.

01:26:36.220 A couple of grams of that.

01:26:37.180 Yeah. And so, and so the Romans are like brilliant engineers, like brilliant engineers. They're, 0.97

01:26:42.000 they're road building, they're, they're monumental building.

01:26:45.200 And they take pride in it too.

01:26:46.860 Yeah, very much so. And like through all, they're maintaining the roads through all of this.

01:26:51.560 They're maintaining these buildings through like all of this. And, and-

01:26:55.160 So a lot of civil engineering going on.

01:26:56.700 A lot of civil engineering going on, like a lot. And building projects, like this was another way,

01:27:02.100 you know, like I said, like, like military victory is the main thing. But if you were an up and coming

01:27:07.440 politician and you wanted to get your name out there and you wanted people to know who you were

01:27:11.200 and the great thing you were doing, you would sponsor things. You would sponsor games, you would

01:27:15.320 sponsor, you would sponsor, you know, like a, like a, like chariot races, or you could construct

01:27:20.820 like a building. And then that building would have your name on it. The Appian Way is called the

01:27:24.540 Appian Way because a guy called Appian, like started its construction. The Flaminian Way is called the

01:27:29.700 Flaminian Way because that guy started construction of it. And so it was another way to, to demonstrate

01:27:36.900 how rich, how important, how powerful you were and how much you were committed to improving the

01:27:43.140 well-being of your society, like improving the society you were living. And so to commission a

01:27:47.200 great work like this and then have it, you know, be carried out to the end, this is, this is a way

01:27:51.600 that you would spread your own name.

01:27:52.920 Yeah. And now we've kind of flipped it where they'll name a street after you if they choose

01:27:56.500 to kind of.

01:27:57.000 Right. It's an, it's an honor to have something named after you as a, but, but we definitely

01:28:00.880 still have people, you know, like if, if you look at like universities, like where are they

01:28:05.140 getting their, because if you call it the so-and-so and so-and-so building.

01:28:09.000 Like the Bob Craft or whatever, Bill Gates or something.

01:28:10.900 Yeah, exactly. And that, and that's, it's exactly the same kind of vanity and name spreading

01:28:15.280 that the Romans bring. 1.00

01:28:16.620 Gulf of America.

01:28:17.240 Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Um, but you know, one of the other interesting things about the Romans

01:28:23.520 and like the ancient world in general is that we, you know, we have this very sort of like

01:28:28.200 technological progressive mentality.

01:28:30.980 Yes. Like modern, like modern society.

01:28:32.840 I just interviewed Mark Zuckerberg the other day.

01:28:34.320 Okay. Great. Like.

01:28:35.660 So it was crazy. I'm like sitting in front of literally, and this is the, I felt like this,

01:28:39.280 an emperor.

01:28:39.860 Okay. Well, he, that's what he would like you to think. He's really big on Roman history. And

01:28:44.200 I think he kind of thinks that he's Augustus. He's got the haircut.

01:28:47.240 He, he's done the reading. Like I know this about Zuckerberg.

01:28:50.780 Yeah. Oh, it was fascinating. I mean, there's some little things you see right now. You see

01:28:53.960 like, uh, Bernie Sanders is preaching against like these oligarchs, you know, when you see,

01:28:58.680 um, yeah. So he's the Grot guy and you see like, there's a lot of, uh, uh, like people

01:29:04.980 that just have so much wealth and a lot of it is in tech, you know? And I believe that

01:29:09.460 we've kind of become this privatized communism, right? That's a thing that I believe it's like

01:29:14.280 a lot of people are like, uh, you know, I feel like the government is, you know, it's

01:29:22.240 almost, I'm not saying it's disappearing, but people are having to hire their own fire

01:29:27.460 departments to take care of their buildings. Now it's like, it's getting more privatized

01:29:31.280 than it is public public.

01:29:33.560 Yeah. Oh yeah. A lot of our commitment to universal civic values has declined, has declined.

01:29:39.380 And if, and if we can privatize it, we will privatize it. And if we can turn this thing

01:29:43.620 that used to be just a public utility or a public good or a public space and make it private

01:29:48.560 so that we can make money off of it, we will definitely do those things.

01:29:52.980 Right. And I don't know if, but it doesn't feel like our government's doing any, I mean,

01:29:55.660 they are doing some stuff, but it feels like our, it's all become privatized now, which

01:30:00.340 is kind of crazy, you know, and that's very scary. Um, anyway, where, where are we going?

01:30:04.080 Oh, but the point I was going to make is that, is that for the last couple of hundred years

01:30:07.220 really coming out of like the enlightenment, we have a very, uh, progressive mentality that,

01:30:12.840 that we want to improve things. We want to reform things. We're, we're having these great

01:30:16.580 technological breakthroughs and like our society and our lives are driven by rapid technological

01:30:22.840 progression. You know, we lived through, you know, like when I was born, there's not really

01:30:27.780 personal computers. They don't even exist. Like, you know, and then personal computers

01:30:31.380 come along and the internet comes along. And before that it was TV. And before that it was

01:30:34.560 cars. And so you, you, you know, every generation is living like a very different life because

01:30:41.000 of all of this technological progress. And we just assume that's the way things are. And

01:30:46.220 like, so, but then you go back to the Roman empire and you go back to the Roman world and

01:30:49.960 yeah, they tinkered with stuff and they improved things and, you know, they would do things

01:30:54.680 like, you know, make this better form of concrete. So I don't want to say that they were not interested

01:30:58.900 in like invention or improvement, but they kind of fundamentally had like a small C conservative

01:31:04.520 approach to the world that they wanted today to be like yesterday. And they wanted tomorrow

01:31:10.760 to be like today. They liked that space. There's a stasis there that that's what they were aiming

01:31:16.200 for. And especially the political elite want things to just, you know, just basically stay the

01:31:21.400 same. And so they're not really aggressively trying to, you know, they didn't have like

01:31:26.520 legions of inventors, you know, they're not constantly trying to like invent a new way to

01:31:31.620 do things the way that we, you know, we've got, you know, scientists, we've got institutions,

01:31:36.160 we've got people who are constantly trying to make a better world for us. And the Romans.

01:31:42.440 Right. And at the cost though, of a lot of stasis, it feels like a lot of times it's like

01:31:45.960 things have become so, you know, it feels, I don't know, at the cost of almost homeostasis

01:31:52.160 completely sometimes. Cause it feels like you're not human sometimes, sometimes like at a certain

01:31:56.260 point, it's like how much technology I'm good. Yeah. Yep. I, I mean, I, I think we're due for,

01:32:02.500 for a little bit of a reset. You know, I would love to get away from having a screen in my pocket

01:32:07.060 all the time. And it's annoying because, you know, like I've got kids and so like, I always have to

01:32:12.500 have my phone on me because I could get a call from the school, like at any moment, like I could,

01:32:16.040 there's an emergency at any moment. And so I got to have the thing that is like my phone,

01:32:19.460 that's my communication device with me. But then it's also like this stupid thing that is just 0.99

01:32:24.740 designed to be addictive. And the next thing you know, you're just staring at the screen because 0.99

01:32:28.660 they're like the most fascinating thing that we can look at with our eyeballs. And so what I want,

01:32:34.520 there was, there was this very, uh, now we're really getting off on it, but there was a very

01:32:38.320 specific moment in like cell phone technology where we had, it was kind of like the Blackberry

01:32:42.840 T-Mobile sidekick. Exactly. Where we had, yeah, where we've got, cause I want to be able to text,

01:32:47.440 you know, cause I don't want to talk to you on the phone. A lot of the time I want to text with you.

01:32:50.740 Yeah. It's nice. So, so I need a QWERTY keyboard because I don't want to do like the three tap to,

01:32:55.080 that we had to do like in the late nineties and early. Insane. If you saw someone doing that now,

01:32:58.300 you would literally euthanize them. Yeah. You would drop him off on the trash pile.

01:33:04.200 Yeah. 17 year olds, but it is kind of proof that like humans can kind of get good at anything if

01:33:08.920 it's what they need to do. Like 17 year olds in 2003, being able to run the little like ABC thing

01:33:14.780 and just like fire off texts. Like I was never even that good at it, but have it. So having the

01:33:18.980 QWERTY keyboard, being able to make a phone, be able, being able to make a phone call, be able to

01:33:22.460 text, but then not have it be like a screen that is my window into the world. Yeah. That would,

01:33:28.060 that would actually feel great. It really would. Yeah. I wonder if there's a point where technology,

01:33:32.640 they don't even think of what happened. I mean, it, I wonder if it's a point where

01:33:36.480 being human is just like, ah, we're good. It, you know, just like it goes. And then it just,

01:33:42.080 you know, it's like, nah, we're it's, you know what I'm saying? Like at a certain point,

01:33:45.260 just whatever's inside of us that wants to be human has just been pushed too far. It just,

01:33:49.920 the governor strikes and it just comes back. And we just pop back because fundamentally we're human.

