


Economics-themed discussion of Homer’s Odyssey, sparked by Christopher Nolan’s 70mm IMAX film. Guests connect the Trojan War’s Bronze Age trade (tin/copper, “toll taking”), the Greek household economy (oikos) and risk management under divine uncertainty (Hesiod, Delphi, dice/omens), to modern ideas like central-bank “self-binding” and credible commitment (Odysseus lashed to the mast; Delphic vs Taylor-rule models). They also argue the Odyssey’s “polytropos” (many-turning) journey maps onto modern displacement and identity crises, comparing Odysseus to Jason Bourne.
Adam Tews, FB economics correspondent and Columbia University professor (in Berlin). Hosts: Cameron Abadi, FB deputy editor.
Troy as trade conflict; Great Bronze Age Crisis; economy from oikos/patriarchy/autarky/division of labor; risk as “iron age” uncertainty; central banks resisting democratic short-termism to avoid hyperinflation; Czech Legion as modern “Odyssey.”
Written by AI. May contain mistakes.
Discussing the historical significance of The Odyssey and its contemporary relevance.
“So, one data point for you all, and that is 2 ,700.”
Exploring the economic realities of ancient Greece as depicted in The Odyssey.
“an adventure tale, it's also a work that gives us some insight into economics in the era of ancient Greece and also economics today from some perspective.”
Examining the Greek concept of oikos and its connection to modern economic principles.
“It's known as the Great Crisis of the Bronze Age, out of which only Egypt survived.”
Contrast between classical Greek economic structures and modern economic theories.
“In other words, you could write yourself into immortality through actions in the public space.”
Explore how economic theories emerged from classical ideas to modern interpretations.
“Now, modern scholars might, notably anyone with a left-wing disposition or a feminist, will take issue with Arendt on that score.”
Delve into the story of Odysseus and how it reflects risk management in economic terms.
“To turn to another aspect of the Odysseus narrative, obviously much of the poem, much of the movie consists of Odysseus trying to get home.”
Explore how central banks establish credibility and manage expectations to prevent economic disasters.
“And what central banks want to do is establish a credible, reliable reaction function.”
Discuss the comparative journey of Odysseus and modern individuals navigating complex worlds.
“So this drama of the self-assertion of independence.”
Analyze the character of Jason Bourne as a modern manifestation of Odysseus's complex identity.
“Yeah, I mean, I was really this was a very thought provoking question.”
Contemplate the explorations of inner and outer worlds in contemporary life.
“He's producing a Jason Bourne version of Odysseus, which is too flat.”

Get the gist, explore an idea or ask about something said.
On Ones and Tooze, what are the key points of this episode?
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.
0:01This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+.
0:32Hi, and welcome to Ones and Twos, FB's economics podcast. Every week we take a couple data points, use them to try to explain the world. I'm Cameron Abadi, FB's deputy editor, with you in FB's headquarters in Washington, D.C. Joining us, as always, is FB's economics correspondent and Columbia University professor, Adam Tews, this week in Berlin, Germany. Hi, Adam. Hi, Cam. So, one data point for you all, and that is 2 ,700. That is the approximate number of years ago that the Odyssey was written. The Odyssey, of course, is the epic poem that describes the journey of Odysseus after the Trojan War back to his home in Ithaca.
1:21It is also the subject of the most popular movie in the world right now, directed by Christopher Nolan, starring Matt Damon as Odysseus. The Odyssey continues to dominate the summer box office, but what's making it even more popular is the fact that the movie is in 70mm on an IMAX. Christopher Nolan's take on Homer's ancient Greek poem brought in, listen to this figure,$260 million worldwide. why that's huge. The film's all-star cast, which includes Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Matt Damon as Odysseus. I can attest, having seen the movie this week, that it is exceedingly loud in addition to being very compellingly filmed.
2:09And the Odyssey has always been one of the most popular works of literature in the world before it was the subject of this movie. And so many will be familiar with the outlines of the story, the journey of Odysseus, the many adventures he encounters on the way home. And it's been analyzed from various perspectives, including right now in the United States, from the inevitable conservative versus liberal perspectives on questions of race and politics. but we wanted to consider it from the perspective of economics, because in addition to being an adventure tale, it's also a work that gives us some insight into economics in the era of ancient Greece and also economics today from some perspective.
