#589 - Roman Empire Expert Mike Duncan - This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von: Summary & Transcript

In short

Podcast Notes: This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von - Episode #589 with Mike Duncan

Episode Overview

Title: #589 - Roman Empire Expert Mike Duncan
Guest: Mike Duncan, historian, author, and podcaster known for “History of Rome” and “Revolutions”.
Discussion: A walk through the History of Rome, including day-to-day life, political implications, and religious traditions. Exploration of the comparisons between the Roman Empire and modern America.

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Key Themes

History of Rome Podcast
Content: 189 episodes covering over a millennium of Roman history, from its legendary founding to the fall of the Western Empire in 476 AD.
Re-listenability: Many listeners return to the podcast multiple times for its emotional connection and educational value.

Cultural Impact of the Roman Empire
Roman Influence: The legacy of Rome in Western culture, including language (Romance languages), legal systems, and governance practices.
Memes and Modernity: Discussion on how contemporary memes (like how often men think about the Roman Empire) reflect the enduring fascination with Roman history.

Daily Life in Ancient Rome
Classes and Professions: Life varied significantly based on social status; most people lived agrarian lives, while the elite participated in politics and culture.
Religious Practices: A very religious society with polytheistic beliefs; rituals and sacrifices were intrinsic to both public and private life.

Political Structure and Changes
Transition to Empire: The shift from a republic to an empire involved the concentration of power among military leaders like Caesar and Augustus.
Consequences of Civil Wars: Economic inequality and military reforms that marked the decline of the republic and rise of autocratic rule.

Historical Narratives and Bias
Historiographical Challenges: The difficulty in discerning factual history from moralistic tales told by historians.
Examples of Historical Narratives: Discussion on Livy’s accounts and how they reflect the biases of the elite rather than the everyday citizen's experience.

Comparisons to Modern America
Societal Parallels: Mike draws parallels between the decline of Roman civic unity and current societal divisions in America.
Political Discontent: The rise of populist movements and the potential for civil unrest as reminiscent of Rome’s historical trajectory.

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Key Takeaways

Roman Legacy: The Roman Empire remains a foundational piece of Western civilization, influencing language, governance, and culture.
Complexity of History: Understanding historical events requires an examination of narratives, motivations, and societal structures rather than just facts.
Warnings from History: The decline of the Roman Republic serves as a cautionary tale for contemporary societies regarding inequality, political division, and the consequences of civil strife.
Future of Society: The discussion encourages listeners to reflect on the current political climate and think critically about the lessons history may offer.

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Additional Points

Mike Duncan's Works: In-depth discussion of Duncan's books, including "The Storm Before the Storm" about the fall of the Roman Republic, and his work on Lafayette's biography.
Humor and Insight: The episode is filled with humor and engaging anecdotes, making complex historical topics accessible and relatable.

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Conclusion This episode provides a rich tapestry of Roman history and its relevance to modern society, emphasizing the importance of studying history to understand current events and avoid repeating past mistakes. The conversation is engaging and thought-provoking, ideal for history enthusiasts and casual listeners alike.

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Transcript

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0:28I've got some tour dates to tell you about. He created the very popular History of Rome podcast, which spanned more than 175 episodes over five years. 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.

1:07Mike Duncan. I'm here. That's you. Yeah. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining me, man. I appreciate it. You have a famous series called The History of Rome that is on YouTube. Yeah. Yeah. And available where all fine podcasts are found. You can get it on Spotify. You can get it on Apple. You can get it anywhere. How extensive is it? 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. 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.

1:53it'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 yes you know there's there's a lot of re-listenability in the history of rome and i've definitely heard that from people there you know i've listened to this 10 15 times and i'm like i 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 um but yeah people people 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 listen to it for the first time.

2:30So it enters like the sort of like emotional connection beyond just like what they're learning about Roman history. Well, yeah, I think that's something that certainly happened recently. There was like a lot of social media. There was this buzz that happened a few months ago. It was like women asking men how often they think about the Roman Empire. Yeah. Yeah. And right when I saw that, I was like, oh my God, I think about the Roman Empire all the time. Where do you think the Roman Empire can – why was that so popular, that meme? I mean when people would ask me that, they're like, do you think about the Roman Empire every day?

3:04I'm like, yeah, I've thought about the Roman Empire every day for like 25 years. I'm writing a book about the Roman Empire as we speak. Like I'll probably think about Rome once a day for the rest of my life. But I'm on like a very extreme edge of all this, and I am a sicko for Roman history. Like other people can be more casual about it, but I'm a sicko for this stuff. You're like the Marilyn Manson of Rome. Yeah, I am. I'm really, really into it. But I think, you know, Rome is always going to have like a hold on our collective consciousness because we're living in a post-Roman society. most of the, you know, cultures, nations, countries, whatever that we think of sort of in the West have roots in Roman history, or at least have a phase in their own history where this is like the Roman period.

3:51Because the Romans, you know, eventually expanded to control the entire Mediterranean basin, like all of North Africa, like all of, you know, what we've now considered the Middle East, and then they're up into like France and Britain. And this is a single unified state that has never been repeated in history. Like you look at a map of, you know, Europe and the Mediterranean today, you know, it's 30, 35 different countries. And once upon a time, this entire thing was the Roman empire. And so their culture, their modes of doing thing, their laws, their language, right? I mean, French, Spanish, Italian, these are all like post-Roman languages.

4:28These are all romance languages. And so I think that because there is this like point at which they were just everything for like a, I mean, not for a thousand, they didn't run the Mediterranean for a thousand years, 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. And I really don't think we should do that. Even hearing you say that, I didn't realize that romance comes from Rome. Yeah. It's, yeah, it's, it's all linked to it. And I never thought about that. It was like, or does it come from, cause it's funny.

5:03Yeah, I don't know about that. I actually don't know about the etymology of romance versus like the city of Rome. The word romance originates from the Latin word romanticus, meaning of a Roman style or in the Roman style. It's just so funny because we all kind of romanticize it that it's that present, right? That it's that present. We don't even notice when it's in a term that we use to describe how we feel about it. Yeah, it's everywhere. It's in tons of invisible ways. How long was the Roman rule? like just in years, just a blanket, like including like the Republic, the Roman empire. So, okay.

5:39There, there's many different ways we can answer that question. So, so like in, in terms of like the legendary origins of the city, it's founded in 753 BC. This is when Romulus kills Remus and they found this city in the, you know, the legendary seven hills. Um, and it goes in the West through 476 AD. So that right there is 750 plus another 500. So we're like at 1 ,200, 1 ,300 years. And then we only here talk about sort of the Western empire. That's sort of what captured the European imagination because they're in a post-Western society. But the Eastern empire just transformed seamlessly into what we now call the Byzantine empire.

6:20And that lasted for another a thousand years after that. So if you say that there's a continuum between Romulus founding Rome in 753 and the final fall of Byzantium in the 1400s, you know, now we are over 2000 years. You hear the fable about Romulus and Remus, right? Can you tell me that fable of how Rome was found? This is like kind of a mythological fable. Do you know what I'm talking about? Oh, yeah, for sure. And it is one of those, like, these are archetypical mythos, right? 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.

6:59They had to be purged because there was a king who was afraid of them. These are very standard stories. I mean, these are biblical stories in the same way. and they allegedly, you know, wash up into some reeds and then a wolf comes along and they suckle. Yes, there it is. They suckle at the teat of the wolf. Uh, and then they grow up big and strong and they wind up, you know, Oh, they do overthrow the King who was afraid of them and found their own city. And I was actually just talking about this with some friends the other day, because, uh, there's a great bit in Livy, uh, who's one of the great, you know, Latin historians who was writing L-I-V-V-Y?

7:33L-I-V-Y. L-I-V-Y. Yeah. And he was, he was around during like the age of Augustus. So, so he's writing about stuff like this is 750 years later. Like he's, he's talking about this and he's like, well, you know, it doesn't really seem plausible that it was a wolf. So I'm thinking that maybe it was like a, 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, so it's, 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. At that time. At that, even at that time.

8:08And because he's 750 years in beyond all that, like we go back 750 years from now, like we're, you know, we're like in Robin Hood days. That's how far away Livy was from the origin of his own city. So the myth isn't true, but how did it actually begin? 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. So there was an easy place to cross the river, to ford the river. And right next to that is a couple of prominent hills.

8:48And if you're a very, very early society and you're looking for a place to build a settlement, it's very nice to have some hills around because you can build a little fortification on top of it. And if anybody comes around to mess with you, you have a really nice defensible position. so it really seems like there were just some some early people who you know come across these hills who recognize that there's this nice ford in the river and now they're sort of on the trade routes that are running like up from southern Italy into Etruria and then you know deeper into the European interior and stuff that's coming down from the interior and out through southern Italy so location location location and then and then you know the soil around Rome and and in that whole, you know, swath of Italy is very fertile.

9:32So, you know, they plop themselves down. They've got some good farms going. They've got trade routes coming through. They have a defensible position. 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. And, you know, the earliest things that they find are not too far off of like this, you know, alleged 753. And these are some of the early findings there on Palatine Hill excavation. Wow. Yeah. And there's just layers and layers and layers because they, you know, they built on top of what had come before them.

10:06And so. Do you think we've found a lot of the stuff that's there? Do you think there's still a lot to be found? There's always more to be found. 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. because that what we have right now, the tools that we have right now for archeology, it's inherently destructive. Like you're going to wind up destroying things in order to get at what you're looking for. And - Destroying things in the ground.

10:37Yeah, destroying things in the ground. And so there are definitely places where it's like, we know that there's stuff there. We're not gonna touch it because who knows, maybe in 20 years or 30 years or 50 years, we'll have better technology 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. That's pretty amazing forethought, you know? So when you look, so going back just to that fable of Remus and Romulus, right? And Romulus, Rome, that was how the name comes through, through the fable. Like how big was myth and fable at the time when Rome began?

11:13Very big. I mean, this is, you know, early human societies have all had myths and legends about their own origins. 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, Native Americans. We have our own origin myths here in the United States of America right now. We've got, you know, George Washington, like never telling a lie. Like these are myths that we, you know, tell ourselves. Christopher Columbus in Thanksgiving, whether there's truth to it or not, but it's still, these are myths that we tell ourselves.

11:47Yeah, and so this is a very common thing to just all human societies. And so, yeah, them telling this story 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. What are our values? What are our morals? What is it that we take seriously? What is it that we think you should do or not do? 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.