01:33:54.100 And I, I think we're experiencing that some with AI, you know, the, the, the things that AI is,

01:34:00.640 is putting out there. I mean, we're looking at it now. God knows if that stuff is even true

01:34:05.160 because a lot of what AI is spitting out is just like garbage slop that's being fed off of its own, 0.98

01:34:10.060 like pack of lies. Or it's data, but it's data can be manipulated. Yeah, exactly. And, but,

01:34:15.360 but being a human being and encountering other human beings and encountering the artistic work

01:34:20.080 of other human beings, like there, there is a difference between a poem that is written by AI

01:34:23.540 and a poem that is written by a person. And we can, we can feel that. And you know, this like lie,

01:34:28.360 like going out and doing like live events and like live music performances and, and live,

01:34:33.800 live comedic performances. There's nothing like a room full of people who are all participating

01:34:38.220 in the same thing together. That's really the essence of the good stuff of life. And we've

01:34:44.580 always been communal creatures. We've always wanted to come together in these ways. And so

01:34:48.080 I do think that those kinds of direct human interactions, like inherently matter more to us

01:34:53.880 and we will be more willing to shed. But of course we're all addicted to it right now,

01:34:58.320 which is the problem. And addiction is a hell of a drug. Yeah. Shit. Hell yeah, it is. I'm all so

01:35:03.060 much addicted to everything, but I'll probably okay. But, um, speaking of communal things, tell me,

01:35:09.440 take me into like the call us, take me into how we get into the Roman empire. How do you get into

01:35:14.540 it? Like from the, from the Republic. Oh, how do we get into it? Oh God. Not like if, if you're in

01:35:19.760 Germany, how do you get to the Republic? Well, you got to go through the limus germanicus. You 0.62

01:35:22.980 probably got to check in with a legionary and then they let you cross and, you know, trade your

01:35:26.240 wares. And then you go back and you pick up some amber from proto Russians. And then you bring that 0.96

01:35:29.520 back. Yeah. You know, yeah, yeah. You just stop off at a brothel and it's great. Um, did they have 1.00

01:35:35.280 brothels then? Of course. Yeah. Brothels are everywhere. Always. Especially around legionary camps. 1.00

01:35:40.160 Really? Of course. For the war? For just being a soldier. Yeah. Um, and a lot of times it's,

01:35:45.780 you know, are they cool or what were they like? Do they have AC in there? No AC, huh? They have AC,

01:35:49.760 in the brothels. That's crazy. I'm sorry. It's stupid. No, they did not. It was hot in there.

01:35:54.080 But they have a cold guy that's fucking. Well, they, you know, with, you know, their, you know, 1.00

01:35:58.400 their baths were incredible. Oh, really? Yeah, sure. And they, they had like, you know, Roman,

01:36:03.460 Roman baths had like a, a tepidarium and a frigidarium and the frigidarium is like the cold

01:36:08.360 room and the cold bath. And you could go in there and, and cool off. And they would do this,

01:36:12.340 like the hot plunge and the cold plunge. And, you know, they, they had this all down to a science,

01:36:16.400 man. That's one of them. Yeah. They, they did understand. They did

01:36:19.740 understand how to make a good bath house. That is absolutely true. And were the brothels hooked 1.00

01:36:24.800 to the bath house a lot of times? Uh, I, that, I don't know. Probably they were close to each

01:36:30.620 other, you know, but I don't want somebody to now send me an email and be like, no, that's not

01:36:35.780 actually for the brothel. Oh, people are sick. I hope that, I mean, I don't know. Okay. I mean, 0.98

01:36:39.940 I, yeah, they seem, both seem pretty good. Um, Oh, there you go. According to the AI,

01:36:45.740 right. Who knows? Who knows if it's true?

01:36:50.340 It's crazy, man. I thought about this years ago. I thought people are like, well, people can make

01:36:54.360 information. That's not true. Right. But then I thought, what if the paper can adjust the

01:37:01.680 information you put on it? That's what I started to think. This is like about three years ago. I

01:37:05.120 started to say, well, at some point, but the imagine you wrote a letter to somebody, but then

01:37:09.680 the paper got to determine what you actually said. Right. That's the kind of place I feel like we're

01:37:13.700 entering where it's like, you can say whatever you want, but now the paper and whoever owns the

01:37:18.700 paper, they can construct the ink to create whatever the, you're not allowed to say, but what can be

01:37:27.200 said. Yeah. The next, the information environment of the next 10, 15, 20 years is going to be really

01:37:34.040 tough to navigate, even for people who are bright and who know what's going on. Um, it's going to get

01:37:39.880 tricky. It's going to get very tricky because these AI machines are going to be feeding off of

01:37:43.660 themselves and they are going to be fed bad information that they will then spit out in

01:37:47.620 very authoritative ways. And there are, you know, this is going to trick human consciousness into

01:37:53.040 thinking that what you're looking at is a true thing. It's a true statement. It's already happening

01:37:57.140 heavily already. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We, we all believe. And, and the thing is, is like,

01:38:01.740 you know, I've been tricked by things. I'm sure you've been tricked by things and I'm, I'm fairly

01:38:05.640 conscious of, of like what I'm paying attention to and, and, and how this is all being manipulated.

01:38:10.480 I'm not illiterate or anything. And I'll get tricked by a video and then I'll be upset about

01:38:13.500 it. And now I'm animated about it. And then somebody like, that's not even real. And then,

01:38:17.520 and then we're stuck in this place where it's like anything cool that you see, you know, on an

01:38:24.360 Instagram reel or like on a Tik TOK, you're like, okay, well that's probably fake. You know, that

01:38:28.400 probably never happened. That probably is fake. That probably never happened. And now, and now we're in a

01:38:32.420 place where we don't trust anything, even real things. And people are like, no, this really

01:38:35.560 cool thing happened. It's like, yeah, probably not though. So that where does that leave us?

01:38:39.360 Right. Not, not trusting anything or anyone for any reason, but also believing everything for every

01:38:44.640 reason. Like this is perfect time for a simulation theory. Perfect time to, to talk to historians

01:38:50.820 and see if we can't figure out how to pick our way through this mess, because we've gone through

01:38:56.500 stuff like this before. And it's like outside of my specific area of expertise, but like when the

01:39:00.820 printing press came along, you know, very similar issues came out of the arrival of the printing

01:39:06.840 press where the Catholic church used to be able to control all information. And now suddenly kind 0.63

01:39:11.020 of anybody can print anything. And, um, you know, what's being put out there, what people are

01:39:16.720 reading. There was, there was no controls on it. There was, there was no fact checking to any of

01:39:20.700 this stuff. And that's a great point. If something was printed on paper, you almost thought it was

01:39:23.880 true just because it was written down. Sure. Yeah. If, if it's in a book, it must be true.

01:39:27.760 So, you know, that, that kind of mentality and, and we come out of like the end of an era where

01:39:32.940 there is robust and extensive editorial vetting of like a lot of things, like certainly in the

01:39:38.220 newspaper and like right now or earlier, earlier, like, you know, probably, you know, like through

01:39:41.960 the 20th century, right. There's, there's robust checks. And even though there's like, there's an

01:39:47.220 elite ideological consensus and like what is allowed to be printed and what is not allowed to be

01:39:51.880 printed is a part of like a cold war consensus, like all of this stuff. Um, but you know, if you're

01:39:56.920 reading it in the newspaper, there's a very good chance that it's true. And it was fact

01:40:00.880 checked and there had, they have sources. And now the things that you fire up and read,

01:40:05.020 no idea where any of this stuff is coming from.

01:40:06.640 Who knows where any of it's coming from.

01:40:07.860 And a lot of them I notice are created just by some automat, like a bot or something.

01:40:13.360 Like I'll see things of myself online with quotes that I've never said.

01:40:16.660 Sure.

01:40:17.140 And I'll see it shared thousands of times or commented on. And it's like, I never said that.

01:40:22.040 Yep. You know, I'll see like news articles that have been put together. It's all misinformation

01:40:26.600 about a celebrity or about a place that you could go visit or something. And it's all,

01:40:31.500 it's a complete lie, but you'll see it has 30,000 views. Like what is that's, it's just crazy to

01:40:37.360 think. Oh, I don't want to forget. What was, did take me into the Coliseum. What was that like?

01:40:42.400 Did people go to it? Was everyone allowed?

01:40:45.220 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Coliseum is open.

01:40:47.460 And why did it happen? Why did they build a Coliseum?

01:40:50.080 Um, so, well, because they're Rome and they are hugely wealthy and hugely powerful. And so they

01:40:56.280 need to have the biggest, you know, theater. So it was like Texas. We want to have the biggest

01:41:01.020 thing. Yeah. We want to, we want to have the biggest thing going, right? That's, that's what

01:41:06.040 we want to have. Um, the Coliseum is a, is like a later edition. Like it doesn't come until the

01:41:11.160 Imperial times. Um, in the 400s, when was the Coliseum? No, no. The Coliseum is, you know,

01:41:16.220 in the first century, um, is when it's coming around. It's like, uh, Vespasian, um, is the

01:41:21.900 one who kind of kicks off that project. And then it takes many, many years, uh, to, to

01:41:27.060 get built. Vespasian also famously, um, when he was collecting taxes off of the urine that

01:41:32.200 they would collect and people were like, that's a little disrupt.

01:41:34.780 Are they were collecting urine?

01:41:35.960 When they're collecting urine so that they could do all the, um, so they could wash the clothes,

01:41:40.020 right? And he would collect a little tax on that and he would get money and be like,

01:41:42.500 oh, that's kind of a gross way to make money. And he goes, money does not smell.

01:41:45.760 Right. So, and so he also started construction of the, uh, of the Coliseum, but so they do

01:41:50.020 this. So in Roman society, like these games, right? Gladiatorial games, um, you know, the

01:41:56.160 chariot races, all of these things are tied to religious ritual, right? It's, it's all a 0.97

01:42:01.360 part of these religious rituals and performances that, that were integral parts of their society.

01:42:07.960 And so a lot of these games are in honor of this or that God, right? And we're making

01:42:12.760 sacrifices to the gods. That's sort of the origin point of all of this stuff.