3:03So Adam, to start off with, the Odyssey follows from the Iliad, which famously tells the story of the Trojan War, and its aftermath. Yeah, if we were to start with that mythic event, what kind of economic history can we tell about the Trojan War as a background for the Odyssey? Yeah, well, the source situation here isn't great. I'm by no means a classicist. And I have to admit that whenever I encountered the era of Greek mythology, I was profoundly confused. Because Because the crucial thing to realize, I think, is that the Homeric epics are from, we think, about 800 BC, which is 400 years before classical Greece, Asa and Sparta and so on.
3:49And they are about events which are 400 years before Homer. So they're about a period that we would roughly place at about 1200 BC. So this is as though we were, you know, in a complicated, arcane, poetic way, writing poetry in 2020 about stuff that happened under Charlemagne, or rather stuff that happened in the late medieval period. and we're trying to place ourselves in this. But the sweep of this narrative where the source base gets relatively dense in the classical Greek period and the period that we're talking about is huge and massively mediated. The date commonly given for the sack of Troy is like something like 1250.
4:36And what that does is to place this within the frame of what is now commonly referred to as the Bronze Age, which is a period in the Eastern Mediterranean of great imperial, of large, stale state structures. Egypt still there from much, much earlier. The Hittites in central Turkey, the Greeks organized in the Mycenaean, state structures and state lerts, the Babylonians, and many more. And the key commodity is bronze, which itself is an amalgam of copper and tin. And so the economics of the age, the sort of high stakes economics, the great power economics of the age, are thought to have revolved essentially around the trade in those two commodities, of which copper was relatively abundantly available, whereas tin had to come from as far away as Afghanistan by ship.
5:29And that's what we think the economy of Troy was most likely based on, which was basically a kind of toll taking on shipments of tin to the Mycenaean Greek states. And there's a moment in the Nolan movie, I gather, which I haven't seen yet, in which Decius, looking back, realizes, are we the bad guys? It's like, are we the people that destroyed this structure because we were the dangerous men that came from the sea? And what we were really doing was struggling with Troy over control of trade. And woe. And because woe is indeed the story of what comes next. Because the Troy story is complex because there is a Troy that was burned down in 1250.
6:09But unlike in the Homeric version, where that marks the end of an entire era and everyone begins to trace their lineages from refugee Trojans around the rest of the world, that Troy actually we know was rebuilt quite quickly. So the one that fits best the story of total annihilation doesn't fit the narrative because it isn't obliterated with mystery, it's rebuilt. But what we do know is that from the early 1200s through to the mid-1100 BC, time running that way, a total catastrophe hit the Eastern Mediterranean civilizations. It's known as the Great Crisis of the Bronze Age, out of which only Egypt survived.
6:52So all of the other state structures were massively disrupted. And so Homer's ethic is looking back not just at the disaster of the war, but also at a civilization that is on the cusp, they know by 800, of disintegration. And we think it's an effect of war making, various types of dysfunctional economic structure, and of climate change that by the 1100s already had essentially destroyed all of the major civilizations of this era. So it's, you know, not for nothing in Western civilization, in Western culture, this epic, though, you know, the chronology is sort of telescoped, so that essentially a period of 400 years seen from 400 years later, and then passed on to us 2000 years later, is compressed into a single drama of the Trojan crisis.
7:50it's not for nothing that this really marks the kind of the war shock the foundational shock of western civilization and its epics and its telling of these stories a foundational mark if you know if you're thinking about german culture the 30 years war and the great wars of the 20th century come to stand as like further epics on this sort of scale nolan made oppenheimer last right so So he moved from making films about atomic bombs to films about this moment. And there's a, you know, there's a sort of logic in that. That's interesting. Yeah, I thought thought of a kind of, yeah, materialist analysis of the Odyssey in this sense, on the basis for it being written in the first place.