12:31Like Marius had an issue with ambition. Let's explore that. Let's talk about that. And that was really for them, the purpose of history was to tell these moral stories. And that's a very common thing in all societies. And it was certainly true for the Romans in a really big way. Dude, having an issue with ambition, what an interesting thing. Ambition's a dangerous thing, man. Like it for, you know, we can't do anything without ambition. Like nobody can do anything without ambition. I would not have done what I did without ambition. You would not be sitting here without a little bit of ambition.

13:03For sure. You want to go think about it. Yeah. You want to go do stuff, but if, but it's like, it's anything it's, it's everything in moderation. If you indulge too much in ambition, now you're willing to do anything and break Like anybody do whatever it takes to get ahead and now you're into hubris and now the gods are going to punish you 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 and it's not him. It's the gods. Yeah, it's fascinating, man. Where did we get all of the information we have on Rome? There's many different places.

13:38I 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. And again, like when I say at the time and I'll just keep going back to Livy. Livy was writing at the time, but he's telling us about events from 200 years earlier, 400 years earlier, 600 years earlier. So it's not really a contemporary history, but he's a huge source of information. Sorry, Nortu, but why weren't there histories at the time? Some of them were. And the ones that we like a lot are the ones that are written very close to events.

14:15Like 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. And he himself was a political actor. He was in Caesar's faction during the wars. And so some of what he's writing about happened at the time. Polybius definitely gets into stuff that happened in his own lifetime. And then sort of off of Rome, 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. And he was definitely like, you can't write about history if you can't talk to people who were there.

14:49That was his theory. So there is sort of two branches of the literary sources. Most of the literary sources that existed have been lost. We are dealing with a microscopic fraction of what actually existed at the time. 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. And you're like, God, if we could just get a hold of that. Oh, my God. I mean, the great white whale is the emperor Claudius wrote – and he comes from the Julio-Claudian dynasty. And he wrote a history of the civil wars that put the Julio-Claudian dynasty in power.

15:27that was allegedly subsequently destroyed. For what reason? Because it was too honest and it was too truthful. 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. But so we only have like a microscopic amount and this stuff is like, you know, how did it get to us? It's like, it's stuff that winds up in like monasteries, you know, like monks are copying this stuff down and forwarding it along. things are just like found randomly in libraries. So those are the literary sources. And then we supplement that with a lot of archeology and like, and like analysis of material culture, because there are limits to what the, the literary sources can tell us.

16:11And this is, 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, how would, how did their furnaces run? Like how did their ovens run? Like all of this stuff is coming from, is coming from archeology in Roman history in particular. We also do a lot of study of coins because they were constantly pumping out coins and coins were, were a means of sort of universalizing, you could call it propaganda, but like messages that the emperor, the state wanted to put out there. And that was a big thing. If you started to get some control, you'd have a coin almost.

16:47It was the thing like you could almost say that, like, what did it mean to be the Roman emperor? And there are lots of different sort of things that that means. The main thing it means is that your face is on the money and your your face goes on the money. And when we talk about like people rising up and trying to usurp like like rival emperors, like there's always this point where they start minting their own coins with their own face on it. And that's OK. Now we've got a viable dude here because he's got control of a mint. Right. Instead of show me the money, it's like show the money me. Show the money to the people.

17:20And it's always stuff like I love the army. And then they bump out all these coins and then the army is like, oh, he loves us. Maybe we should support him. Oh, they would put little slogans on them? Yeah, yeah. And they had all this like shorthand for like what different symbols meant. And they would recognize these things 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. But they had slang at the time almost. or like almost emoji, not emojis, but. I mean, emojis isn't far gone. I mean, it's iconography and emojis are just iconography.

17:53And there's also changes in like sort of how the faces are depicted depending on what era of Roman history we're into. And so people can spend their entire lives just studying like Roman coinage. But those are roughly like the three main pillars of then how we know things about the Roman empire. So did people at the time keep diaries? 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? I think for most people, they're illiterate. That's, I mean, mass illiteracy is definitely a thing. So when we are talking about like, what was it like for the Romans?

18:34Like 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. But in the Maine, the ancient world was largely rural and agrarian. Most people were doing farming. Most people were doing either subsistence farming or maybe they've got a surplus that they can sell into the market. And so you are living and working on farms in those little communities. And it's kind of the same way that we think about rural agrarian communities at any time and place. You're kind of circumscribed. You're probably not going within 50 miles of where you grew up.

19:14you're living and dying. Going further than you mean. Yeah. Yeah. Excuse me. Like, yeah, very similar still to today. It's very, it's very similar. This is, these are very human things. Like people don't go far from home. Like, and so that's, that's their life is they are living, you know, a life of, of rural agrarian work, which is either nice or not, depending on if you like the work, if, you know, when, when it's going good, it's going good. If there's a drought and there's, and you know, then famine is sweeping through and that's not so good. And then, but we also do have at this point, the rise of like major urban centers.

19:51So there is, there is a major urban society that is happening inside Rome. When you say a major urban society, like what does that mean? I'm talking metropolises, cities in the way we think about cities. And Rome, for example, was the first city in history to go over a million people. That's how big it was at its height. It was, there's a million people there. Let's, you know - As big as Tucson. I think how many people are in Tucson, Arizona? I bet that's about the same. Oh, Tucson only has 542 ,000. Try Milwaukee. Milwaukee's probably like 500 ,000. Yeah, I bet it's close too. Look at that. So the size of Milwaukee and Tucson combined, there we'll go.

20:30Yeah, yeah. Double the size of Milwaukee. I love Milwaukee. I do too. Yeah, Milwaukee's a great little city. Dude, Milwaukee is, we've been touring for like years, But one of the, one of my, one of the places I found that surprised me the most was Milwaukee. It's got like really cool old architecture. It's right there on this bay. And it has like this whole, like, yeah, I'm, yeah, I'm about like, I don't know, 90 minutes west of Milwaukee. And so I'll get over there a couple of times a year, usually for a Brewers game. And then I'll like stick around. Wisconsin's amazing, man. La Crosse was one of the other favorite places that I've found.

21:01La Crosse. Yeah. All right. That's a deep cut. Just a perfect, like, yeah. Yeah. I've been through La Crosse. But anyway, getting back to it. So Rome actually is like a huge city. And there are other cities that are over 100 ,000 people. This is big for the ancient world. And inside of those cities, you do have sort of – this is when you have a different life depending on what era of Roman history you're actually talking about. whether you're there as a wage worker, whether you're an artisan, whether you're one of the elite and whether you're involved in the law. Like there's this whole like stratification of like professions that you can have.

21:42And then we get into later sort of like the bread and circuses aspect of Roman civilization where the empire itself became so rich and so powerful and all – like the wealth of the entire Mediterranean world is like flowing into this city. and this is what's causing people to like move there and come into Rome. And then, you know, we do need to feed these people and so you start getting like grain doles and then, you know, circuses and games were always a huge, huge part of Roman society. And so they would throw these spectacles for people and there is a book about daily life in ancient Rome that, you know, at the height of the empire, a lot of what you were doing is kind of like bouncing around from patron to patron, picking up a few coins from this guy, picking up a few coins from that guy, getting through your day and then getting up the next morning and doing it all over again.

22:28And you didn't really have a profession. You were able to just kind of like bum around. Figure out your hustle a little bit. And what was the religion at the time? Like, did things start to change from mythology into actual religion during Rome? I think those two things are very linked. The Romans are very, very religious people. They were very into ritual and sacrifice, and they took it really, really seriously. And when we look at the myths that they told about themselves, the first king of Rome is Romulus. And what was Romulus? Romulus was a warrior above all. And this is actually like what the Romans are above all.

23:10They are the children of Mars. They do war. They're really good at it. That's why they They conquer the entire Mediterranean world. They're better at it than just about anybody else. So it's a very masculine society? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's the patriarchy like to the max. And they were very martial society and they're sort of – Martial society? Martial society. And like their political institutions are mirroring their military institutions. And the consul and their leaders are simultaneously – they're the political leader but also the leader of the armed forces. This is actually what their job is.

23:45Wow. The other role of the consul, however. The consul. The consul, right, which is one of the key leaders in the Republican era, is overseeing these critical sacrifices and critical rituals that the Romans felt that they had to perform and needed to do in order to stay on the right side of the gods. And that was the job of the political leadership was to defend the city using the armies and to make sure that the gods were happy by making the proper sacrifices. sacrifices. And so the second King of Rome, this guy called Numa, he was all about religion. And so when they tell this story, they're like, the first guy is war.

24:20And then the second guy comes in and he's like, uh, we need religion to like guide this in like an ethical way. And like to make sure that we're not just like insane barbarians that we actually like have a, an ethical and moral structure to our society. And those are the two things. And then the next, there's legendarily like seven Kings of Rome, like there's seven Hills, there's seven Kings of Rome. Like, you know, seven's a lucky number. It kind of always has been. And so when you, when we talk about the seven Kings of Rome, there's like, it goes like warrior, religious guy, warrior, religious guy, warrior, you know, religious guy in, because those two things go hand in hand for like one side, the other one side, the other.

24:54So even that's even still today in our society, it kind of seems like it's like, there's two parties sort of, and it's one, it's one side, the other one way, the other. Yeah. And, and then, and what those sides and what they are change and their values change over time. Yeah. And, and when we talk about them being a religious people, you know, this is sort of pagan polytheistic religion. And so there were different gods, right? And we know these gods, a lot of them were borrowed from the Greeks. So it's, you know, it's Jupiter is Zeus and there's, you know, Minerva and there's, you know, Bacchus and all of these, you know, different gods that are out there.

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25:29So they didn't have religion in the sense of like there was one thing that everybody did and was a part of and everybody went to church on Sundays. There were different temples in different places. And like one city, their patron would be Apollo. Another city, their patron would be Diana, right? And so it would change from time to place. And so they had this very open-mindedness towards religion and how you practiced religion. When they would come across a new society, and by come across, I mean conquer, they would often incorporate those religions or they would make sort of what they were doing, their religious sacrifices their gods.

26:07And they would be like, oh, this is analogous to our thing over here. It's probably two aspects of the same God that we're talking about. And it would all just be integrated into one thing. And how were they able to master that control? But just because their army was so powerful at its base, the legions do a lot to keep people in line. So the political leaders were often also the leaders on the battlefield. They were. Wow. They were. That's literally what they were there to do. Wow. Yeah. So that's as if James Carville would actually would also then have a military, he would have to be a politician or a Fetterman, you know, the laid back warriors.