01:42:17.880 Was that true or do you think it was just a selling point?

01:42:20.680 Well, it's, it starts that way for sure. I think, I think it's, it starts out as very much

01:42:26.660 a religious obligation and a religious thing. And it turns into, you know, I do think that there's

01:42:33.940 probably just mere lips. Like if you're, if you're a spectator, like, you know, you're there to see

01:42:38.540 the action, right? They're, they were sports fans, right? We all, anybody who's a sports fan

01:42:43.740 would fit right in, in ancient Rome because the Romans were nuts for sports. They love 0.94

01:42:48.920 gladiatorial combat. They love chariot races. The best gladiators were famous celebrities. The best

01:42:54.240 chariot racers were famous celebrities. And as, as you sort of go forward and get over into the

01:42:59.160 Byzantine empire, I mean, there were, there were warring political factions that were tied to

01:43:04.280 chariot teams, you know, like there was a huge riot in Constantinople between, uh, chariot teams that

01:43:10.800 was very politicized. So they took, they took all this stuff like very, very seriously and throwing

01:43:17.140 these games was a way to bring people in and entertain them. So that, I mean, a little bit so

01:43:23.920 that, you know, it's the opiate of the masses kind of stuff. Um, speaking as a sports fan who enjoys

01:43:29.800 sports, I think that there's quite a bit more going on inside of sports than just like, oh, this is

01:43:36.100 just a distraction by the ruling class to trick you into not paying attention to what's really going on.

01:43:40.800 It's like, no, I mean, feats of athletic strength are like pretty sweet, right? Like, yeah. Like watching

01:43:45.780 great athletes be great athletes is like pretty cool, right? It's like the pinnacle of what the human

01:43:50.740 body can do. And I, I love that stuff. And if, if you can get passionately committed to, to something

01:43:56.080 that is happening down there, then I think that that's really fun, especially if you're doing it

01:43:59.560 with like your friends and neighbors and parts of your community. I think sports is actually a really

01:44:03.800 cool, great part of civic life. Yeah. And it's entertainment as well. I mean, it's, yeah, you

01:44:07.500 marvel at some of them. Yeah. You yourself maybe played something at some point so you can envision

01:44:12.220 yourself or live vicariously through them. I mean, you watch, you watch, you watch some, I mean,

01:44:16.380 I'm not even like a football fan, but you watch some wide receiver sprinting down the line,

01:44:21.600 doing an over the shoulder catch while tiptoeing both of his lines, like inbounds, making the

01:44:28.100 catch, like, like this stuff is like crazy. And you're like, you watch it and you're like,

01:44:31.980 this is just inherently cool. Like, don't tell me this is just-

01:44:35.160 Home or erotic too many times.

01:44:36.240 I mean, they are fit, aren't they?

01:44:39.020 Yeah, they are. But so, but so that kind of stuff, like that kind of like, you know,

01:44:44.360 enjoying sports in that way and competition in that way is a very, is a very human thing.

01:44:49.900 And the Romans were huge, huge for it. So that's where the Coliseum comes from.

01:44:53.160 Is it true that the animals would fight the people and stuff?

01:44:55.960 I mean, this stuff gets into like, those were usually like, I mean, it's, it's overblown.

01:45:01.200 Like when you see it in the gladiator movies, like certainly things would go on, but those

01:45:05.500 were usually like if, if the exotic animals, so like exotic animals absolutely brought in to

01:45:10.680 the mix. Okay.

01:45:11.700 Which, you know, showing off an exotic animal is both, take a look at this exotic animal.

01:45:16.640 Isn't that cool? But also think about how much I had to do, how powerful and influential I needed

01:45:22.240 to be to bring elephants to you, to bring tigers to you. Like, like this, like, aren't you impressed

01:45:28.300 with what I've been able to do?

01:45:29.940 So really showing off your wealth.

01:45:31.360 Exactly. Like you're really showing it off. So there, but there would be hunts, right? And

01:45:35.440 there would be like hunting sort of exhibitions, like great, you know, great archers taken.

01:45:40.880 And they would go out and shoot tigers. That's, that's usually, at least my understanding of

01:45:45.760 what would go on. And as opposed to send a gladiator out there and have them fight, but

01:45:50.280 you know, it definitely did happen.

01:45:52.740 How much of ancient history from Rome is factual, do you think? Or how much was adjusted to make

01:45:59.080 things look a certain way?

01:46:00.660 That's a, you know, I don't know what percentage I could give on things. You know, how much of it is

01:46:06.940 true? Like some of it for sure, because we can independently verify it from inscriptions and from

01:46:13.660 other sort of physical evidence. But like I said at the beginning, what, what the Roman and Greek

01:46:21.600 historians were mostly interested in was, was telling these morality tales about how to live

01:46:27.020 a contemporaneous, how to live in contemporary society rather than sort of fidelity to the

01:46:32.820 objective truth. Like this is what really happened. Now that said, they cared a lot about, you know,

01:46:38.940 like they were looking through documents the same way that historians do today. You know,

01:46:43.360 Livius, or excuse me, like Polybius is, is interviewing people. He's, he's looking at documents

01:46:47.820 and they are trying to tell a correct story. I think that they're just, they're, they're definitely

01:46:53.620 trying to do it. But if the, if the sort of morality tale runs into the facts, like which is

01:46:59.380 going to win, they're going to massage it towards the morality tale. And then you have to sit down

01:47:03.580 and you have to ask yourself, okay, well, what, where did this person come from? What is their own

01:47:08.160 social position? What is, you know, what is their own family connections? There's a, for some reason,

01:47:14.220 we keep going back to Livy because he's just apparently on the forefront of my mind, but

01:47:19.240 there's a description of the battle of Cannae, which is Cannae, C-A-N-N-A-E. Okay. And this is 0.95

01:47:27.500 one of the greatest defeats in Roman history. This is Hannibal is defeating the Romans. He just

01:47:34.520 absolutely wipes them out there. And this is during the second Punic war. And the story that Livy tells 0.91

01:47:39.780 is about one particular Roman consul who was basically an idiot and caused all of this to 1.00

01:47:45.660 happen. Right. The one consul did not want to go into battle. The other consul did want to go into 1.00

01:47:50.180 battle and they, they alternated days of who was in charge. Right. So it's like you're, I'm in charge

01:47:55.900 on Monday. You're in charge on Tuesday. I'm in charge on Wednesday. And so the guy, yeah. So the guy who

01:48:00.740 was in charge on Wednesday was like, we're going into battle. And you couldn't argue with him because he

01:48:04.100 was the consul and he was in charge that day. And then they get wiped out by Hannibal. And then you

01:48:09.620 go look into Livy's past and his own family tree. And you find out that he's maybe trying to make

01:48:15.420 one of his ancestors look better than they actually were. So this is a, this, and this is actually like,

01:48:21.260 if you lean into it, this is one of the, it is a fun part of sort of deconstructing and decoding

01:48:27.080 these things. If you really get into it, this stuff is fun. It's kind of, it's, it's entertaining

01:48:31.300 and it's interesting. You have to examine the author and some of his motivations and how much

01:48:34.780 would he be willing to adjust things and possibly why? And then you have to put that on the same

01:48:39.320 scale on the other side of the scale of the facts and information that you do have.

01:48:43.580 The book that I'm writing right now, which is about the crisis of the third century has like

01:48:47.960 a missing battle that we have to contend with, where there's this huge inscription of, of these

01:48:54.060 great Sassanid Kings, this guy Sharpur and Artashir who have this like huge monuments that were

01:49:00.620 built to them. And then on the side of these cliffs, they etched in huge letters, like basically

01:49:05.000 their resume, all of their accomplishments, all the things that they did. And one of the things

01:49:09.640 references this battle where they defeated the Romans. And then you go look through the Roman

01:49:15.660 historical record and it's patchy at the time, right? This is one of the things about the crisis

01:49:19.920 of the third century is we don't have a ton of information because it was so chaotic and, but we

01:49:24.640 don't have any reference to this battle. And, and they're specifically referencing like which

01:49:29.840 emperor was defeated. So it's like, who's lying? Are the Romans trying to cover up a defeat by not

01:49:36.000 mentioning it? Or is this, did this guy just make up a battle to tell his own people, look, I defeated

01:49:41.360 the Romans this time too. And I, he did beat the Romans many times. Like we just, we don't. And the

01:49:47.140 thing is, we don't know. We, with absent a time machine, there's, there's ambiguity in the historical

01:49:52.820 record at all times. And this is, you know, again, like when you become a real sicko for history, 0.57

01:50:00.080 you stop needing history to be just an objective set of events. Like, just tell me what happened is,

01:50:08.040 is something that like, take out your ideological biases, like take this out, like, just tell me the

01:50:13.220 facts. That never happens. And it can never happen because humans are always going to be writing in

01:50:19.340 their own subconscious biases. When we pick and choose what information to share, when we pick

01:50:24.860 and choose how to frame a certain event, nobody can ever just sit down. Even me, like, and as I'm just

01:50:31.380 trying to tell you the facts of Roman history, of course, my little biases are coming into it.