8:32But if we were to look at the narrative itself, much of the drama has to do with the household of Odysseus and its fate, what will happen in his absence to that household. And it seems worth noting that the word economy itself, the word that we have in English and other similar languages, derives from the Greek word oikos for the home. And I'm curious what that etymology, what that derivation tells us about economics today. I mean, again, you know, a deceased household, in what sense was it then more than just a home? I mean, it seems like the drama treats the household as almost comparable to a corporation, if one were to look at it through that lens, you know, with various successors battling over control of that household.
9:28But yeah, in what other sense does Oikos, the household in ancient Greece, and what ultimately seems to be a kind of private idea of the economy, Yeah, how does that relate to our guess more modern conception of the economy, which is a much kind of broader concept that we apply to all sorts of like, you know, broad public understandings of social life? Yeah, I mean, I think this is a really fascinating topic. I mean, the big drivers of the economy in the Bronze Age in this region were the palace economies. So those were the super oikoi, the big, large households that were driving long distance trade.
10:05But the basic unit, presumably, of society was not the palace, but large oikoses, so households, which were units, exactly as you say, Cam, of integrated economic management and material production in which you would have an owning family member, property, land which they owned, perhaps some craft implements, slaves, labourers, in a relatively self-sufficient term. And it's not by accident that the word for economic self-sufficiency, autarky, is also Greek, because that's what describes one of the functions of an oikos, or rather one way of defining what an oikos is, is a unit, men, women, priests, enslaved, animals, tools, land, that is self-sufficient.
10:54That's what makes an oikos. That is also its goal. And it achieves that through a second fundamental principle, which is division of labor. So this is already a social organism in that not everyone does the same thing, that this system is organized into a series of appropriate tasks. So men typically managing agriculture, women doing indoor tasks, certain work for free people, certain work for slaves. And then also it is a model of management and patriarchal management. And that, after all, is the central question on the domestic side of the Odyssey story is who's going to end up with marrying the widow, the supposed widow, because they then enter into control of this oikos.
11:43And this adds a second element to the Greek notion of economy, which is oikos on the one hand, and either nomos, I've seen it derived from, or nomine. So nomos is order, nomine means management. So in the idea of economicus, which we get from Xenophon in the Socratic dialogue, you have oikos management as being a new type of knowledge. And it's something that young future masters have to learn. It is something that women have to be taught by their husbands. It is something that has to be imposed as a form of order. So it's an inherently hierarchical, inherently patriarchal, based on the radical division between free and unfree, between directing and non-directing.
12:32and it is indeed I think if you were to mirror it in the modern world something like well in the Christian world monasteries would fit within this model and then ultimately you might think the corporation as a similarly a zone of hierarchy and order within what in our period has become something much wider which is a public economy and the steps to that are really complicated and tested also within the classical literature I mean the the version that you and I will have learned in political theory courses is that in the classical Greece, oikos and polis, so the world of private economic reproduction, which was held within the household and sufficient unto itself, was prior to, but also inferior, ultimately, in its logic to political action in the realm of the public sphere, the polis, where people attained not the endless drudgery of reproduction, but something like history.
13:28In other words, you could write yourself into immortality through actions in the public space. And Hannah Arendt, amongst modern political theorists, will draw this line most starkly. And she does it in part, I think, to distance herself and place distance between herself and what she sees as one of the degeneracies of the modern era, of the modern condition, which is that since the 18th century, progressively, the oikos has actually become the public realm. So as the household of the ruler opens up, as a civil society, a public sphere, the economy begins to be theorized in the 18th and 19th century as a zone of general exchange and indeed of significant both public and state interest, this new zone of the economy and then a zone of what will really irk our end, the zone of the social emerges, which is really the public version of the interna of the oikos as the central concern of modern life.
14:29Now, modern scholars might, notably anyone with a left-wing disposition or a feminist, will take issue with Arendt on that score. Apparently classical scholars also take issue with this because they actually believe that this version of the sharp distinction between the private and the public that Arendt derives from Aristotle is overdrawn. And the actual logic of Greek polis state society functioning was, as you'd imagine, far more integrated than that. And if you think about, you know, my great friend Stefan Ice writing about Aristotle on money, you can already see the way in which in the realm of exchange and chrismatics, you see intermediary links, because when households have to trade with each other, what do they trade in?