26:48But anybody or the casual dressed down Friday warriors, you know, which I think they would love it. Great. They would love it. But those people also, if I love the fact that if they made rules for people, they also would have to get out on the battlefield and at some way they have to put their money where they have to put their blood where their mouth is. 100%. And it actually goes deeper than that. So yeah, if you're running for consul and you want to be consul, the thing that you want for yourself and expect for yourself is to be the leader of the legion and then go out and defeat something or someone on behalf of Rome and then come back and have a triumph.

27:24And the triumph is you getting to parade through Rome and show off the spoils of your conflict. And, um, sometimes there were actual wars to fight. And sometimes there's, there's this very funny thing that's called triumph hunting, which is when a console becomes, comes into power and he's like, there's nobody to fight. And so he'll just pick some random tribe and attack them and be like, Oh, I defeated such and such a people so he can have his triumph. Um, which we still do today in different ways. Yeah. But create enemies. I mean, yeah, yeah. We, we do invent enemies and then go fight them. Don't we?

27:55Um, but, but there is, But there is a thing like in early Roman society, really through almost to the end of the Republic, there was a property qualification to serve in the legions because you had to have enough money. You had to have enough land to participate in the legions. Their assumption, their sort of cultural assumption was that the people who constitute this society that we are in are fundamentally like the landowners. And so if you own a plot of land, then you're a part of the society. You're the people who go and fight for this society and defend this society. If you are, you know, if you're in poverty, if you don't have land, you don't qualify for service in the Legion because in their mind, you're not actually really truly a part of this thing that we are trying to defend.

28:41Right. So how can you put that you're all into it if you don't have something, you don't have a vested interest almost? Yeah. And then the leaders and then, yeah, the higher you go, the more you are out there. Now, granted, like they're in the command tent. And you're not like on a horse, like literally leading the charge, but you were expected to be out there and an active military leader. And everybody who had a stake in that society, that meant that you also had to be there. The richest people in society went off to war. The poorest people stayed behind. And we have kind of flipped that. Yeah.

29:15God, that's fascinating. I can't even imagine. But it sounds like, you know, you always hear like, oh, I wish all of these, you know, if these politicians had to have their children go off to war, they would feel totally different about the things that they send children off to war to do. Yeah, they're called chicken hawks. Yeah. Wow. I didn't know that that was the term it is. Yeah. Yeah. Chicken hawks. Yeah, we've had chicken hawks all throughout history. The people who will bang the drums of war and then send other people off to die. Wow. A chicken hawk has go back up to the top. Sorry. Has multiple meanings.

29:47In bird names, it refers to three hawk species, coopers, sharp shinned and red tailed. In gay slang, it's used to describe an older man who prefers younger males. OK. And politically, it can describe someone who supports war but avoids military service. Ah, like draft dodgers kind of. Yeah. Similar to that. Yeah. And we've had a whole run of them as presidents. You know, Clinton got out of it. Bush got out of it. Trump got out of it. Oh, yeah. You know, Obama, I don't think, had the opportunity to. But yeah, we certainly have not followed that same steed where the people who are writing the rules are the same one who have to go out there and make sure it's their own blood that's providing the ink.

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33:24And it is like a lot of what I just said, how we shape our present society is the stories we tell about the past. I could see this being a fascinating tour. I don't know exact how you do it, but I just, you got to do a tour of this. I could see this. I want to talk at the end about what it would be like if we had a tour that you went on, like with some visual effects. We're actively planning this now. Yes. Great. Good. This is how things happen. Yes, it is. Because we both got a little bit of ambition, don't we? Yes. Yes, we do. That is fascinating. And the fact that if a government found a way to curtail people's ambition, wow, how fascinating that is.

33:59Because you never even think that that could be happening to you. Were they curtailing people's ambition during Rome? Well, I mean, certainly a slave was encouraged to not think that there was anything else that they could do but be a slave. A woman was encouraged to believe that there was not anything that she could do but be a woman who was mostly there to make little Roman boys. So, yeah, there was an elite that was allowed to have these kinds of ambitions. But a lot of other people were supposed to know their place. Got it. So it was a caste system pretty much? Yeah. And, you know, like stoicism, there's lots of great stuff about stoicism as, you know, one of the main sort of philosophies that comes out of the ancient world.

34:40But one of the sort of, I think, negative things about stoicism is it encouraged people to just do the best they could with whatever they were meant to be. And so, yeah, if you're a slave, you were just told, well, be the best slave that you can be. That's not really a great message. And Marcus Aurelius, who's one of the great voices in stoicism, would be like, we all have our role to play in this. And I should be the best emperor that I can be. And you should be the best soldier you can be. And you should be the best slave you can be. and aren't my burdens the same as that of the slave? And it's like, well, Marcus Aurelius, I'm not actually sure that's true.

35:13It's a nice thought. And I do understand that there are burdens to being emperor, but like - And it's easier for you to say that. Yeah, it's pretty easy for you to say that, less so for the slave. What did people wear during the time? Like what was some common garb kind of? Well, I am not an expert on what they were wearing around. Oh yeah, I feel that. For sure. Um, but you know, the, our, I can say this, the sort of the togas that we all imagine them wearing, this is very, this is very upper crust where the toga was, you know, practically a tuxedo. Like you would clock that in Roman society is like, this person's walking around in something very fancy.

35:52Um, and it's something that the senatorial class would wear around. So like most people are not bumming around in daily life wearing a toga. They, and those were actually like, they're very cumbersome, right. To wear around. It was a cumbersome piece of clothing. Yeah, it's almost like you're playing hide and go seek in your own clothing. Yeah. You know, because you think it's going to be easy and you got to keep this end up. It's like people was like, yeah, I'm a ghost or whatever. But and you probably had a nice piece of fabric from somewhere, which was something only wealthy people would have.

36:21Yeah, yeah. And when you get into sort of like what are the fruits of having this kind of empire and having trade routes that are now reaching to China. Yeah, they've got silks coming in. And they've got other kinds of like fancy finery that they get to wear. But like most people are in rough tunics, you know, and like some sandals. And that's about what they're wearing. Yeah, that's – yeah, you didn't have any Air Force Ones or anything. Did they have – what were people eating at the time? If you are just a peasant, you're eating whatever is around, you know, barley, millet, you know, like – Like parts of beer.

37:01Yeah. There's a lot of barley and millet that's going around. If you're on the coast, you've got fish coming in and you've got different kinds of the fruits of the... The fruit de mer in French, which is the fruits of the sea, which is seafood. There's some... There's meat. There is red meat that people are eating, but it's in far less quantities than we eat today. And then, you know, you can get Roman cookbooks today where people go through like different recipes that we sort of knew that they had. And like, you know, dormice always seem to show up as one of the things that people like to eat.

37:40A little dormouse. Yeah. A little dormouse action. We always got to do that when we do Roman food. There's a great sort of like fish sauce called garum that they were all, you know, that they were wild for, which is actually the principal export of Pompeii before they - Was garum? Yeah. Fish sauce? Yeah. They were famous for their fish sauce. Wow. And then what are they drinking? They're drinking wine. And there's a lot of wine being consumed in the ancient world. And they would make this like, it was a very thick wine. Like a port almost? Yeah. But so much so that you would cut it with water.

38:19And so it was almost like concentrate, right? And the way it's like Kool-Aid. I remember we used to have like that. They used to sell that orange juice concentrate like in the frozen block. Oh, yeah. That's good. And your mom would buy that. Yeah. And put that into something. So yeah, it's basically that. And that's a lot of what their wine was. Ah, so a lot of their wine was a concentrate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then people would splash, would cut it with water and then have themselves a bit. And there would be sort of like if somebody had a problem with alcohol, you would say that they drank it without cutting it.

38:51You know, that was like a thing that would get passed around. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he would just drink it straight. That's not so good. Oh, Ricky's drinking it straight, huh? Oh, he's not doing well. No, he's not doing well. We need to have an intervention. Yeah. Could a peasant rise up in society at the time? Was there any chance that – because you always – there's this – I think there's this idea, right, that like you're the peasant on the parade route and you see the princess go by and you catch her eye. And then you have a chance to be her boyfriend or whatever, spouse or whatever. You know, you have, I think that's every like poor kid's dream, you know, like certainly when I was growing up, you would think like some rich girl would see you and then her dad would think you were nice.

39:36And then you would have a chance to help run his car dealership one day. Right. That's the dream. Or coin car wash, dude. We had this hottie at our school, dude. named Emily, dude, and her dad had two coin car washes. Great, bro. Yeah. Oh. Aspirations of a lifetime. Oh, man. Yeah, and that's what you could have been doing, and instead you're stuck here doing this. I bet that, what an awful turn of events. You could have had two coin-operated car dealerships, and instead you just have a very successful career in podcasting. But you know what's funny? There's a part of me that's still just, you just still want to be picked by her to be the inherity of those two coin op car washes.

40:21God, they were nice, boy. And I still, man, that just, the idea that still just pressure washes my soul, you know? So to answer your question, you know, social mobility in the ancient world ain't great. Okay. You know, if you were born a peasant, you're almost certainly gonna die a peasant. There are, you know, once we move along through the empire, sort of the republic has fallen. and we are now into the imperial age, there's certainly commoners who are elevated a little bit in the way that you're talking about. They become a favorite of the emperor, and then there's a lot of griping, like, who is this guy?

40:59Why does he get access to the emperor when we don't? This is all very embarrassing that we have this commoner around. And that'll happen sporadically over hundreds of years. It didn't happen very often. When you get into sort of like the second and third centuries, there is a phenomenon of being able to enter the army and having that be the main sort of avenue of social mobility. And this is actually – now that I think about it, this is actually true for most of the empire, at least once the legions become professionalized. How do you move up in the world? The legions. And when you say those are the – Those are just the armies.

41:39The armies. Yeah, we're just talking about the armies. When they become professionalized. They become professionalized. So when people start to see that as a way to move up rank. And if you're provincial and there is a – And what does provincial mean? Just see. A provincial is somebody who lives in the province – lives in a province of the Roman Empire who is not themselves a Roman citizen. OK. OK. So these are the provincials. And a provincial could become a citizen through service in the army. and that, and if you somehow managed to make it through 20 years of service, you would be discharged with citizenship papers.

42:13And there, there are tablets, they're called resumes. You can find them in museums that then you would carry that around. Like for the rest of your life, it was like the most precious thing in your possession, right? If you had one of these things, because then wherever you went, you're like, you have to treat me differently because I have citizenship. You can't mess with me. And so these, these, yeah, these are very, very important things that people would have. When the empire starts to run into troubles militarily, socially, politically, like in the second and third century, there is a run of emperors in the third century who become emperors because they had risen through the ranks from the lowest rank all the way up.