01:50:35.520 Of course, my opinions are coming into it. There's no, there's no sort of escaping that. And once you

01:50:40.600 understand that it's inescapable, then it just becomes a layer to have an even greater understanding

01:50:46.340 of the human condition in human society, which is, I think what we're really after when we study

01:50:50.560 history. Oh, yeah, that's fascinating. I was going to ask you kind of what makes a good historian,

01:50:54.740 but obviously one of the things is being able to recognize that you're not going to be able to get

01:50:59.040 something absolute because it's kind of impossible. Yeah. And, and at the end of the day,

01:51:05.920 it's impossible. Now, leading up to that, like what makes a good historian? Yeah. Fidelity to the facts,

01:51:11.500 fidelity to the sources, like don't say something if you don't have a source backing it up, go to the

01:51:18.160 primary sources, read those primary sources, try to present those sources in as accurate a way as

01:51:23.940 possible. And so it's absolutely not the case that professional historians are just running around out

01:51:28.860 there only publishing their biases, right? Only doing things in the service of their own political

01:51:34.220 or social beliefs. Most historians, most of the time are trying to do that project of like, I just want

01:51:41.240 to, I want to examine this. I want to examine the evidence and I want to talk about it. It's just

01:51:46.840 at the, it's an impossible dream, but moving towards that dream in a, in a way that is rooted

01:51:54.520 in the facts is really important. And that does make a good historian for sure. Yeah. We certainly

01:52:00.020 got off that path in the past 20 years where it's like it felt like news outlets had, it used to feel

01:52:06.360 like it was real information and it was factual and it wasn't biased. And then they went down this

01:52:10.780 other road. It felt like, you know? Um, but then it's always been like, can you trust your

01:52:15.600 government? Can you trust the reporting? Can you trust these, you know, the councils that are running

01:52:21.240 things, you know, who can you trust, you know? And that's, it feels, it seems like from listening

01:52:25.280 to you that it's, that's kind of, it's always been some version of that since the beginning. Um,

01:52:32.460 certainly through, uh, through Roman times when, you know, you, you always hear people say now,

01:52:39.340 well, um, we're going to fall Rome fell, uh, the society, American society will fall. Um,

01:52:46.680 what comparisons do you see between the two or what, or is there any like footprints in the sand

01:52:53.240 that you can, that you can follow to see a path, to see like a, a, a story arc of how societies

01:53:00.920 fall? Do we like, are we parallel enough to Rome to even have the same trajectory as them?

01:53:09.220 What do you think about some of that? There, there is, I mean, like, it's like both simultaneously,

01:53:16.020 right? Because on the one hand, all civilizations and all societies are unique unto themselves.

01:53:23.120 And it's not the case that we just are reliving some thing over and over again, that there,

01:53:29.200 there actually is like a, a cycle to these things that is objectively true. And, and we're just

01:53:34.280 sort of bit players in a, in a, in a historical, uh, historical force that's beyond our control.

01:53:40.100 Um, but also we are humans who have come together and humans are often behave in very similar ways

01:53:45.940 and respond to certain things in very similar ways. And yeah, I mean, Rome is a huge civilization

01:53:51.140 that we see the entire course of it from, from its founding, to its growth, to its peak,

01:53:55.640 to its decline, to its fall. Was it even a fall? Was it merely a transformation? It's probably just

01:54:00.420 a transformation. Calling it a fall is probably too dramatic. And of course the Eastern empire is 0.84

01:54:04.640 going to keep going for another thousand years. And like, is America going to fall the way that

01:54:10.300 Rome did? Um, well, number one, the United States of America is going to go away. Eventually

01:54:14.600 there's no timeline that you can extend out far enough that does not involve the United States

01:54:20.620 eventually disappearing from the face of the earth. That's just what going to happen.

01:54:23.360 Really? What makes you say that? Well, we're not going to last for 10,000 years. We're not

01:54:27.300 going to last for a million years. The United States will eventually not be a thing anymore.

01:54:30.560 I'm not saying it's going to happen 20 years from now or a hundred years from now,

01:54:33.460 million years from now. Are we here? No, no, no, of course not. Of course we're not here.

01:54:38.920 What's going to happen? So live it up. Yeah. Live it up. Cause we're not going to be here

01:54:42.720 in a million years. So you may, may as well get your kicks in now. Exactly. And so, um, but like we talked

01:54:53.020 about the very beginning, you know, our society is rooted in Roman history, like, and a lot of

01:54:58.660 the things that stamps are political or economic or legal and social culture, like comes from Rome

01:55:05.480 comes from the Roman experience. And so it's not outside. I don't think it's out of bounds to say

01:55:10.920 like, yeah, like there's probably going to be some, some similarities into how these things progress,

01:55:16.400 how great empires rise and fall. Like we've seen this happen before. Um, so where are we in the Roman

01:55:23.980 timeline, right? Like, are we at the end? Are the barbarians at the gate? You know, is, is America 0.52

01:55:29.580 about to fall? Um, I certainly don't think so. You know, that's, that's not my opinion at all. I don't

01:55:35.000 think we're anywhere close to the end of this. And I certainly don't think that like, uh, poor people 1.00

01:55:39.980 coming from Guatemala or El Salvador are like literally the Goths, which is, you know, how they're often

01:55:45.480 portrayed in media. They're like, oh, you know, the Roman empire fell because of immigration. Um, 0.99

01:55:50.420 now the Roman empire, number one, didn't really fall because of immigration. And number two, like

01:55:54.680 trying to make the Huns or the Goths analogous to, you know, the kinds of people who are moving to the

01:56:01.720 United States today is like wildly, it's like insanely, uh, inaccurate. Yeah. I don't know if I

01:56:09.300 ever would think that the problem is at the everyday man level. To me, the problem is at the

01:56:15.660 top, you know, the problem is at the, in that upper aura, you know, I think that you, we've

01:56:22.020 started to fall apart of having a purpose and feel a connection to our country. And I don't know why,

01:56:28.960 I mean, there's a ton of different reasons for that. And there could be different reasons for

01:56:32.000 people that have even different political beliefs or different ideologies. Um, but it certainly used

01:56:37.520 to feel like we were all Americans and now it still feels like we're all Americans, but people have a

01:56:41.660 lot of different thoughts about it. And so I don't know how that like kind of permeates as time goes

01:56:48.000 on. Well, so, so my, so like when I look back on this and actually my first book, which is called

01:56:52.860 the storm before the storm, the beginning at the end of the Roman Republic, um, is about the decline

01:56:58.800 and fall of the Republic, not the whole empire. Right. So that was when the Republic turned into the

01:57:03.640 Roman empire. When the, when the Republic becomes an empire. And what I, when, what I was curious

01:57:07.540 about is when Caesar comes along and Crassus and Pompey come along and effectively destroy

01:57:13.680 the Republic, but then goes to Octavian and Antony and Octavian wins that battle.

01:57:18.700 Like what was going on 50 years before that, 80 years before that, that sort of starts knocking

01:57:25.200 out the foundations of Republican society. The Roman Republic lasted for 500 years. They went through 0.83

01:57:31.160 a lot. They went through huge wars. They went through huge upheavals. There was, you know,

01:57:35.040 there was ambitious men coming and going left and right for hundreds of years. And the Republic

01:57:40.220 continued to persist. There was a Senate, there was assemblies there, you know, this Republican

01:57:44.900 project continued. Um, so what is it that started to go wrong prior to the collapse of the Republic?

01:57:51.640 And then it turns into this authoritarian military dictatorship. That's what the Roman empire was.

01:57:57.140 The Roman empire becomes an authoritarian military dictatorship after the fall of the Republic.

01:58:01.520 Like what Octavian did when he becomes Augustus, which is like, you know, he's the first emperor

01:58:06.240 of Rome though. He doesn't say like, I am an authoritarian dictator now. He doesn't say like,

01:58:10.240 I am now, you know, the emperor. He did, they didn't even call themselves emperors. That's just

01:58:14.120 something historians call them to describe the person who had all of the sort of powers of the Republic.

01:58:22.780 They were simultaneously a tribune and a consul and a pro consul and an edile. They had, they,

01:58:29.760 they themselves had, they were the Pontifex Maximus. They were the head of, of sort of the Roman,

01:58:34.800 the Roman religion.

01:58:35.900 So they were the Senate. They were the, um, uh, representatives.

01:58:39.340 Yeah.

01:58:39.660 They were every, they were the Senate. They were the Congress. They were the...

01:58:42.560 Yeah. It's, it's, it's as if one person was president and speaker of the house and majority

01:58:47.420 leader of the Senate and ruler of the military and the, and of course, commander in chief,

01:58:52.180 of course, commander in chief of the military, four-star general, um, and five-star chef even.

01:58:57.360 No, no, they pay for the five-star chefs. They, they don't cook for themselves. And then also like

01:59:01.660 governor of 25 of the 50 States, right? That's what Augustus did. Augustus did this like power

01:59:07.560 sharing thing with the Senate when he was trying to settle things afterwards. And he's like, okay,

01:59:11.740 we'll divvy up the provinces. You can run half of them. I'll run half of them. Um,

01:59:16.120 every province that Augustus had were the provinces with armies and all the provinces the Senate was

01:59:22.080 allowed to govern were the provinces that did not have armies. So, you know, like who's actually in

01:59:27.440 power here, but you know, the stuff that went on prior to the collapse of the Republic is the stuff

01:59:34.380 that when I look around in contemporary American society, like, you know, I wrote that book because

01:59:40.740 I was like, I sure see a lot of echoes here, you know, like, is it, is it going to proceed exactly

01:59:47.680 the same? No, but you know, can history rhyme? Yeah. I think history can rhyme a little bit. And

01:59:53.340 there, there's a quote from Plutarch that I use in my book. That's just like, if, you know, if,

01:59:58.520 if the stuff, if, if the sort of the constituent parts of a historical moment are the same here and

02:00:04.040 the same there, it's not unreasonable to think that like the outcome will be the same or at least

02:00:08.680 very similar. And if we're studying history, there is a point at which like, what is the

02:00:15.560 purpose of studying history? It's a little bit to learn what happened before, what mistakes were

02:00:21.520 made, what, you know, how events unfolded so that we can like maybe do it better. Well, for surely

02:00:26.800 it's like why it's like rewatching a football game. It's like why you ran these plays, you ran these

02:00:30.840 plays, didn't this happen? And then this happened. This didn't. Let's never, let's never run that play

02:00:34.800 again. And then we don't do that again. And then over time you have tons of games. You're like, okay,

02:00:38.140 these are the plays. And then you be able to build up statistics. So at a certain point, yes, you

02:00:41.720 could, I mean, I'm surprised it's not on draft Kings yet, whether or not there'll be a, you know,

02:00:45.740 a spread on, on the fall of America. What were some of the early things that you noticed?