15:10They trade in money. And money is eminently a political function, because it's almost like a language that ties the polis together. So nevertheless, that's the kind of genealogy we're talking about here. And in European political thought, from the early modern period onwards, as the Renaissance hits and people go deep into the Greeks and start kind of working this through, the modern vision of the economy is self-consciously developed against readings of this classical history. We're going to take a quick break right here, but we'll be back in just a second to continue talking about the Odyssey.
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18:11BetterHelp is now in network with more than 125 health plans, with many co-pays as low as$15 for eligible members. And if you don't have eligible insurance or you live outside the United States, you can still get 20 % off your first month. Sign up and get 20 % off at betterhelp.com slash ones twos. That's betterhelp.com slash ones twos. To turn to another aspect of the Odysseus narrative, obviously much of the poem, much of the movie consists of Odysseus trying to get home. He is inevitably on his boat trying to navigate the seas. And he encounters difficulties because he has wronged Poseidon, the god of the seas, who then inflicts punishment on him.
19:07At least that's his own understanding of what's going on on his way home in the form of storms and other punishments. And so I'm curious how this theology of kind of being punished by gods shapes our understanding of risk. I mean, because, you know, voyaging by sea is kind of one of the fundamental ways that we think about risk in terms of ship journeys, insurance on ship journeys, et cetera. But if capricious gods can just kind of intervene to ruin any ship journey, I mean, is it even possible to conceive of insurance in the first place? I mean, what is the kind of status in that sense of the sacrifices made to gods?
19:48Is that a kind of like primitive form of risk management is not even comparable to insurance so yeah how does this kind of theological ideas ultimately underpin our ideas of of risk in the economy i think this is a fascinating question um because risk is also so closely associated with questions of you know underlying metaphysics what do we think about how does the world organized and again i'm no classicist but i was reading this this um there's a source uh a farmer named hesiod who in the 8th century BC, so a little after Homer, I guess, writes this text called Works and Days, in which he describes to his lazy brother how the world works.
20:28And his underlying theory of the riskiness of the world is tied to a historical narrative, what we would call historical narrative. So he thinks there was a golden generation that was created by Zeus directly, who lived like gods, and they were in harmony with the gods, and all was good for them. And then came the second generation, the silver generation, who were arrogant and proud and began to get ahead of themselves. And then there was a bronze generation. You can see he uses iron types to describe this, who were violent and self-destructive. And then came the fourth age, the age of heroes, the age of heroes described by Homer, who went to their graves at Troy.
21:08And Greeks now, he's saying to his brother, from the 700 BC onwards, live in an iron generation, which is marked by a weather system, if you like, of good and bad fortune, in which pain and joy alternate in ways which you have to prudently learn to manage. So he has a meta theory of why there is risk. And we're at risk because we live in an age of iron. We got there through our own psychodramas with the gods. And in that world, to live free of worries is essentially impossible. You can't. You're going to live in a world in which things don't last. Summer won't last forever. So what have you got to do?
21:52You've got to build granaries. There's neither a stop to toil and sorrow by day nor to death by night. You have to adjust to this tough iron reality, his lectures, his brother. So what can you do? Well, what you've really got to do is figure out what the gods will, what Zeus wants, because that's your only hope of navigating this space. And so according to Hesiod, this Hesiodian kind of view, well, then it puts a huge premium on divination. What you've really got to be able to do is figure out what these forces are aiming to do. And so every kind of divination, most famously, of course, the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, which I've had the privilege of visiting, may even have done a show from there.
22:35I mean, it's the sort of place that could make you think you could see the spirit of God acting here. but then if you can't afford the trip to Delphi and you can't afford to pay for an oracle you know you throw dice so the Greeks were in the western tradition the great originator of games of luck but not just games of luck but moans of divination and they would look for any kind of omen so there is a figure I mean a misgarbled of Greek which is Tresmologoi Tresmologoi yes whose job it is to read oracles and this is a big business it's kind of like what we do. It's like talking heads of the Greek polis who would give opinions about things like whether the Spartan invasion of 1431 is going to go well for the Greeks or the Spartans, or whether it's really a good idea to send a huge expedition to Sicily in 1415.