42:52Because when you're in a crisis, there's kind of two paths in front of you. You can either cling to the leadership that had been leading you before and in fact, like probably created this crisis or you allow talent to rise up and you're like, okay, let's, let's have the people who know what they're doing, wherever they come from, like, who cares? Let's have them be in charge. And so there's this run of, of emperors from Illyria who, when we look at their biographies, it's always like they can't, they, they, and they were peasants, they were commoners. They enter in the lowest possible rank. And then they rise up through, through talent and through will and through merit to become generals.

43:28And then that's the transition point into becoming an emperor. But like when you actually dig into it, there's this way of like, if you're really rich and you're like, oh, that person came from nothing. A lot of the times they're just talking about like a regular middle-class kid, not like not really somebody who grew up in poverty. It's just somebody who grew up without like insane amounts of wealth. And so sometimes when they're like, oh, this future emperor came from nothing, it was very possible that they were like a well-to-do local family who rise up. Right. They just weren't royalty. They just, yeah, they just weren't royalty.

44:02So it's, so it's kind of difficult to tell, but there is, but, but in general, that's how you're going to go from being what you were, which is nothing to maybe being something is it's the army that's going to do it for you. Wow. And it was, but it's been 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, but I certainly felt like it used to be that way more. Yeah. I mean, like America's experience with armies is, uh, is different, but very similar to what it was kind of in the early days of Rome where it's not so much like only rich people would go off and serve in war.

44:35But when we did have broad-based conscription for like World War II and for the Korean War and for World War I, like all of society is kind of going off and being a part of the army. And then you come back and yeah, maybe you have, like you rose up the rank and now you're a captain. And then when you come back to civilian society, Now you've got some stature. You know, you've proven yourself and now your resume looks quite a bit better for sure. Oh, yeah. I remember, yeah, when military guys would come to visit your school or something. I mean, it felt like it meant something, you know, certainly when I was a child.

45:06And not that it still doesn't. I just think there was probably more combat then or coming off of more combat or you had more friends' dads who had gone into heavy combat. And so those stories were more plentiful probably in society at the time. That's why I say that. what were women regarded like at that time? Did they, because there were female gods, goddesses. Sure. So obviously there was a, and it was a war society and you had like Athena, the God of war, Athena. But you had female goddesses that were powerful. How, how were women viewed in society during Roman times? So it's a strongly patriarchal society.

45:46And the head of the household is invariably a man and they are in charge of everything. And so if you're a woman in one respect, you don't really have rights at all, like who you marry, what happens to you, where you go. Like most of these things are completely out of your hand. And what you're really there to do, the most important thing that you can do is make babies to fill the legions so that we can continue to be this strong military society that we are. But all of that said, the Romans also did have written into law, actually, there did become spaces for women to own property in their own right, to be able to manage some of their own affairs financially.

46:30A lot of early Christianity, for example, is bankrolled by wealthy widows because they had had a husband, they had had a family, that husband dies, They don't remarry. There is legal space for them to exist as a widow who's unconnected to a man who controls her own money. And the story of early Christianity, like who was patron – who was a patron of this? Like who was patronizing these early Christian groups? A lot of it is like wealthy widows is where the money is coming from. So it's a mixed bag, but I would say like in the main, if you were a woman in Roman society, you do not have a ton of rights at all.

47:12What did they do like if children were born with disabilities, handicaps and stuff like that? How were people treated like that? Not great. You know, exposure is a thing, you know. And what does that mean exposure? Like – Put them out on a trash pile. Really? Yeah. That's crazy, dude. What did people think of life at the time? Did they value their life? Did it mean as much to them as it feels, seems like it does to us today in America? Does that make sense to you? It does. And I think it did. I think their lives did matter to them a lot. And even though, you know, we were just talking about like exposing babies because they couldn't live, right?

47:47That was like a difficult choice that they would make. But we often today, because we have all this advanced medical technology and because we have vaccines and because we basically eradicated childhood diseases, which is one of the biggest killers in world history. Like childhood vaccines is one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of human civilization, right? Prior to the 20th century, the mortality rates for children were appalling. And this is why you had to have six, seven kids because three or four of them might not live to adulthood. Wow. Bring that up. And so we think these days that like, oh, because there was that much death surrounding them at all times, because loved ones were dropping dead left and right, that they must have been more callous.

48:32They can't possibly have cared about each other as much if they're just going to die. And I have, in all of the historical studies that I have done, I just don't find that to be true. People loved their children. We love our children as human beings, right? It wasn't different for them. If a woman gives birth to a child. She loves that child. And if that child dies at the age of 18 months, that is a devastating tragedy. It is the worst thing that can happen to a person is the death of a child, full stop. Nothing else even comes close. It affected them in that way. They cared about each other in that way.

49:07They tried to protect each other and save each other. We are always fighting for life, and we are always fighting to save people that we love. And so it is absolutely not the case that they were more callous or more hard-hearted. Why do we get that idea then? Because I see what you're saying. Because yeah, God, I can only imagine. Because we can't conceive of what that must have been like. Wow. Because if I had five kids, I mean, if either one of my kids died, I'd be, that's it. I'm a wreck. Like, I don't even know how to recover from that. Yeah, we just had a guy on Kevin Von Erich and he has a famous movie.

49:44He has a famous life. his five of his brothers died okay they were professional wrestlers in the 80s 70s and 80s in texas and five of them died from suicides and different and he said that he's just a remarkable man he said i lost all my brothers he goes but i could not imagine losing one of my children it's yep and it was just fascinating not fascinating to hear that of course you get that but But, you know, yeah, it's interesting to think that the weight of that would be – it's interesting to have some quantifiable weight of that coming from someone like him and hearing it from you. Let me see.

50:23In ancient Rome, infant mortality was significantly higher than today with estimates suggesting that about 25 to 30 percent of children died in their first year of life. Yep. Wow. That's – every single one of those deaths mattered. Right. Every single one of them mattered. You almost had to have three children to get two children. Yep. God. it's hard it's hard man and that's why that's why vaccines are so great that's why it's so important that they exist because what was what was killing these kids it was early childhood diseases yeah bring up the bring up how did vaccines change the life expectancy of children just so we know that we've never looked at that you hear everybody talk about vaccines we've talked about how don't we've listened a lot about it in here let me see child immunization specifically started with edward jenner's successful smallpox vaccination in 1796 yeah yeah the practice of vaccination including for smallpox gained traction throughout the 19th century with massachusetts being the first state to require it for school children in 1853 yeah great dude they should require it in massachusetts just for that uh accent you know what i'm saying but i mean this is obviously something that has been at the forefront of like scientific investigation right the fact that they that it was such a problem that they were losing this many children that it was like, this is something we have to figure out.

51:39If we can figure this out and stop this, let's do it. Because every one of those deaths, it's not just like we've lost that person. Like every person who was connected to that kid is now traumatized by that. So you have these societies that just everybody is walking around, not hard-hearted, not caring about these things, but basically victims of trauma. They've all been traumatized. And that does inform what previous societies were like that had a lot more to do with the fact that we care about each other than the fact that we did not care about each other. Wow. And I bet care was almost at a different depth then because it moments probably meant something more because you, there was, I mean, it was literally in the trash pile of your, like the morning was on the curb of not only of your heart, but of your home.

52:29Oh, I can't even imagine that. It's a hard thing to imagine. and god I think imagine how much more light how real it was then we are one I guess it's a blessing that we have today is how we're able to kind of hide things from our own reality in a way um if that makes any sense kind of especially visually you know we're able to uh you know one thing I always that I thought was neat about being like because we grew up in like a really poor area and you couldn't hide anything like if somebody's getting a butt whooping if somebody was if parents were fighting every day. It was all right there. Right.

53:05And it was a blessing and a curse. It was like, it was too much information for a kid. But then also it was like, this is real. I'm involved in a fucking show. Right. Like where nobody's talking anybody in the nightlight in my room gave up two years ago. He moved to fucking Minneapolis. It's like, you know, just, I don't know. There was something real about it. And then when you have some money, you got like, you can get hedges and you get a fence and you get to, you get an attorney, you get things to hide behind. Well, I, I mean, I grew up in, you know, the affluent suburbs of Seattle, Washington, right?

53:36So I, so I'm, I'm from the suburbs of the eighties and nineties. And so, yes, it was very much not that it was, everybody's fine. Everything is great. We all go to our little, you know, single standing houses and, and every family is doing great. And then, you know, and then it, you know, behind closed doors and underneath all that. Yeah. Of course, I was 11, man. Like when, yeah, when Smells Like Teen Spirit came out, like, oh, I was 11 years old. So like I was just deep in the scene. Of course I was. Yeah. Oh, those early mosh pits, dude. Every one of my friends, older brothers was in a horrible band.

54:12Sure. That would play, it was like a pet store. They would move all the cages into the back and they would have a little mosh pit. Because Eddie Vedder showed everybody that you could sing with a kind of deep voice, which we can all kind of do. Yeah. And so it was like, oh my God, this is the thing that we can do now and like and so they're because we can all do that whereas before that it was all the glam metal guys with these like registers that were just like i don't even know how you do that like i can't even hear that yeah like vince neal those guys exactly yeah like i can't i can't emulate that but eddie vetter i can do and like you know screaming into him i i come from punk right that was sort of my like skinny puppy that type of stuff oh no like you know like 90s third wave stuff um you know like rancid and bad religion and no effects acid bath No, not acid bath.

54:54Okay. Sorry. It's okay. Yeah. All right. Slipknot? Gashoffer. Yeah. Well, no, Slipknot is like, now we're, that's metal. Right. We're getting into metal. And I've like, I'm not a metal guy. I do not, but I do not believe that there is a split between metal and punk. I think we have far more in common with each other than we don't. And so I will always be a peacemaker and an ambassador between metal and punk because I don't want us to fight. I want us to be on the same side because we're all probably throwing shows at the same crappy little place. I love that. And if there's ever a treaty to be signed, I would love for you.

55:24Yeah. Metal and punk. Right. We need to stand in solidarity with each other. But that said, I do not listen to metal at all. I think it's I think it's overblown and ridiculous. I want three chords and some incoherent yelling. Yeah. That's that's what I that's what I want out of music. Dude, that's so cool, man. Is pornography causing a problem in your life? Do you find yourself watching porno for longer periods of time and having trouble stopping? Is porn affecting your relationship or dating life? Well, you're certainly not alone. Watching pornography has become so commonplace today and oftentimes men use porn to numb the pain of loneliness, boredom, anxiety, and depression.