02:00:52.160 Well, one of the biggest is there was runaway economic inequality that was happening where,

02:00:58.880 you know, like we talked about how you had to like have a certain amount of property in order to join

02:01:02.720 the legions. And when they got into these like protracted wars, people would be brought into

02:01:08.640 the legions. They would have to go off and fight in Spain for like five years. And while they were

02:01:12.300 gone, their, their little plot of land back in Italy would fall into disrepair and you wouldn't

02:01:17.520 really be able to make it productive. Maybe you'd be down on your luck financially and you would sell

02:01:21.260 it off to your rich neighbor. And the richest component of Rome, the senators, there had always been

02:01:28.760 stratification in the wealth. There had always been rich. There had always been poor, but the rich

02:01:32.780 started becoming like super rich. During the Roman empire? During the Roman Republic. The later,

02:01:37.720 the later days of the Roman Republic. Okay. I see what you're talking about. Yeah. You said that's

02:01:40.700 what the book is about. Exactly. It's when you start getting these large estates, like insanely large

02:01:45.340 estates, as opposed to merely big estates that were surrounded by people, families who had their own

02:01:50.320 individual plots. And the, the, basically the smallholders of Italy are like pushed out of,

02:01:55.860 of the picture. They kind of don't exist anymore in Roman history. And so there is that, there is an

02:02:02.400 economic inequality that is unfolding at the time that puts stress on the society because now they

02:02:10.020 can't recruit for the legions for one thing. Because you can't recruit for the legions because

02:02:15.100 they don't respect you anymore? Because they don't meet the property qualifications. Oh, that's right.

02:02:19.740 So then what you got to do is you got to lift the property requirements and say, okay, now we can

02:02:24.120 recruit anybody and they will be paid and who's going to pay them. They're going to be paid by the

02:02:28.480 person who's organizing that legion. Where's that money going to come from? It's probably going to

02:02:32.840 come from them conquering something or defeating something and getting the spoils of war. So now

02:02:36.840 we're going off and we are conquering things, not just for political reasons, but also to sort of

02:02:41.820 enrich the army. And then this is where you get personalist armies where the legions aren't fighting

02:02:46.960 for Rome. They are fighting for Caesar, for Marius, for Sulla. I'm here to fight for Sulla.

02:02:54.760 That's who I'm fighting for. And so that has a major effect on the internal coherence of the Roman 0.99

02:03:02.460 Republic. I don't know if we're there like in a war sense, but we're there in a capitalistic sense,

02:03:10.900 it feels like. Yeah. And I mean, one of the things that gives me some hope is that one of the things

02:03:16.540 that Augustus did during his settlements to kind of – because the Romans lived through like a 50-year

02:03:21.860 period of nonstop civil war. And one of the things that Augustus did accomplish was like ending those

02:03:26.780 civil wars. And one of the things that he did was he regularized the pay of the legions. He put out

02:03:32.880 these mints. You were paid by the central state. You were no longer getting your money from your local

02:03:38.000 commander. You were getting it from the central state. So like a UBI kind of.

02:03:42.240 Well, and it's basically like what we have in the military today. And one of the reasons we don't

02:03:47.740 have to worry about the army or the navy or the marines like hauling off and following some general

02:03:54.280 or some political leader as opposed to like sticking to the constitution is because their paycheck is

02:03:59.960 coming from the centralized political authority, not from somebody else. And so dismantling that,

02:04:07.460 creating private armies of mercenaries, like that's when it starts to get a little sticky.

02:04:12.200 And I don't think they would even let you do that in America.

02:04:14.700 Well, I mean, you know, like there's the Eric Princes of the world.

02:04:17.620 Right. Things should happen.

02:04:18.720 Yeah. But it's definitely not at the scale that –

02:04:21.820 Right. Where it's popularly known.

02:04:25.180 Yeah. And then like there's this other sort of thing.

02:04:27.180 That's a good point. I'm sure there are people – there's very wealthy people that have their own

02:04:31.240 small militaries.

02:04:32.700 Definitely.

02:04:33.060 Definitely. But not like –

02:04:34.400 But nothing that can take the 82nd Airborne.

02:04:35.960 Right. Right. Exactly. And that's the thing is you would have armies that could take the 82nd

02:04:40.520 Airborne. And then, you know, to tie it later to like the immigration issue, the reason why the

02:04:45.460 Goths and the Huns were such a powerful force in smashing the empire is because they could take 0.90

02:04:51.600 the 82nd Airborne. They were strong enough and big enough and well-armed enough. There's nothing

02:04:56.320 that can touch the United States military right now. There's nothing on earth that can touch us.

02:04:59.760 Not really.

02:05:00.500 Unless the people in it who were fighting for it started to realize that they were being – if

02:05:06.260 they decided that they were being used for practices that weren't good for the country.

02:05:12.620 Right.

02:05:13.020 But were just good for a select few. Is that right, you think? Or how would that happen?

02:05:17.420 Well –

02:05:17.660 I've thought about this.

02:05:18.560 Okay.

02:05:18.740 You know, and it's weird to say it because I have a lot of friends in Minnesota, but you

02:05:22.580 start to think, well, how does the military get compromised? How do they choose to become

02:05:26.860 like the people in – what was that movie with? Oh, in the Patriot, right? How do they – you

02:05:35.360 know what I'm saying? Like how do they decide that who they're fighting for isn't who they

02:05:41.640 thought they were fighting for?

02:05:42.800 Yeah. And that's – you know, that's the plight of grunts throughout time and history, 0.96

02:05:47.340 right? You are ultimately just following orders and you have to go do it. And can you

02:05:53.240 have a large enough mutiny to overthrow a government because you don't like how you're being used

02:05:58.780 anymore? It's happened. It's largely the story of the Russian Revolution. You know, those

02:06:04.640 guys were being so badly mistreated that the army mutinied and winds up overthrowing the

02:06:09.700 czar. That's definitely – that's definitely a major constituent part of the story of the

02:06:15.240 Russian Revolution. But like – so what was one of the other – there is this overarching

02:06:22.180 notion that the Romans themselves often pointed to is that they had been engaged in this long

02:06:28.260 struggle with Carthage as this great rival in the Western Mediterranean. This is where the

02:06:33.300 war against Hannibal comes. This is a series of wars against Carthage where Roman Carthage are

02:06:39.160 kind of equal going into it. And whoever wins this war is going to be the dominant power in the

02:06:44.200 Western Mediterranean and then ultimately like the entire Mediterranean. So who wins this war is

02:06:48.260 really important. And the Romans win the war after 100 years, 130 years is how long these things go

02:06:54.760 on. There was – but between the first – between the first battle and the last battle, I think it's

02:06:59.880 like 100 –

02:07:00.380 Because it's three generations.

02:07:01.020 Yeah, I think it's – maybe it's like 110 years. I don't want to exaggerate.

02:07:03.980 But once the Romans sort of lose that great unifying enemy, you start getting political

02:07:15.080 rivalries inside the senatorial class breaking out beyond the bounds of what used to be acceptable

02:07:23.320 practices. There used to be a really strong elite consensus and they did stick together at all times.

02:07:28.940 And there were things that you didn't do or wouldn't do even if you – like even if you

02:07:34.060 lost a consulship and you were pissed about it because I hate that family over there. Like you did

02:07:39.460 not –

02:07:40.040 Break the code of conduct.

02:07:41.540 You didn't break the code of conduct. You didn't go get an army and then like overthrow that person

02:07:45.780 because you're pissed off that you lost an election. You just simply wasn't done.

02:07:48.840 After the Punic Wars are over, this is when we – it's like this is when it starts happening. 1.00

02:07:56.560 And it's like the internal cohesion of the elite ruling class breaks down and then they start seeing

02:08:02.880 their own political ambitions as something that don't really need to have a check because I'm not

02:08:09.080 worried about being – we're not worried about being defeated by some foreign enemy. So I'm just going

02:08:14.720 to keep going. Like we can have a civil war. It doesn't matter because we don't have to worry about

02:08:18.500 Carthage. And so if you're doing this sort of like let's unfocus our eyes and look at sort of the

02:08:23.440 beats of history. OK. So what purpose is the Cold War serving for the United States of America

02:08:28.460 through all of this? Is it a unifying force that enforces elite consensus and keeps things in bounds?