23:25And apparently local potentates would buy off the weather forecasters to get them to make the right signs. And of course, the Sicilian expedition was absolutely catastrophic. But the other way of mitigating risk, you're absolutely right. I mean, it's a crude functional reading, but it's nevertheless clearly true, is that you make offerings. And you try and, as it were, establish a relationship with the gods, which is benign. You signify your subordination. You try and read their minds. Because you've got this theory that we're in this age of iron, where through our own, you know, failure to basically live in harmony with the gods, and through the disaster of Troy, where the true heroes died, we're now in this space of what we would call kind of radical uncertainty.
24:10Like we have to cope with this. I mean, because isn't the very premise of risk that it's calculable? I mean, isn't that the very sort of... Well, this is calculable, but that's so, yes, but that's facile, right? Because how do you know whether it's calculable or not? What are the conditions under which it's calculable? When they get the dice out and roll the dice, they're saying it's calculable and these dice will tell you that you know it's like we'll go but that's very unscientific and then i'll say to you well you know you show me the science on ai forecasting like and so they construct calculability and what we can see them doing is definitely trying to reduce it to risk even though you know hesiod is telling them you know this might not be that kind of problem i'm guessing the dice has a greater margin of error than than actuarial you know uh tables would it really leads there right what do you do actuarial tables for but essentially to to map the dice game of life that's the that's what they're for they're they're literally designed for cities like manchester where you're going you know can i take out insurance on a middle-class guy in manchester what's his death rate compared to if he was living in the countryside like is this a good proposition manchester was you know we We talked about this in the last show, like an incubator of social science, precisely because they were trying to calculate the risks of surviving in this new Iron Age.
25:35Yeah, no, no, it's interesting. It's just broadened this idea of what data can consist of. Yeah, perhaps a sort of Oracle's prediction counts as a kind of data that we can tabulate. Yeah, it just thought, their version, it was as real as a heart attack for them, I'm sure. Yeah. Now, to narrow in on one aspect of this narrative and these travails that Odysseus is being confronted with by Poseidon on his way home, he famously encounters the sirens from his boat. He's warned about the sirens, and the sirens famously sing this song that is extremely tempting, and so he's warned not to allow his fellow sailors to hear it, because otherwise they'll be tempted into a shipwreck.
26:24So he stuffs his crew's ears with wax so they cannot hear the sirens' call as they steer their ship past. but Odysseus himself demands to be lashed to the mast of his boat and not to have his ears stuffed with wax so he can hear the sirens as they pass by. So this is a very famous story and it's often cited as a metaphor for economics, specifically for the operation of central banks. I've seen it evoked in this sense in the terms of central banks tying themselves to the mast economically and setting long-term goals and not being tempted by the siren call of, I guess, more short-term goals. But I'm curious if we were to unpack this metaphor, how exactly does it work?
27:15I mean, who are the sirens if the central banks are Odysseus? And why in the first place are central banks, you know, indulging this temptation to listen? I mean, what is motivating the temptation then to listen in the first place if this is in fact the metaphor so so yeah how does this uh metaphor get unpacked in economic terms yeah i mean i think the the general problem is that of self-binding right and of credible commitment and the sort of slightly perverse logic by which depriving yourself of freedom um is a way of better achieving your goals in the face of the fact that your free will might be subverted by forces that you can't control and you can't control your reaction to.
28:02And what central banks want to do is establish a credible, reliable reaction function. They want to make themselves into a function. They want to become risk and not uncertainty in terms of our earlier exchange. And to do that, they have to deprive themselves of freedom. And this is the central message in Western culture of the of this image. And the temptations in the case of political economy, as certain sort of conservative political economists, this is a conservative myth, by the way, the temptation is that you might succumb to the blandishments of democratic politics, which might opt for a short term fix of some kind.
28:44And that if central banks consistently indulge this impulse, the result would be a destabilization of expectations. First of all, we've had this so many times on the show when we talk about central banks. And then if you keep on indulging, in the end, you'll end up in hyperinflation. And then you'll really be on the rocks, and that'll be the disaster, and you'll never get home. And so to avoid this, you establish independence of institutions. And it would make sense. You could certainly follow through, Cam, and just simply say, well, why go through the whole Odysseus heroic thing, why not just stuff your ears as well and just use a mechanical function, which will be the sort of totally non-discretionary central banking, Taylor rule.