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56:58To learn more about Valor Recovery, please visit them at www.valorrecoverycoaching.com or email them at admin at valorrecoverycoaching .com. Thank you. What did the kings and the royalty live like? Were they living? Was it just like a, what was it like over there? Could you just knock on the drawbridge? How did you even get over there? Well, for one thing about the Romans is they did not have kings anymore. And this is an important part of their political ideology. Once they kick the kings out in the legendary day to 509 BC, there aren't kings anymore. Okay. And why did they kick the kings out?

57:42For a variety of reasons, most especially like it was immediately caused by the aristocrats, those of the senatorial class, not liking the last king of Rome. And it's actually a story that he raped the daughter of a prominent senator. And so that's what precipitated the overthrow of the last Tarquin king. And that was in the Roman – that's how the Roman Republic started? Yeah. Yeah, because like if you go back, like Romulus allegedly founds Rome 753 and then they're kings of Rome for like 250 years. Okay. And then around 500, that's when the Republic gets going. And what started the Republic in?

58:19Take me through that story. The legendary story is that there's a last king who was – the local senatorial elite in Rome did not like him very much. What was his name? Tarquin. Okay. And the Tarquin family comes from – yeah, Tarquin is supervice. But they were in a Trurian family. And Etruria is north of Rome, not Roman. So it was a foreign monarchy. So there were provincials? The Romans were being ruled. Yeah, the Romans were being ruled by a king who came from someplace else. That's all it is. It's a foreign monarch, which is something that is common throughout history. And so they don't like the foreign monarch.

58:56And this is all trying to like sort of capture how the Romans get out from under the cultural hegemony of Etruria at the time, because the Etruscans were quite a bit better at things earlier than the Romans were. And then the Romans come along and supplant them. But to your question of, which is really like the high aristocracy, the senatorial class, and then ultimately the emperors, like how are they living? Well - Oh, and wait, did we finish the story? What happened? Oh, you told us about the story, but what happened with the - Oh yeah, according to the story, Tarquin rapes the daughter of a prominent setter in Rome.

59:28And that guy goes and he rallies all of his, you know, his brothers and his allies and his friends, and they overthrow the king and they kick him out. And then they say, we're not doing kings anymore. Wow. We are going to do a like job rotation system and set up proto-democratic assemblies. And then that's how they ran themselves for like 500 years. And is that how democracy began? Well, democracy, I mean, it's one of the places. Like, yeah, I mean, democracy is coming from like Greece, right? They're taking cultural cues from what's happening over in Greece because like just as, and there is debate about when the Roman Republic was actually founded because you do get sort of Solon coming over to Athens and being like the great lawgiver of Athens and sort of the like, I'm going to get this date wrong, but it's like around 470 is when he's the lawgiver of Athens.

1:00:18And this is when you start getting sort of like what we think of as democratic government. And it's entirely possible that later Roman historians went and backdated, like they retconned their own history so that they would come along like 30 years before that because everybody knew about what was going on in Athens. And they were like, actually we got there 30 years earlier, which is just them, you know, doing a little light revision of their own history in order to make sure that they were always the super bus. It's like an Instagram filter. It's like an Instagram filter. Exactly. A little Jakarta.

1:00:44Yeah. But, you know, if you're a senator. So now we have the Republic going on. Yeah. This is where the Republic of Rome, this is the second of kind of three of the, this is the second of kind of the three main parts of Rome. Then we get into the Roman empire. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. So now we no longer have kings. No longer have kings. Kings bad. You cannot be a king. In fact, if anybody tries to be a king, if anybody tries to become a king, any Roman citizen can kill that person. Oh, yeah. Kill the kings. Oh, yeah. No kings. Sacramento kings even. There is a reason why the emperors are not kings because kings are verboten, right?

1:01:19You are not ever going to be a king. And every Roman senator ultimately thought that they were superior to any king. And there were kings throughout the Mediterranean world who would be like clients of the Roman Empire. And any Roman senator considered themselves socially, morally, politically above a mere king. So you have the republic now and the counselors of the republic, the rich guys, how were they living at the time? The people who were sort of the aristocrats, which is synonymous with the senatorial class, they are the major landowners of Rome. And so they do not have occupations. They are living off of the rents of their land.

1:02:04They're living off of the produce of the peasants who are living on their land and then ultimately the slaves who are living on their land. That's where their income is coming from. That's where their wealth is coming from. They themselves don't have to do anything. They don't have to have a profession. They don't have to have a job. And in their minds, this is what made them the perfect people to lead the republic because they were the only people who had the leisure time to like be literate, to read things about history, to learn things about how to actually do statecraft. to have the time to engage in all of those pursuits.

1:02:37And that made them like uniquely able. And then if you say like, well, hey, maybe we should educate everyone then. And then like, we can have all of these. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't wanna go that far because really they just wanted to be in charge. But there is sort of a self-justifying like ideological project there, which is like, we're the ones who have the time to do this. And so we will be the ones who do it. And so, you know, they would have country villas. They would usually have like a place in the city. A lot of them clustered on the Palatine Hill. That's, I mean, to this very day, you know, jockeying for a house in the best neighborhood.

1:03:12This is, I mean, this is a tale as old as time. This is what was going on on the Palatine Hill. You know, you wanted to be in a good house and a bigger house. Amongst the other people who are thinking and making decisions. But at this time, even literacy was kind of a delicacy. Yeah. Yeah. Literacy was a very rarefied thing. And did they have like prostitutes and stuff like that? What was that? Was that going on? Oh, sure, man. I mean, that's the world's oldest profession. So. Yeah, dude. Yeah, absolutely. PLM, bro. Yeah, absolutely. There were, yeah, there were sex workers. Yeah. For sure. And then, you know, they would.

1:04:18do whatever they wanted to do. some humorous sort of satires that were written about the life of the aristocracy. And these are very much like, oh, yeah, they're, yeah, what was going on behind closed doors was quite, you know. We would consider it taboo. Like, well, like, was it perverted? Like, was it like, I mean, I know like, was it like pedophilia type stuff? No, no, no, nothing. No, I don't think it's anything like that. Although in some times and places, yeah, for sure. Because that's always been something that's been with us, unfortunately. But yeah, you know, there's orgies, there's drinking parties, there's, you know, they're putting on, you know, theatrical plays and, you know, it's bawdy, it's rivaled, you know, all that stuff.

1:04:58Like Bacchanalia. Yeah, yeah, Bacchanalia. I mean, that's where this stuff comes from. Yeah, I grew up in a New Orleans area. So it's like we would, you know, you'd see the different parades. I mean, the list we put up earlier, that's 80 % of the names of all the different parade groups that are there. Yeah. So the rich were living it up. They were enjoying themselves. They were the ones who were getting together and thinking. They were the ones that were strategizing. Are they still the ones that are going out into the battlefields too? Yeah, yeah. For centuries, absolutely. And whether they liked it or not, Cicero famously complained about having to do military service because he wasn't a soldier.

1:05:39He didn't consider himself a soldier. He wanted to – he was engaged in the law. He didn't have to be. Like Cicero could have just sat around and done nothing for sure if he wanted to, but he does get involved in basically having a legal career. But he had to go do his service in order to qualify to be a consul even though he wasn't a soldier at all. And also there's a very famous – or famous inside the Roman historian world where a buddy of his is writing to him and is like, how do you feel about being a consul and having to be in charge of all these like religious things when you're like an atheist?

1:06:13And he's like, well, yeah, I'm an atheist. I don't believe any of it, not necessarily, but we go through the motions, don't we? How did people, what was plumbing like? Waste management? How did people wash their clothes? Okay. These are not areas I'm an expert in. Okay. But I can tell you some things because the Romans were very good about aqueducts and sort of having running water in different places. But, yeah, they've got pipes. They've got public latrines. But sometimes you've also just got chamber pots that you're filling up and throwing out the window when you're done with it. you know that one of the things about the past is that it probably stunk to high heaven everywhere you go yeah yeah like i like when you read about the way people live like want that yeah like like oh when you go back to the past like oh it'd be so great it's like yeah he's been like this smells gross you know because i've done a lot of work like in um in french history too and like in the louvre which used to be like the palace of the king you know they would talk about this is up through like the 15, 1600s, just like princes and nobles, like if they had to go to the bathroom, they would just literally go pee in the corner of a room.

1:07:32This is what they were doing. No way. And this is something that is really - Like a SIG app or whatever. Yeah. Like, okay. Because we've gotten very used today to the glories of indoor plumbing and what it can do for us. It's kind of cool that it'd just be like, keep talking. You just turn your back and just piss the other way. Or somebody comes by with a little piss head and you piss in there and they run off with it or, or whatever. I don't even know what they would do with it. Would they recycle the urine at all? Did they need like fluids that bad back then? So not fluids, but what they did need was like the, um, like the, the chemicals that are in human urine, like to actually, this ties directly into your point of like, how did they do laundry?

1:08:14Um, those chemicals that could be extracted from human urine was great for washing clothes. Yeah. Really? Romans clean their clothes using a mixture of water, alkali, often urine, and fuller's earth. The urine provided ammonia, a natural detergent, while the fuller's earth acted as an abrasive to remove dirt. The process involved washing the clothes in vats, often with the fullers or their slaves treading on them to agitate the clothes. After washing, the clothes were rinsed and dried. that's kind of crazy to think that you would use urine and earth to clean something and who figured that one out so there's you know it's like that's like the thing the bravest man who ever lived was the first person to eat an oyster you know there's like there's those little things it's like okay there was a guy who figured out that if you peed on clothes you could get them clean yeah who was that guy what was that guy's story because we have no idea who it was yeah and it'd be yeah it'd be tough to convince somebody that today.

1:09:18What were their news sources? Like, how did they get information? So information is going to be passed through like traders. Okay. So that's one way that you're going to find out what is happening throughout the world. And so like, obviously, if you live in a port of some kind, you're going to be more hip to like what's going on in Egypt or North Africa than if you're just like somebody who's living in some little village in the interior of Gaul, which you have no idea what's going on. The Romans do develop an incredibly extensive network of roads, like an insanely extensive network of roads. This is like one of also their greatest accomplishments.

1:10:01And a lot of these Roman roads like basically still exist. A lot of what we use today are, you know, this is where the Roman road used to be. And so especially among the upper classes, there's extensive correspondence that is going on between people in the upper classes. And like if somebody goes off to a posting someplace, they're writing back. There's exchanges of letters and correspondence that is happening all the time. And then the government itself has agents and then ultimately like bureaucrats who are producing material and sending it back to the center and passing information amongst each other.