02:08:33.920 Yeah. Yeah, it sure does. And when we lose the communists as a unifying force that keeps the

02:08:40.380 political class together, is that when we start seeing as early as the 90s great frayings in

02:08:47.140 in that fabric and people being willing to do things that are way outside the bounds of what

02:08:52.340 would have even been considered possible 10 years earlier, 20 years earlier because we don't have

02:08:57.180 to worry about the communists anymore. We won. Everything is great from here. And kind of ever

02:09:01.560 since then there's been vague attempts to like who's going to be the new enemy that unifies us. And

02:09:07.380 nothing has really done it the way that the Cold War did. It was terrorists for a while but that

02:09:13.940 never really did it. You know, people try to demonize China and try to turn them into something,

02:09:19.520 but it doesn't take the same way because it's not really the same thing. So, you know, you lose that

02:09:25.620 external threat and now you start having the political ruling class being willing to turn on

02:09:30.180 each other. And yeah, the political environment right now is absolutely toxic. Absolutely toxic.

02:09:38.080 Yeah. And it's because people I don't think are afraid of the consequences of pushing things all

02:09:43.640 the way to civil war. Yeah. I think some people you start to feel like what I say doesn't matter,

02:09:52.240 what I feel doesn't matter. I don't even know if my vote counts because we don't even know if they're

02:09:56.940 being tabulated fairly or not. I mean, you just don't know, you know, and there's so much

02:10:00.700 misinformation. You don't know. There's never been such wealth in the power of such few.

02:10:08.880 And you start to feel like, I mean, we talk all the time on here about, we just had Mike Rowe on,

02:10:13.880 we're talking about having purpose, like having a job, what it means to you to have a job and to do

02:10:20.200 something and to make something and be a part of something. And once you don't have a purpose anymore,

02:10:24.600 you'll kind of fall for, you'll find anything you'll find, you'll find a purpose. It just sometimes

02:10:29.600 can be kind of on the darker side of things. But I think in the end, it's for some sort of form of

02:10:34.180 self-preservation. So I don't know what that looks like. I wonder if there would be a civil war.

02:10:40.540 Where do we meet up if there is? That's my big question. Where do we meet up? Like you and me?

02:10:45.000 I mean, oh man, where's a good place to meet up? I think Denver. Okay. Should we go to the Rockies?

02:10:53.340 I mean, here's the thing. You already said you got to get a place with some elevation.

02:10:56.380 Yeah. You got to, you got to, you got to get some, you got to get some elevation. Yeah,

02:10:59.360 absolutely. I just don't want it to come that day and it hits, you know, say it hits on a Thursday

02:11:03.420 night and you've already had a long week and you're like, fuck, you know, cause you had the 0.98

02:11:07.200 weekend off or whatever, but now you have to do civil war or whatever. And then you're like, 0.99

02:11:11.160 where do I go? I do not want that. Cause you're not gonna be able to text and find out.

02:11:14.960 No, it's no, it'll, if it comes, it'll be a huge mess. And civil wars are like the worst,

02:11:23.400 just the worst thing. They're just the worst thing.

02:11:26.740 Oh yeah. Even if nobody wants to do, you know,

02:11:29.120 even if they're fought for a good reason, right? Like you're only destroying yourself.

02:11:34.940 You're only destroying your own infrastructure.

02:11:37.140 It's on your own front yard. A lot of times.

02:11:38.860 The English civil wars, which happened, you know, uh, this like Cromwell era, like Stuart

02:11:44.320 England, you know, they, they called those civil wars a war without an enemy, you know,

02:11:48.420 like, cause that's, that's a lot of, of what it is. And so we should, we should definitely

02:11:53.800 try to avoid civil war, but also, also there are things that, you know, if, if things get

02:11:59.020 pushed too far and we're also, we're allowed to have values, we're allowed to care about

02:12:03.980 things. And if literally every single thing that you believe in has to be sacrificed to

02:12:09.280 avoid a civil war, right? Like everything I believe in will no longer exist, but at least

02:12:15.780 we won't have a civil war. Is that civil war worse than fighting for the things that you

02:12:21.160 believe in?

02:12:21.760 I think at a certain point you choose to fight. I feel like.

02:12:24.380 I think so too.

02:12:25.340 You know, I really believe that.

02:12:26.640 And I'm saying that as somebody who like, I've studied civil wars. I don't want any part

02:12:31.180 of a civil war. And I don't like people who play fast and loose with talking about civil

02:12:35.120 wars. No, I don't, I don't like people who, who romanticize it. I don't like people who

02:12:38.940 talk about it because it is an awful, awful, awful thing. Sometimes though you, yeah.

02:12:44.140 Yeah. Well, it's just, it's a thing. It's a thought of like, well, how did that happen?

02:12:48.700 Right. Cause I'm sure if you'd asked people a hundred years earlier, that would never happen.

02:12:52.720 Right. And how do you get to things like that? And then, yeah, I don't want to not have

02:12:57.460 someplace to meet up. I do not want to not have Dan and look, I'll even do. We'll do

02:13:04.780 Milwaukee dude. If we want to have two places to meet up because I got, I got some property

02:13:08.520 out in rural Wisconsin. Okay. You're just going to Denver as far though. Yeah. Everybody.

02:13:12.420 Yeah. So you don't want people having to go to fricking trying to think of one other

02:13:16.080 spot. Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you this. Like if there's actually going to, the

02:13:20.280 shape of the second American civil war has less to do with like territory in that way,

02:13:26.800 like this, these States versus these States, it's going to be very rural versus urban. And

02:13:32.340 that's, that's the, one of the main political divides I think right now. And so, so cities

02:13:37.360 are one thing and sort of the surrounding environs are a different thing. And that will be the

02:13:42.540 shape of things. There will be 50 regional simultaneous conflicts between people in the

02:13:51.360 rural areas and people in the cities. And that's, I think how it would go. Dang. Mikey D.

02:13:59.500 Which I don't, I don't want any part. I don't want any part of that either. I don't, I was just,

02:14:04.200 I was just joking that I was raising my son to be John Connor to like fight, to fight AI when it

02:14:10.420 tries to take over. I'm just like, why do you think I'm trying to teach you these things, man?

02:14:14.560 Anyway, let's go back to lock picking. John Connor for Columbus. We're going to call him, dude.

02:14:19.460 Somebody's got to go into AI and save us. Yeah. I mean, I showed them the Terminator movies. I'm

02:14:23.540 like, this is what we, this is what we got to avoid, man. And it's up to you because, because I,

02:14:28.500 I can't do it. You know, where will we find our allies at those times? If that were ever to

02:14:32.320 happen, what do you think people find an ally in them? Like, how do you, how would you say this

02:14:36.740 person is my ally in a civil war, do you think? There, I mean, there are ways to do it, right?

02:14:44.240 Like you're going to, you're in an area that has a lot of like-minded people. We all have our own

02:14:48.420 social networks that already exist. Yeah. You know, and like, yeah, I mean, my existing social network,

02:14:54.940 like I'm pretty sure would all be on one side of a civil war. And I, and I would be on that same

02:15:01.460 side as them. And that's a lot of how, you know, people wind up joining these things. They, they

02:15:06.800 join, they join in groups. They're, you know, a lot of civil, a lot of companies are sort of like

02:15:11.460 self-raised from some local area. And so those kinds of things, it is that kind of like personal

02:15:17.880 trust that goes a lot into it. But of course it's also difficult because there are people who are

02:15:23.080 intentionally trying to trick you into thinking that they're on your side, but they're not really.

02:15:26.640 And, and then you got to have internal secret police and purges and executions. And now you're

02:15:30.480 living the worst life you can possibly think of. So let's just not do it. America, let's just not

02:15:37.260 do it. Okay, Mike. Okay. I hear you there. Great. We'll have to talk about that another time. We'll

02:15:41.620 talk about some revolutions and things like that. I would love to get into another conversation about

02:15:45.200 it, man. How did people say Rome fell? Some people say it's just kind of, it's kind of just took on

02:15:52.080 different, like it became the Byzantine empire. Some people say different things, right? What is kind of

02:15:57.340 classified as the fall of Rome? How did it fall hypothetically?

02:16:01.060 Right. Yeah. I mean, if you, if you buy into the framing, it's a lot of the, the central state

02:16:06.880 stops being able to draw on the wealth of its own society. Some of this is the result of civil wars

02:16:15.580 and ongoing civil wars. Some of it is the result of migrations and population pressures where the

02:16:22.120 Romans used to be very good at fighting wars and battles beyond their own frontiers. They would 0.93

02:16:27.500 expand, right? So you're never fighting on your own territory. You're fighting on their territory,

02:16:31.300 then you're beating them. And then you're moving on to the next territory beyond that. And by,

02:16:35.700 by the third century and by the fourth century, the Romans are fighting wars on their own territory.

02:16:41.140 And so you're not getting the spoils of war. You're not getting booty. You're not getting-

02:16:45.940 You're getting spoiled. Even if you win, you lose.

02:16:48.420 Yep. Yep. The things, things are getting, things are getting trashed. And so there, there is a long

02:16:53.560 term degradation in sort of the military and political and economic strength of the empire,

02:16:59.400 such that on the other side, like on the other side of the Rhine and on the other side of the

02:17:03.780 Danube, you have all these like Germanic tribes who at one time were smaller and disconnected. 1.00

02:17:12.160 And so it was very easy for the Romans to do like divide and conquer. Like we'll give this chief 0.97

02:17:16.780 a bunch of money and he will be our ally and you'll be our representative there. And then these

02:17:20.840 guys won't, but this guy will always be our friend because he knows that his local power is backed

02:17:25.540 entirely by Roman gold. So he's, he's with us and we can, and the Romans could keep these groups kind

02:17:31.440 of disunited. This is classic divide and conquer. Eventually those groups become larger and larger

02:17:38.480 and they form their own like larger and larger confederations such that they're able to build

02:17:43.840 up manpower, weaponry strength that can go toe to toe with the legions in a straight fight.