29:26But that would also, I think, deprive you of the drama, whereas the drama of central banking in some senses is to resist the thing that will be easy and to be seen to be resisting it, so as to establish. So not to be a robot, to be a person that actually resists. And what's interesting is there's another type of model that the central banks also sometimes invoke, which is a slightly softer version, which is what they call the Delphic model, which goes back to our conversation a minute ago, which is the sense that, you know, rather than simply saying, we're the central bank, we stand for price stability, we see and hear everything else, but do not believe that we are going to change our course in any way.
30:08This is our goal. So this drama of the self-assertion of independence. The Delphic vision is a little bit more like the forward guidance type story that is now so much in debate because Walsh, the new chair of the Fed, is against it, which is a kind of, you might call it data-driven, negotiated conversation. You go to the oracle and you present omens or the oracle sees things and you ask questions of the oracle and the oracle gives you answers. And the central bank becomes a sort of participating forecaster rather than simply this rock-like or this, you know, Nisian figure tied down and bent on its course regardless.
30:48And so that Delphic vision of the central bank is also in discussion. Both of them essentially deriving from the same set of Western civilizational, what are we going to call them, myths, ideas. Of course, they were actual practices, at least Delphi was. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that does help me make sense of the political status of central banks in the terms of the drama you describe about them being at the center of the action. Like if it was an automatic mechanism that would defer the action elsewhere, it would sort of be like, well, there would have to be a decision maker outside the boat to say, okay, do we go, what's our course here?
31:28Yeah. It's underrated also what he does to the oarsmen, right? Because they just have to keep on cranking. Yeah, exactly. It's interesting. It's a rich metaphor. Again, probably why the Odyssey has the status it does. But then I guess to finish off this conversation, I'm curious about your thoughts about whether an Odyssey of this kind is even possible today. And by that I mean the very premise of the poem's narrative is that Odysseus' travels from one island to another and his journey to get home from Troy to Ithaca allows for a travel between radically different worlds where from one island to another, he's encountering different gods.
32:21He's encountering different civilizations, different nymphs who have not heard about where he's coming from or where he's going. And this allows for an adventure on one hand. It allows for a posture of pursuing this kind of adventure as an end in itself, as a goal, as a kind of good. It allows for the promise of a certain kind of discovery, both literal and metaphorical in terms of self-discovery. This obviously was a kind of pre-globalized world. It's a time where even Greece was not unified from island to island. So is it even conceivable in our current world to have this kind of odyssey to evoke that term?
33:06Yeah, where geography, I guess, is still like a real salient factor in how we think about understanding ourselves and the world around us. Yeah, I mean, I was really this was a very thought provoking question. I mean, if we start with we start this is only one way of reading this. But if you start with the war as the starting point, I mean, the most obviously tempting comparison is with the extraordinary stories of soldiers, displaced people returning home after big wars. And the most extraordinary story like that, which is actually a story of the global era, but one in which the global era operated more slowly, is the famous Czech Legion, which were members of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which surrendered to the Russians in 1916, that were recruited by the Russians in 1917 after the revolution to fight with the Russian revolutionaries against the central powers.
34:02that then come the Bolshevik revolution, go over for a second time to a new alliance backed by the British, the French and the Americans, fight their way from. So these are people who start in Bohemia, end up on the other side of the conflict, end up then in Ukraine, and then spread out along the Trans-Siberian Railway Line and fight their way back to Bohemia by way of the Trans-Siberian Railway, Vladivostok, the Pacific, California, by which point they're welcomed as heroes, New York, the Transatlantic, they arrive in France and they arrive back in Bohemia. I mean, if that's not an odyssey, I don't know what is, right?
34:43That's the most extraordinary circumnavigation. And one can only imagine the perils and the extraordinary. If you start out as a peasant in Bohemia and that is how you traverse the world, God knows what happened to their subjectivity. But if we start from the more psychological reading, I gather that the key term is polytropos. So this is how Odysseus is described. And there was an interesting conversation between Emily Wilson, one of the most celebrated recent translators of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Derek Thompson, a really thoughtful substat post in which Thompson was remarking on the fact that Wilson had simply translated this rather bluntly as Odysseus was a complicated guy.