1:10:34And all of that is being done via these road networks. Or like, you know, people who are traveling from here to there, like tell you, oh, well, this is what was happening down there. And then this was happening down there. Would they spread misinformation too? Would they send false information out? Like, was that a thing then? Oh, I'm sure. Like, I mean, not on the regular. Definitely is there bad information? Yeah, because it's like a telephone game, right? And by the time you get to the other side, you're like, monkey banana raffle. That does not mean anything to me. And it started out with like, there's a war in Egypt.

1:11:05And it's like, by the time it gets to Gaul, it's like, monkey banana raffle. I do not know what that means, sir. But yeah, I mean, they were, they were, when you were engaged in a war, they were definitely intelligent enough. You know, I can't think of any anecdotes right off the top of my head, but like to try to trick people into thinking things. And, you know, like the, the sort of like the hidden army trick is always a thing. You know, Hannibal managed to slip, Hannibal managed to slip the, the Romans at one point in the second Punic war by like tying torches to, to some oxen and sending them off in the middle of the night.

1:11:37And then the Romans were like, oh, the army's leaving. And then, you know, it's just a bunch of oxen. In the Roman Empire, Octavian used coins as a tool for spreading fake news. He had slogans and messages printed on them to discredit his political opponent, Marcus Antony. This strategy of using easily distributed small items like coins to spread political messages is an early example of using medium for propaganda. Just like you said earlier, the coins, how that was such a big thing. Exactly. And to think, oh, nobody would take a coin and make it fake to create a bad message. And that guy did.

1:12:05Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, and what Octavian was doing just then is making Mark Antony out to be no longer a true Roman, because at this point, Antony has gone east and he's now hooked up with Cleopatra. And the Romans had this like very sort of like – not standoffish attitude towards the east, but they were very much like, oh, that's the like effete, like effeminate, this like orientalized part of – they're just into luxury. And the old Roman conservative guard was always trying to like protect Rome from like these Eastern ideals. This is sort of like what's rattling around in their heads.

1:12:42And Octavian uses this to great advantage because he starts painting Mark Antony as somebody who is no longer truly a Roman. He's been Easternized. He's been Orientalized. He's gone native over there with Cleopatra, you know, which was a little bit true. So propaganda was – there was propaganda then for sure. Oh, propaganda is relentless. Yeah, of course. Were they, you know, I'm sure they were probably doing the equivalent of photoshopping stuff too. Did regular people live in fear at the time? Did they, because if you were just a peasant, as a regular person, was a lot of your life dictated by what your, not, I guess, yeah, what your government chose kind of for you?

1:13:20A lot of people who are just living their lives don't encounter the government at all, right? But like when we think about especially like the high empire, the interaction between even the imperial bureaucracy, let alone the emperor themselves, and really like these peasant communities in Spain or in Gaul or in Syria or whatever, almost certainly you're not encountering the Romans and Roman bureaucratic administrative anything at all. You're going to encounter your local elites because they're going to come around and ask you for taxes. And that's like – that's the main thing is like are you paying your taxes?

1:14:00Are the taxes of your community being generated? Most of that work though is being done either by private contractors, which they had an extensive private contracting operation to do tax – to do tax collection or it was the local elites like who are doing this. So mostly you are just going about your own daily life. You're not really thinking about the wider world at all. you're certainly not encountering the Romans in any real way. And when we talk about sort of the tyrannical emperors, like the worst emperors, like Nero and Caligula, and we hear these stories about how horrible they were to people, all of that was being done to the senatorial class, right?

1:14:41The senatorial class were the people who were actually in the orbit of the emperor such that the emperor and the emperor's power could touch them immediately. You could be arrested and you could be executed by a mad emperor at like at any time. But that's not happening to peasants. It was not about like the oppression of the people. And in fact, if you want to – if we really went back through it and really started doing like revisions of what we think about things, there's definitely a revisionist case to be made for Caligula. There's a revisionist case to be made for Nero that they were actually – if you talk to regular people, they were like, we loved him.

1:15:16That guy was great. But he looked out for us. He gave us money. The only people who don't like him are the senators because he's abusing the senators. But who writes the history? The senators. The senators write the history. And so now we hear all the bad things about these guys because they were mostly bad to the senatorial class. Maybe they get into the equites a little bit. But I still love that the effects of things fell on the higher-ups. Like even the higher-ups, like you're saying, had to go out and fight the battles. like still because it seems like now more the effects of things right because it's so capitalistic now that the effects of things fall on the lower class but even then the effects of things fell on the higher class what were things that nero and caligula were accused of for being bad oh well i mean a lot of it is sort of arbitrary arrest and execution that's always going to be a fear that's that's bad um just arresting people for no reason or whatever yeah having them killed type of Yeah.

1:16:10And, and, you know, uh, for bad information, seizing, you know, seizing property is a big one. Um, and then, you know, it's sort of like, there's always this, they're living too luxuriously. They're like, they're, all they're doing is throwing parties and not actually paying attention to, uh, to statecraft and this, you know, and you know, that's a, that's a, you know, that's a fair hit on Nero. Nero, Nero wanted to be a musician and an actor. He did not want to be like an emperor necessarily. Like his passion was, was the liar. Yeah, it's hard to go to open mic night when you're the emperor. Yeah, yeah.

1:16:43But he kind of did. And it was very embarrassing to the Roman aristocracy that he would debase himself and give these performances. Because in Roman society, not counting the slaves, but the absolute lowest rung in the Roman social order was like actors and musicians. Really? They were the lowest of the low. And like being caught around. Still are. And of course, and people would slum it. Like, of course they would. You'd go down and you'd slum it and you'd hang out with these people. And Sulla very famously like spent a lot of time slumming it with actors. But this is like a disreputable thing for them.

1:17:20Yeah, yeah, yeah, big time. And this is, again, one of those things, it's like, it's completely flipped because now musicians and actors are, you know, that's S tier level celebrity for us. But for them, it was like, no, you, this is the scum of the earth. You got to keep these people separate. Why was it looked at so poorly, you feel like? I don't actually know. It was just like, it certainly, it's not productive in any way. You know? It's not real probably for one. It's like they're pantomiming things. They're reenacting things. Yeah. I bet it probably didn't have as much value at a time when it was like, you know, we want the real, you know, there's no real gravitas here maybe.

1:18:04Yeah. But at the same time, like there's theaters everywhere. Like theaters are like the thing that we have a lot of the time that is like left over. So like they cared about drama. They cared about performance. They just like on a social level, they were just treated as really, really second rate, second class. And so for somebody like Nero to be doing these things is really like, oh my God, that is not what we want him to do. So this is Nero. But the people probably thought he was pretty relatable. Yeah. Well, and he also spread the money around, right? And he was good at that. So this is him playing the liar when Rome burns.

1:18:41Like, this is not true. Like, he didn't actually do this. And I think, you know, it's been a minute since I've gone through the exact details of this. But Nero definitely was trying to organize fire relief in Rome. Because the fire is real. Like, Rome would burn periodically. But Rome was burning. You always hear that term, right? Rome was burning? Yeah, Rome burned a lot. It's, you know, wood. wood burns and they don't exactly have fire codes at the time. And so, you know, any little thing could, could set off a blaze and, and poor and portions of the city would burn. And in fact, like if you look at the, the sort of the buildings that they would live in, because they did have kind of like tenement buildings a lot of the time.

1:19:24What does tenement mean? Just, you know, just like a multi-story housing unit. Okay. Right. In, inside the city itself. And these days, the, where, where do the rich people live in, in a building? They live upstairs. They live upstairs. They live in the penthouse, right? Like that's, that's the best place you can be. During Roman times, that was the absolute worst place you could be. And so if you, if you had money, you were living like on the ground floor. Why? Because if there was a fire, you could get out, get out first. And if you're on the seventh floor and a fire breaks out, I'm sorry, you're dead.

1:19:52Yeah. Dang. How did they get up and down through stairs and stuff? Wow. Yeah. Stairs, ladders. And then there's like, there's great stories about, um, you know, how to combat fires. And Combating Fires was often sort of like private companies, basically like privately organized things. And Crassus, who's very famous in Roman history, he was connected to Pompey the Great and Caesar in this thing called the Triumvirate. And they are a major force in sort of collapsing the republic and turning it into an empire. Each one of them thought they were using the other two to advance their own interests.

1:20:26And then Caesar is the one who winds up getting killed. It's like a Spider-Man meme, kind of like that. Did you ever do Game of Thrones? Yeah. Great. So there's a part in Game of Thrones in the very first season where that guy gets like the molten gold, like poured down his, okay, so that's Crassus. That's the death of Crassus. That's where that comes from. And is that supposedly true? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's allegedly true because he goes off and tries to conquer Syria and winds up, or he tries to conquer Parthia and winds up getting caught. And Crassus was the richest man in Rome, right? This is the thing about it.

1:20:59Like, Crassus is one of the richest people who ever lived. He acquired most of his, you know, real estate portfolio during a thing called the Sullen Prescriptions when he was in charge of going around and finding the enemies of Sulla and killing them. And he would often find that the enemies of Sulla were people who had really nice estates that he would like to own, right? And this is what he would do. And once he's, you know, sort of past that phase, he had a little fire brigade and your house would be burning down. and this fire brigade would come around and say like, well, give us money, we'll put it out.

1:21:30And if you don't, then we won't. So like mafia style. Yep. And there's definitely stories that these fires were being started on purpose. And then he would send his little fire brigades in. Or he would say, sign over the deed to this place and we'll put the fire out, right? Then you can have your stuff, but I'm gonna own the property. That flame mafia right there. And this is how you get rich. I mean, there is a thing, like no great for like all great fortunes begin with a crime and that's i've largely found that to be true i think that that still is true today wow that's wild dude and crassus that's where we get the term crass from that i do not know actually where does that come from crass because people say that's so crass crass the only true punk late 15th century in the sense dense or coarse from latin crassus i'm solid or thick okay i mean it comes from the same word then so probably maybe not far off stupid stupid insensitive blundering I mean yeah who knows but that's how he allegedly died they poured that gold down him yeah because he was captured really so what take me through that what was that story oh well like I said if you wanted to be a major political player in Rome you needed to win battles right that was the currency that was the currency of the realm in terms of like your political influence Caesar had gone off and conquered Gaul you know He did some light genocide along the way, which is not so great.

1:22:55But he was definitely winning battles on behalf of Rome and conquering territory for Rome. That makes him huge. Pompey the Great had a whole resume of battles that he could point to and say, like, I did this for Rome and that for Rome. I conquered the pirates. I conquered all this territory in the east, and that's why I'm Pompey the Great. And Crassus was rich, and Crassus wanted in on political power. Of course he did. but he didn't really have a great military victory to point to and say, this is what I've done. Because when he was consul, the war that he had to fight was the war against Spartacus and the slaves, which is not the same as going off and conquering, you know, some group of people far away.