02:17:50.820 And then the Romans are also saying to themselves, you know, we don't have the manpower that we used

02:17:57.480 to have. And so if we want to win wars, we need to kind of outsource some of our fighting to these

02:18:03.000 groups. And this becomes an incredibly, there's, there's a couple of hundred years of incredibly

02:18:07.800 complicated political and military sort of maneuverings between the Romans and these groups

02:18:13.460 where, you know, Alaric and the Goths, this is, this is the people who, who sack Rome, right? 0.86

02:18:18.900 Which is sort of one of the big moments that we point to and say like, gosh, that was a big deal.

02:18:24.180 Rome had not been sacked in like 800 years. That was a big deal. It's not the case that this was

02:18:30.260 Alaric and the Goths marauding into Italy and mindlessly destroying Rome and looting it of 1.00

02:18:38.000 its wealth. Alaric had been off and on allies and auxiliary and a general who commanded armies for

02:18:43.980 Rome for like 20 years. So he'd been a contractor for a long time.

02:18:46.980 Long time, long time. And it was actually a vital component of the Roman national security state,

02:18:52.840 if you could call it that, at the time. And he was just looking-

02:18:56.840 Alaric the Ambitious?

02:18:58.180 Alaric the Ambitious.

02:18:58.980 Is that his name?

02:18:59.540 No. Is it? Is that what they call him? I don't call him that. I call him Alaric the Goth. But

02:19:05.500 he was trying to get what was owed to him by the emperors. They had promised him, they had made

02:19:12.560 promises to him. And what he, and what he really wanted was to be more formally integrated into the

02:19:17.540 society, to not just be a mere auxiliary, but to, but to be entered into, um, into the fabric of,

02:19:24.740 of Roman society.

02:19:25.600 And they wouldn't let him?

02:19:26.140 Which by this point they're hiding in Ravenna because it's like behind a swamp and like,

02:19:30.040 yeah, no, they didn't let him because of, because of prejudice, partly because of ethnic prejudice

02:19:33.780 against him. And he said, look, if you don't follow through on your promises, you got nothing

02:19:38.580 protecting your most important city. I can just do this if I want. Anytime I want, I can just go and

02:19:43.780 do it. So follow through on your promises to me and I won't do it. It's pretty simple.

02:19:47.440 They didn't follow through on their promises. So he said, fine, I'll go do it. I didn't want to,

02:19:52.900 but I'm going to. So, so that sack is a very sort of calculated political move on his part.

02:20:00.200 So, and that's, and that's part of the story about how Rome doesn't just fall. It's like,

02:20:04.560 it's transforming into something else. It's not just mindless barbarians destroying civilized life,

02:20:10.380 you know, like in that sense, I think that Alaric was acting in a more civilized way 0.97

02:20:14.500 than the emperors in Ravenna were acting because they were acting like petulant little liars and 0.63

02:20:20.220 Alaric was trying to do something. What is it? Is it greed that it's hurting those? Yeah. Greed,

02:20:26.920 greed, prejudice, just sheer myopia, you know, just myopia mean myopia means an inability to see

02:20:33.360 outside of your own little narrow circumscribed world. And by that point, like I said, like the

02:20:38.460 political powers that be had left Rome, like they, like for a while Milan was, was the capital

02:20:44.900 of the empire because it was closer to the Alps, which put them closer to the borders, which allowed

02:20:50.000 them to like run things better. Rome is kind of deep in the Italian peninsula. And then when things

02:20:55.040 really started getting bad, they moved over to Ravenna because Ravenna is on the coast. And so

02:20:59.340 you can supply it really easy. It's difficult to besiege. And then also it was surrounded by swamps.

02:21:03.400 So it's difficult for a land army to get in there. And so now you've got like the imperial court

02:21:07.780 planted like in the middle of a swamp, just disconnected from everyone and everything.

02:21:13.300 And they didn't know what was going on. It's like, we got child emperors who have no idea

02:21:18.360 what's actually, yeah, yeah, yeah. What's actually happening out there in the world. And so this,

02:21:24.080 you know, the story of, of the collapse of Roman civilization is a lot to do then with,

02:21:29.140 with like really poor leadership and poor leadership. Disorganization.

02:21:31.940 Yeah. Poor leadership decisions on top of all the material reasons why it collapses.

02:21:36.420 Who was one of the most gangster, like children emperors that they have?

02:21:43.640 Gangster of the children emperors? Who was somebody that was like, oh, this dude should

02:21:47.400 not be in there. Oh, I don't, I mean, I mean, one of the great lessons of the history of Rome

02:21:52.020 is don't give teenagers power. Like don't do that. Right. Like no, like no bad, but you know,

02:21:59.000 like Honorius. Oh yeah. Who are the, who are the other guys that were, oh yeah. These are

02:22:04.000 the classics. Gordian III was pretty good. Gordian III? Yeah. Gordian III was actually

02:22:08.800 pretty good. I'll give, I'll give a shout out to Gordian III. Emperor at age of 13.

02:22:13.680 Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Which he, he, he emerges from the year of the six emperors. In case you're

02:22:20.080 wondering how crazy things got during the crisis of the third century. In one year?

02:22:23.480 Yeah. There's, it's the year of the six emperors and he, and Gordian emerges as the,

02:22:28.420 as the last of them because the Praetorian guard supported him and liked him. And actually the

02:22:33.520 people of Rome supported and liked him. And what were his vibes? Like, did he have a good,

02:22:36.740 pretty good vibe or what was it like? I think he did have a pretty good vibe. Yeah. He had a,

02:22:40.120 he had a really great advisor who was with him for like four years. This, this particular guy who I'm

02:22:44.960 not even going to attempt to pronounce his name because every time I try, I completely fail.

02:22:49.080 Um, but he had, he had good advisors, right. And he had good people around him and he seemed to be

02:22:55.380 sort of educated and chill enough that he wasn't just like, I'm here to just use this power that I've

02:23:01.420 been given, you know, any way that I see fit. Like there did seem to be some sense of like,

02:23:06.760 I have a civic duty and my role as an emperor matters. And I think that was true with him.

02:23:11.660 And I think that was true of, um, this guy, Alexander Severus too. And who was a psycho? Any of them?

02:23:16.120 Um, well, if just like, you know, just, uh, self-absorbed. Yeah. I mean, the list,

02:23:22.200 the list is Caracalla, Nero, Elagabalus, um, uh, Caligula. And then those guys at the end,

02:23:29.800 uh, Honorius, they're just, they're just completely out to lunch. So they're just completely out to

02:23:36.920 lunch. And, you know, and my, you know, my big theory is that as they are, um, you know, as,

02:23:41.580 as Rome is, is falling into disrepair and they are resisting fully incorporating the Goths

02:23:49.500 into Roman society, that it was that resistance to incorporating the Goths. That is what meant that

02:23:57.800 the power of the Roman empire just ceased to matter. You know, like the people who would come 1.00

02:24:02.520 along who were heirs to, uh, to the Roman empire were often still acting under the auspices of like

02:24:10.200 the emperor back in the East that like, like the guys who come along after it, like, Oh, I'm doing

02:24:13.780 this because so-and-so told me that, that I could be in charge over here. They were still referencing

02:24:18.120 the power of the emperors. Um, but if you're going to, if you're going to keep all your,

02:24:23.240 all your generals and the people who are actually running your society on the outside and not giving

02:24:27.620 them any real political power, eventually they're just going to stop caring because force

02:24:32.200 force is power. Force is what underlies everything. Every society, all political power is rooted in

02:24:40.340 brute force. And if you can't command brute force and they can, they're going to take over. And so

02:24:47.400 what the Goths wanted was to be fully integrated, which the Romans had been so good at. It was,

02:24:52.840 it's one of their greatest strengths. Like you said in the beginning, they would take over lands.

02:24:56.200 They would incorporate the people, the religions, everything. Yep. And like, and if, you know,

02:25:00.000 they weren't an inventive people, but if they find a better sword that you were making,

02:25:03.180 they're going to take that along. If the, if you have a better way to build an aqueduct,

02:25:06.580 they're going to copy that. And, you know, the book I'm writing right now is about the crisis of

02:25:11.320 the third century when the Roman empire nearly fell, but did not, you know, who saves the empire?

02:25:16.940 It's a bunch of guys from Illyria, which is the Balkans, right? It's a bunch of like dudes from

02:25:20.460 Croatia and Bosnia who are the ones who saved the empire because they had been fully integrated

02:25:25.780 into the system and they believed in, in Rome and Roman-ness. There was never an ethnic

02:25:29.660 component to Rome, not really. And certainly it's not the case that when Rome stopped being,

02:25:36.400 you know, like fully pure blood Italian, um, that that's when things started to go wrong.

02:25:41.460 Actually, like in many cases, the thing that stopped things from going wrong was that we

02:25:46.780 weren't listening to the full blooded Italians anymore. We were giving power and authority to 0.99

02:25:51.120 people who would not have traditionally been in, in power, but because of the way that Roman 1.00

02:25:56.860 society worked, could now be in power. And to have not done that at the end with the Goths, 0.94

02:26:02.560 like, I think there's a, there's a, there is a moment when there is a, there is a, a sister of

02:26:07.020 the emperor and a brother of the chieftain of, of Al, it's Alaric's brother. They get married and they

02:26:12.540 have a kid. And if that kid, that kid died because kids die in the past, right? We've talked about this.