35:27he was complicated so he was a migrant a poet, a loving husband, a father an adulterer, a homeless person a pirate, a thief, a liar, a mass murderer a war hero, like in that sense if we start there and then ask ourselves what kind of trajectory could one imagine being traced out and we think of the multitudes that we all in various ways contain then why not in an abstract sense, not the literal sense of geography that the Czechs were encountering or displaced people after World War II, or indeed even in the great dramas of the African wars, the extraordinary odysseys that people go on from Eritrea to Italy or Eritrea to Britain.
36:09But in a more microcosmic way, is that not actually in some ways, isn't this one of the things which makes it such a timeless text is that in fact, you could think of modernity as turning this from the legend of the particular person into the experience of many, many people in modern life, right? The uprooting, the need to find yourself, the travel, this complicated variety of roles that we take. Because we're not in oikoi. We're not tied into oikoses. We're not tied into particular divisions of labor. We're these free, broken people. And what really struck me, thinking about this in these terms, is the Matt Damon connection.
36:49because who else is he embodied? But for me, the iconic figure is Jason Bourne. And Jason Bourne, to me, is a kind of global war on terror Odysseus. He wakes up in the Mediterranean, somehow miraculously not drowned, and he doesn't know who he is. And he goes on this incredible trajectory, and then where does he end up? Well, not in the Mediterranean, but facing the Atlantic in this incredible scene of the Portuguese windmills, you know, walking into the bar with this woman that has walked into his life. And all of a sudden he is free from, because he doesn't know who he is. Like the whole drama is about the fact that he has all these talents that he doesn't, and they're warrior talents and he can do terrible things.
37:37And he doesn't, he knows he's done terrible things. And you have, you know, Moby in the background with extreme ways and whatever. And it's this sort of feeling of who am I and how do I find myself? I mean, Wilson was saying that she thought that Damon in this film is essentially, I mean, she said it just one line, but it struck me as a very powerful observation that Damon is in effect replicating. He's producing a Jason Bourne version of Odysseus, which is too flat. And that actually isn't, I mean, for her, reading as a classicist, this doesn't do justice to the complexity of the character. yeah this is interesting because yeah i think you're you're describing the modern condition i think is can be parallel but there there is a when i think of jason bourne i think of existential crisis so there's a kind of like that's the drama is this kind of existential sense of loss or something right and really not knowing who you are right not really understanding how you've come by the skills that you have which turn out to be a mixture you know other rather mixed blessing of capacities.
38:38I would think of polytropos as a kind of more outward facing thing where the kind of the sense of adventure I mean I guess to evoke that term again it's almost a kind of good itself and maybe again that may just be that we just we just know too much now I don't know that it's kind of this this idea that um GPS is going to spoil it all. Yeah and then I mean what are what are the terrains we can explore we can explore our interiority you know i mean i guess that's that's something that we all need to explore um outer space right yeah well it brings us back to elon musk maybe as our modern space odyssey like you know the the film yeah i guess maybe not an accident that christopher nolan has also made at least one film based in outer space interstellar but um in any case i i can recommend the movie it was um entertaining and as we've i I think just shown some food for thought.
39:34Did you take the kids? No, they were asleep. I went, I did go with Britta and I think it would have been too, I've been talking to my son about it. He would like to go and it's not gory. So like maybe like for kids, it could may actually be fitting, but maybe, maybe for a second few and I'll take my 10 year old. Anyway, we should probably end this conversation for now. But of course, we'll be back in a week with new data points.
40:04ones and twos is written and edited by adam and me and produced by claudia tady the show is made possible through the support of foreign policy readers and ones and twos listeners as always we love getting listener feedback you can leave voice messages on the ones and twos homepage on foreign policy.com or email us that's podcasts at foreign policy.com or you can tweet us that's at onesandtwospod. I'm Cameron Abadi. Thank you very much for listening, and we'll be back in your feed next week.
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The poem written some 2,700 years ago and the contemporary film directed by Christopher Nolan are the topic of this week’s show. Adam and Cameron discuss the economic and philosophical underpinnings of the story.
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