1:23:36Like you're just fighting slaves. Like, is that even really that big of a deal? So if you watch Spartacus, right, the movie Spartacus, like Crassus - With Michael Douglas? Yeah, yeah. So Crassus is, you know, probably the main - Kirk Douglas, sorry. Yeah, Kirk Douglas, yeah. He's the main antagonist. Like he's the one who's fighting against Spartacus. And so that wasn't that great of a moment. And so he's still looking for, he's triumphant. He's still trying to figure out what he can do. And so he picks the Parthians, where basically the heirs of the Persian Empire, who then become the Sassanids, is now basically like Iran, who control things all the way into Mesopotamia.

1:24:12And so Crassus is gonna try to go in and take Mesopotamia and conquer that for the Romans. And he was led astray and he made some mistakes and his legions were defeated and he died. And then they tell this story about having gold poured down his throat, which to tie this all the way back to what we were talking about at the beginning and how Roman history was morality tales more than it was like a factual accounting of events. Look what happened to the richest man in Rome. Look at what happened to the man who spent his entire life doing nothing but trying to acquire money. He died in the desert having molten gold poured down his throat.

1:24:49Right, which is like, could you be happier? Your life's over, here you go. So what's the lesson to be learned from that? Maybe dial back the greed a little bit and you won't die like that. You'll die like Caesar, stabbed many times in the back by your best friends. But still a little more respected. But maybe a little more for respectable death. What inventions or practices did they start in Rome that we still have today? A lot of things that the Romans were doing are still around. They were great at aqueducts. They were brilliant at road building. I think Roman concrete is still a legendary mixture for keeping things together.

1:25:29Yeah, bring that up about concrete in Rome. That's fascinating. Yeah, yeah, Roman concrete. Ancient Roman concrete, a blend of volcanic ash, lime, and aggregate, was a remarkable building material that enabled the construction of massive, enduring structures like the Pantheon and Colosseum. Its longevity stems from the interaction of lime, volcanic ash, and seawater, which promotes the growth of minerals like tobermorite that seal cracks and strengthen the concrete. Modern concrete, in contrast, often relies on Portland cement, which is more prone to degradation. Yeah, I mean, Roman concrete was like better than what we have.

1:26:05Oh, yeah. A couple of grams of that. And so the Romans are like brilliant engineers, like brilliant engineers. They're road building, they're monumental building. And they take pride in it too? Yeah, very much so. And like through all, they're maintaining the roads through all of this. They're maintaining these buildings through like all of this. So a lot of civil engineering going on. A lot of civil engineering going on, like a lot. And building projects, like this was another way, you know, like I said, like military victory is the main thing. But if you were an up-and-coming politician and you wanted to get your name out there and you wanted people to know who you were and the great thing you were doing, you would sponsor things.

1:26:43You would sponsor games. You would sponsor, you know, like chariot races. Or you could construct like a building. And then that building would have your name on it. The Appian Way is called the Appian Way because a guy called Appian like started its construction. The Flaminian Way is called the Flaminian Way because that guy started construction of it. And so it was another way to demonstrate how rich, how important, how powerful you were and how much you were committed to improving the well-being of your society, like improving the society you were living. And so to commission a great work like this and then have it be carried out to the end, this is a way that you would spread your own name.

1:27:23And now we've kind of flipped it where they'll name a street after you if they choose to kind of. Right. It's an honor to have something named after you as a, but, but we definitely still have people, you know, like if you look at like universities, like where are they getting their, because if you call it the so-and-so and so-and-so building. Bob Craft or whatever. Yeah, exactly. And that's, it's exactly the same kind of vanity and name spreading that the Romans. Gulf of America. Yeah. Okay. Okay. But, you know, one of the other interesting things about the Romans and like the ancient world in general is that we, you know, we have this very sort of like technological progressive mentality.

1:28:01Yes. Like modern society. I just interviewed Mark Zuckerberg the other day. Okay, great. So it was crazy. I'm like sitting in front of literally, and this is the, I felt like this, an emperor. Okay. Well, that's what he would like you to think. He's really big on Roman history. And I think he kind of thinks that he's Augustus. He's got the haircut. but he's done the reading. Like I know this about Zuckerberg. Oh, it was fascinating. I mean, there's some little things you see right now. You see like Bernie Sanders is preaching against like these oligarchs, you know, and you see - Yeah, so he's the Grok guy.

1:28:30And you see like there's a lot of like people that just have so much wealth and a lot of it is in tech, you know? And I believe that we've kind of become this privatized communism, right? That's a thing that I believe. It's like a lot of people are like, Like I feel like the government is – it's almost – I'm not saying it's disappearing, but people are having to hire their own fire departments to take care of their buildings now. It's like it's getting more privatized than it is public. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of our commitment to universal civic values has declined. Has declined. And if we can privatize it, we will privatize it.

1:29:12And if we can turn this thing that used to be just a public utility or a public good or a public space and make it private so that we can make money off of it, we will definitely do those things. Right. And I don't know, but it doesn't feel like our government is doing – I mean they are doing some stuff, but it feels like our – it's all become privatized now, which is kind of crazy. And that's very scary. Anyway, where are we going? The point I was going to make is that for the last couple hundred years really coming out of like the enlightenment, we have a very progressive mentality that we want to improve things.

1:29:44We want to reform things. We're having these great technological breakthroughs. And like our society and our lives are driven by rapid technological progression. You know, we lived through – you know, like when I was born, there's not really personal computers. They don't even exist. Like, you know, and then personal computers come along and the internet comes along. And before that, it was TV. And before that, it was cars. And so every generation is living a very different life because of all this technological progress. And we just assume that's the way things are. But then you go back to the Roman Empire and you go back to the Roman world.

1:30:19And yeah, they tinkered with stuff. And they improved things. And they would do things like make this better form of concrete. So I don't want to say that they were not interested in invention or improvement. But they kind of fundamentally had like a small C conservative approach to the world that they wanted today to be like yesterday and they wanted tomorrow to be like today. They liked that – there's a stasis there that that's what they were aiming for and especially the political elite want things to just – Stay the same. Just basically stay the same. And so they're not really aggressively trying to – they didn't have like legions of inventors.

1:30:57They're not constantly trying to invent a new way to do things the way that we've got scientists. We've got institutions. We've got people who are constantly trying to make a better world for us. And the Romans – Right. And at the cost though of a lot of stasis, it feels like a lot of times. It's like things have become so – it feels – I don't know. At the cost of almost homeostasis completely sometimes because it feels like you're not human sometimes. Sometimes, yeah. Like at a certain point, it's like, how much technology? I'm good. Yeah, yep. I mean, I think we're due for a little bit of a reset.

1:31:34You know, I would love to get away from having a screen in my pocket all the time. And it's annoying because, you know, like I've got kids. And so like I always have to have my phone on me because I could get a call from the school like at any moment. Like I could – there's an emergency at any moment. And so I got to have the thing that is like my phone, that's my communication device with me. but then it's also like this stupid thing that is just designed to be addictive and the next thing you know you're just staring at the screen because they're like the most fascinating thing that we can look at with our eyeballs and so what i want there was there was this very uh now we're really getting off on it but there was a very specific moment in like cell phone technology where we had was kind of like the blackberry team of sidekick exactly where we had yeah where we've got because i want to be able to text you know because i don't want to talk to you on the phone a lot of the time.

1:32:20I want to text with you. Yeah, it's nice. So I need a QWERTY keyboard because I don't want to do like the three tap to that we had to do like in the late 90s and early insane. If you saw someone doing that now, you would literally euthanize them. Yeah. You would drop him off on the trash pile. 17 year olds. But it is kind of proof that like humans can kind of get good at anything if it's what they need to do. Like 17 year olds in 2003, being able to run the little like ABC thing and just like fire off texts. Like I was never even that good at it. But have it. So having the QWERTY keyboard, being able to make a phone, be able, being able to make a phone call, be able to text, but then not have it be like a screen that is my window into the world.

1:32:57Yeah. That would, that would actually feel great. It really would. Yeah. I wonder if there's a point where technology, they don't even think what happened. I mean, I wonder if it's a point where being human is just like, ah, we're good. It, you know, just like it goes and then it just, you know, it's like, nah, we're it's, you know what i'm saying like at a certain point just whatever's inside of us that wants to be human has just been pushed too far it's just the governor strikes and it just comes back and we just pop back because fundamentally we're human and i i think we're experiencing that some with ai um you know the the the things that ai is is putting out there i mean we're looking at it now god knows if that stuff is even true because a lot of what ai is spitting out is just like garbage slop that's being fed off of its own like pack of lies um or it's data but it's data can be manipulated.

1:33:44Yeah, exactly. And, but, but being a human being and encountering other human beings and encountering the artistic work of other human beings, like there, there is a difference between a poem that is written by AI and a poem that is written by a person. And we can, we can feel that. And you know, this like live, like going out and doing like live events and like live music performances and, and live, live comedic performances. There's nothing like a room full of people who are all participating in the same thing together. That's really the essence of the good stuff of life. And we've always been communal creatures.

1:34:16We've always wanted to come together in these ways. And so I do think that those kinds of direct human interactions like inherently matter more to us. And we will be more willing to shit. But of course, we're all addicted to it right now, which is the problem. And addiction is a hell of a drug. Yeah, shit, hell yeah, it is. I'm all so much addicted to everything, but I'll probably okay. But speaking of communal things, tell me take me into like the call us take me into how we get into the roman empire how do you get into it like from where from the republic oh how do we get into it oh god not like if if you're in germany how do you get to the republic well you got to go through the limus germanicus you probably got to check in with a legionary and then they let you cross and you know trade your wares and then you go back and you pick up some amber from proto-russians and you bring that back almost sex of term yeah you know yeah yeah you just stop off at a brothel and it's great um did they have brothels then of course yeah brothels are everywhere always especially around legionary camps.

1:35:10Really? Of course. For the war? For just being a soldier. Yeah. And a lot of times it's, you know - Were they cool or what were they like? Did they have AC in there? No AC, huh? They have AC in the brothels of ancient Rome Bay. That's crazy. No, they did not. It was hot in there. But they have a cold guy that's fucking - Well, they, you know, their baths were incredible. Oh, really? Yeah, sure. And they had like, you know, Roman baths had like a tepidarium and a frigidarium and a frigidarium is like the cold room and the cold bath. And you could go in there and cool off. And they would do this like the hot plunge and the cold plunge.