02:26:18.320 And if that kid had lived and gone on to become emperor and integrated the Goths into Roman 0.54

02:26:25.460 society, I think, I think that buys them a couple hundred years easy, man. That's, that's, but that's

02:26:31.120 my own, that's my own little pet theory, which, uh, which I came across by studying the, the collapse

02:26:36.860 of Roman civilization on, on a practically on like a day by day level. And just being like, yeah, you

02:26:41.820 guys fucking blew this one. Didn't you? You didn't have to, but you did. It just shows you every day 0.98

02:26:48.620 counts, huh? Every day counts. You have a series that you're do working on now about more. It's

02:26:54.940 about in the, in the future. Yeah. Yes. Yes. We'll, we'll, we'll radically bounce 2000 years.

02:27:03.220 That's okay. Into the future. Um, yeah. So the other show that I have done is, is revolutions,

02:27:09.860 which each season of revolutions covers a different great political revolution in history.

02:27:15.660 And it is the case. I have found that a lot of revolutions do follow like a similar trajectory.

02:27:21.380 There's, there's an Ancien regime that's falling apart. There's discontentment among the elite.

02:27:25.880 Uh, there's new ideas that have been entered. And then there's like a liberal nobility. There's

02:27:29.520 pissed off lawyers and journalists. Like a lot of these things are similar. There's a first wave of

02:27:33.760 the revolution. And then there's a second wave of the revolution that often throws out the people who

02:27:38.420 started the revolution. This is kind of how the French revolution goes and the Russian revolution

02:27:42.480 goes. Um, it is where like the Jacobins come from. And, and then there's always a war. There's 0.97

02:27:48.200 always a civil war. Like these, so these, these things, these large structural beats of the story

02:27:53.100 of a revolution. Um, there's, there's a lot of similarities. And so what I've done, uh, is I have

02:27:58.480 taken those structural beats and I'm writing a completely fictitious future history of a revolution

02:28:05.580 on Mars in 22, 47. And I walk it through day by day and I'm 20, I am 23 episodes into it.

02:28:16.500 I love it. I love it. What is the, what is that? Where are you getting that from?

02:28:20.860 It was a revolution. That's, that's fan art. That's not me. Oh, well, it's still nice. Pretty

02:28:26.500 nice fan art. Yeah. It's nice fan art. Yeah. My fans are good. Um, wow. I just think it's so

02:28:32.460 fascinating because you have to take such a breadth of history and information and then put it into

02:28:38.980 something that's like, um, so, uh, like, uh, imaginative, you know, but also quickly coming

02:28:48.520 with the future. Yeah. And then, and then a lot of the things that are happening in the Martian

02:28:52.580 revolution, if you listen to it, you'll be like, Oh, I see. He's also commenting on present society and

02:28:57.840 where we are because all good science fiction is not actually about the future. It's about the

02:29:02.760 present. And so the Martian revolution is that too, but it's, it's a pretty, you know, when, when

02:29:07.620 all is said and done, it's going to be 125,000 words that I wound up writing in like six months

02:29:12.420 to crank out this massive epic history of a science fiction revolution, which if you're into that kind

02:29:19.720 of thing, come along for a ride. It's pretty fun. And, and every part of it, you know, is,

02:29:23.860 is like constructing like a mosaic where sort of every constituent part, like has a reference point

02:29:30.320 in history somewhere. Like I'm trying to tie all of these different things together and like, Oh,

02:29:34.660 this is an element from the Mexican revolution combined with an element of the Russian revolution

02:29:38.260 combined with an element of, you know, the French revolution. And then moving on to the next thing

02:29:43.020 and Oh, I'm going to take this thing from the Haitian revolution. And I'm going to take this thing 0.93

02:29:46.000 from the English civil wars. And we just go through it. And I've got, I've got six episodes left. I don't

02:29:51.580 know. By the time this thing airs, there'll be like three probably left.

02:29:56.200 Congratulations. Yeah. I'm coming down the barrel of it. It's, it's gone really well. I

02:30:00.060 really enjoyed writing it. Oh, well, it's just fascinating, man. It's interesting to talk to

02:30:03.720 a historian. It's interesting to talk to someone with so much knowledge. Um, yeah, I'd love to talk

02:30:07.500 about revolution sometime. I appreciate it, man. Thanks for taking us. Yeah. Just, it's just

02:30:11.820 interesting to be, to be like, cause you always fantasize in your head, like, you know,

02:30:15.580 Oh, I think about the Roman empire, man, I could have been. And you always fantasize yourself

02:30:20.580 as I never fantasize myself as one of like the, um, slaves or anything like that. I don't

02:30:27.080 think you always kind of fantasize yourself at least somewhere in the middle or upper

02:30:31.500 echelon, you know? Yes. Why does our brain do that? I wonder. Uh, cause we want to be

02:30:36.500 safe and protected. And so we put ourselves in a safe and protected environment where the

02:30:40.700 society is working for us rather than us working for the society. Nobody wants to imagine themselves

02:30:45.580 as a slave. Um, and so, yeah, when, when people fantasize about being in the Roman empire and

02:30:50.780 they're like, Oh, it would have been so great. It's like, yeah, for like 27 guys, you know,

02:30:56.220 like for the emperor and some people around him, everybody else, it was kind of rough going. And

02:31:01.800 there's a very good chance you died at the age of three. And if you didn't die at the age of three,

02:31:05.780 there's a very good chance you died at the age of seven. And if you didn't die at the age of seven,

02:31:09.180 there's a very good chance you died at the age of eight, right? Like you're, you're probably not

02:31:16.100 living very long. So wasn't that great. So like as a historian, and sometimes people are like,

02:31:22.180 would you want to go back and live in some period in the past? And mostly I'm really,

02:31:27.520 I really like modern medical technology and a lot of the things that we have, like I am pampered that

02:31:33.000 way. Like if I get sick, I want antibiotics. I don't want to just die of some like festering wound

02:31:38.340 because we don't have antibiotics yet. Like I love all those things where I would really go.

02:31:42.360 If I had like a time machine, I could go anywhere. I'd go back to those primordial forests before like

02:31:47.380 humans were even a thing. Like I'm from the Pacific Northwest. It's beautiful up there. It's beautiful

02:31:51.780 up there. And like, I would go to like, you know, like basically like where Lake Washington is right

02:31:56.180 now, or like the Puget Sound before humans were even a thing, just these ancient primordial forests and

02:32:01.820 just hang out there for a little bit, get, get, get a nice little cabin. And hear the sounds that,

02:32:06.640 and I bet animals made cooler sounds before we came around and started listening to them.

02:32:10.260 They would certainly behave differently, you know, because right now, like there's no

02:32:13.640 interacting with wildlife, not really because they all learned to stay away from humans.

02:32:17.520 Yeah. And a lot of the parents have been locked up to zoos or whatever. So I think a lot of them

02:32:22.640 it's gotten. Yeah. So like, yeah, you go out to the Olympic peninsula and you kind of get a glimpse

02:32:27.280 of what that stuff used to be. Or like when I was writing about Russia and like, you think about

02:32:31.880 like these huge primordial forests that like stretched all the way from like Europe, all

02:32:36.540 the way to China, just these amazing, you know, just this amazing number of trees and, you know,

02:32:42.240 animals and plant life and stuff. Mother nature. Yeah. Just, just go chill with mother nature.

02:32:46.420 And I think once humans come along, it's like, yeah, right. I'm going to, I'm going to head

02:32:51.080 back to where I can go to the hospital. If I, you know, if, if things get really bad.

02:32:55.300 Sometimes I wonder if we were helping things or hurting them. Um, Mike Duncan, thanks so much,

02:33:01.140 man. I appreciate your time. And, um, yeah, everyone can check out if you want to hear,

02:33:05.640 uh, more about Rome. You have two books, your second book, uh, the, the, the new book that

02:33:10.500 you have out is. The book I'm writing right now, which is I'm not turning the manuscript

02:33:15.380 in until September. So it won't be, it won't be out till 2026, but yeah, these are the ones

02:33:19.120 like storm before the storm, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, which is a lot

02:33:22.420 of what we talked about today. Like if, if you're interested in those sort of like parallels

02:33:25.940 between what kind of trajectory it feels like we're on as a society and what trajectory the

02:33:31.280 Romans were on, that's, that's my best stab at sort of talking about that storm before

02:33:35.700 the storm. Yeah. Storm before the storm with the storm being like the civil wars that destroyed

02:33:39.800 the Republic. Yeah. Um, and then out of, uh, you know, outgrowth of, of my work in revolutions,

02:33:44.900 I wrote a biography of the Marquis de Lafayette, uh, who is a guy who had like a 50 year

02:33:50.240 long revolutionary career. And we only ever think about him as these like this like 19

02:33:54.940 year old kid who like hung out with George Washington for a few years and we like him

02:33:58.480 because we all like a Frenchman in a uniform. Uh, but he actually lived like this insane 0.98

02:34:03.280 50 year life in and out of revolutions. And you know, as I was right, as I was writing

02:34:07.920 the show, I was like, God, this guy just keeps popping up. So I wound up writing a whole

02:34:11.240 biography about him. He was a gangster, huh? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There he is. There's

02:34:17.160 my boy. Gibert de Montier, Marquis de Lafayette. There he is. Mike Duncan. Thanks so much for

02:34:23.700 your time, man. I appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me. Yep.

02:34:26.220 Now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves. I must be

02:34:33.700 cornerstone. Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind. I found I can

02:34:43.840 feel it in my bones, but it's gonna tell you.

This Past Weekend with Theo Von - June 14, 2025

#589 - Roman Empire Expert Mike Duncan

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