1:35:44And they had this all down to a science, man. Ooh, that's one of them? Yeah, they did understand how to make a good bathhouse. That is absolutely true. And were the brothels hooked to the bathhouse a lot of times? That I don't know. Probably they were close to each other, but I don't want somebody to now send me an email and be like, no, that's not actually what the brothel was. People are sick. I hope that. I mean, I don't know. I mean, yeah, they seem both seem pretty good. Oh, there you go. According to the AI. Right. Who knows if it's true? It's crazy, man. I thought about this years ago. I thought people are like, well, people can make information that's not true.

1:36:27Right. But then I thought, what if the paper can adjust the information you put on it? That's what I started to think. This is like about three years ago. I started to say, well, at some point, but imagine you wrote a letter to somebody, but then the paper got to determine what you actually said. That's the kind of place I feel like we're entering. Yep. Where it's like, you can say whatever you want. Yep. But now the paper and whoever owns the paper, they can construct the ink to create whatever you're not allowed to say, but what can be said. Yeah, the next – the information environment of the next 10, 15, 20 years is going to be really tough to navigate, even for people who are bright and who know what's going on.

1:37:09It's going to get tricky. It's going to get very tricky because these AI machines are going to be feeding off of themselves and they are going to be fed bad information that they will then spit out in very authoritative ways. And there are – this is going to trick human consciousness into thinking that what you're looking at is a true thing. It's a true statement. It's already happening heavily already. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We, we all believe. And, and the thing is, is like, you know, I've been tricked by things. I'm sure you've been tricked by things and I'm, I'm fairly conscious of, of like what I'm paying attention to and, and, and how this is all being manipulated.

1:37:40I'm not illiterate or anything and I'll get tricked by a video and then I'll be upset about it. And now I'm animated about it. And then somebody like that's not even real. And then, and then we're stuck in this place where it's like anything cool that you see, you know on an instagram reel or like on a tiktok you're like okay well that's probably fake you know that probably never happened right that probably is fake that probably never happened and now and now we're in a place where we don't trust anything even real things and people are like no this really cool thing happened it's like yeah probably not though so that where does that leave us right not not trusting anything or anyone for any reason but also believing everything for every reason like this is perfect time for a simulation theory yeah perfect time to to talk to historians.

1:38:21Kind of true, right? See if we can't figure out how to pick our way through this mess because we've gone through stuff like this before. And it's like outside of my specific area of expertise, but like when the printing press came along, you know, very similar issues came out of the arrival of the printing press where the Catholic church used to be able to control all information. And now suddenly kind of anybody can print anything. And, you know, what's being put out there, what people are reading, there was, there was no controls on it. There was, there was no fact checking to any of this stuff.

1:38:51And that's a great point. If something was printed on paper, you almost thought it was true just because it was written down. Sure. Yeah. If, if it's in a book, it must be true. You know, that, that kind of mentality. And, and we come out of like the end of an era where there is robust and extensive editorial vetting of like a lot of things, like certainly in the newspaper and like right now or earlier, earlier, like, you know, probably, you know, like through the 20th century, right? There's, there's robust checks. And even though there's like, there's an elite ideological consensus and like what is allowed to be printed and what is not allowed to be printed is a part of like a cold war consensus, like all of this stuff.

1:39:25Um, but you know, if you're reading it in the newspaper, there's a very good chance that it's true and it was fact checked and there had, they have sources. And now the things that you fire up and read, no idea where any of this stuff is coming from. Who knows where any of it's coming And a lot of them I notice are created just by some automat, like a bot or something. Like I'll see things of myself online with quotes that I've never said. Sure. And I'll see it shared thousands of times or commented on. And it's like, I never said that. Yep. You know, I'll see like news articles that have been put together.

1:39:55It's all misinformation about a celebrity or about a place that you could go visit or something. And it's all, it's a complete lie. Yep. But you'll see it has 30 ,000 views. Like what is, that's, it's just crazy to think. Oh, I don't want to forget. What was – take me into the Colosseum. What was that like? Did people go to it? Was everyone allowed? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Colosseum is open. And why did it happen? Why did they build a Colosseum? So, well, because they're Rome and they are hugely wealthy and hugely powerful. And so they need to have the biggest theater in the world. So it was like Texas.

1:40:30We want to have the biggest thing. Yeah, we want to have the biggest thing going, right? That's what we want to have. The Coliseum is like a later edition. Like it doesn't come until the imperial times. In the 400s, when was the Coliseum? No, no. The Coliseum is in the first century is when it's coming around. It's like Vespasian is the one who kind of kicks off that project. And then it takes many, many years to get built. Vespasian also famously, when he was collecting taxes off of the urine that they would collect. And people were like, that's a little disruptive. Are they collecting urine?

1:41:05When they're collecting urine so that they could do all the – so they could wash the clothes, right? And he would collect a little tax on that and he would get money and be like, oh, that's kind of a gross way to make money. And he goes, money does not smell. And so he also started construction of the Colosseum. But so they do this – so in Roman society, like these games, right, gladiatorial games, the chariot races, all of these things are tied to religious ritual. Okay. It's all a part of these religious rituals and performances that were integral parts of their society. And so a lot of these games are in honor of this or that god, right?

1:41:42And we're making sacrifices to the gods. That's sort of the origin point of all of this stuff. Was that true or do you think it was just a selling point? Well, it starts that way for sure. I think it starts out as very much a religious obligation and a religious thing. And it turns into – I do think that there's probably just mere lips. Like if you're a spectator, like you're there to see the action, right? They were sports fans, right? We all – anybody who's a sports fan would fit right in in ancient Rome because the Romans were nuts for sports. They loved gladiatorial combat. They loved chariot races.

1:42:21The best gladiators were famous celebrities. The best chariot racers were famous celebrities. And as you sort of go forward and get over into the Byzantine Empire, I mean, there were warring political factions that were tied to chariot teams. You know, like there was a huge riot in Constantinople between chariot teams that was very politicized. Wow. So they took all this stuff like very, very seriously. And throwing these games was a way to bring people in and entertain them. So that – I mean a little bit so that, you know, it's the opiate of the masses kind of stuff. um speaking as a sports fan who enjoys sports i think that there's quite a bit more going on inside of sports than just like oh this is just a distraction by the ruling class to trick you into not paying attention to what's really going on it's like no i mean feats of athletic strength are like pretty sweet right like yeah like watching great athletes be great athletes is like pretty cool right it's like the pinnacle of what the human body can do and i i love that stuff and And if you can get passionately committed to something that is happening down there, then I think that that's really fun, especially if you're doing it with like your friends and neighbors and parts of your community.

1:43:32I think sports is actually a really cool, great part of civic life. Yeah, and it's entertainment as well. I mean, it's, yeah, you marvel at some of them. Yeah. You yourself maybe played something at some point so you can envision yourself or live vicariously through them. I mean, you watch some, I mean, I'm not even like a football fan, but you watch some wide receiver sprinting down the line, doing an over the shoulder catch while tiptoeing both of his lines, like inbounds, making the catch. Like this stuff is like crazy. And you're like, you watch it and you're like, this is just inherently cool.

1:44:04Like, don't tell me this is just - Homorotic too many times. I mean, they are fit, aren't they? Yeah, they are. But so that kind of stuff, like that kind of like, you know, enjoying sports in that way and competition in that way is a very human thing. And the Romans were huge, huge for it. So that's where the Coliseum comes from. Is it true that the animals would fight the people and stuff? I mean, this stuff gets into like – those were usually like – I mean, it's overblown. Like when you see it in the gladiator movies, like certainly things would go on. But those were usually like if the exotic animals – so like exotic animals absolutely brought in to the mix.

1:44:41Okay. Which showing off an exotic animal is both take a look at this exotic animal. Isn't that cool? But also think about how much I had to do, how powerful and influential I needed to be to bring elephants to you, to bring tigers to you. Like this – like aren't you impressed with what I've been able to do? So really showing off your wealth. Exactly. Like you're really showing it off. So – but there would be hunts, right? And there would be like hunting sort of exhibitions, like great archers taking – they would go out and shoot tigers. That's usually at least my understanding of what would go on and as opposed to send a gladiator out there and have them fight.

1:45:20But it definitely did happen. How much of ancient history from Rome is factual do you think or how much was adjusted to make things look a certain way? I don't know what percentage I could give on things. How much of it is true? Some of it for sure because we can independently verify it from inscriptions and from other sort of physical evidence. but like I said at the beginning what what the Roman and Greek historians were mostly interested in was was telling these morality tales about how to live a contemporaneous how to live in contemporary society rather than sort of fidelity to the objective truth like this is what really happened now that said they cared a lot about you know like they were looking through documents the same way that historians do today.

1:46:13You know, Livius, or excuse me, like Polybius is interviewing people. He's looking at documents and they are trying to tell a correct story. I think that they're definitely trying to do it. But if the sort of morality tale runs into the facts, like which is going to win, they're going to massage it towards the morality tale. And then you have to sit down and you have to ask yourself, okay, well, where did this person come from? What is their own social position? What is their own family connections? For some reason, we keep going back to Livy because he's just apparently on the forefront of my mind.

1:46:48But there's a description of the Battle of Cannae, which is - Cannae? Cannae. C-A-N-N-A-E. Okay. And this is one of the greatest defeats in Roman history. This is Hannibal is defeating the Romans. He just absolutely wipes them out. This is during the Second Punic War. And the story that Livy tells is about one particular Roman consul who was basically an idiot and caused all of this to happen. One consul did not want to go into battle. The other consul did want to go into battle. And they alternated days of who was in charge. So it's like, I'm in charge on Monday. You're in charge on Tuesday. I'm in charge on Wednesday.

1:47:28And so the guy who was in charge on Wednesday was like, we're going into battle. And you couldn't argue with him because he was the consul and he was in charge that day. And then they get wiped out by Hannibal. And then you go look into Livy's past and his own family tree. And you find out that he's maybe trying to make one of his ancestors look better than they actually were. And this is actually like, if you lean into it, this is one of the, it is a fun part of sort of deconstructing and decoding these things. If you really get into it, this stuff is fun. It's entertaining and it's interesting.

1:48:02You have to examine the author and some of his motivations and how much would he be willing to adjust things and possibly why? And then you have to put that on the same scale, on the other side of the scale of the facts and information that you do have. The book that I'm writing right now, which is about the crisis of the third century, has like a missing battle that we have to contend with, where there's this huge inscription of these great Sassanid kings, this guy Sharpur, and artist here who have this like huge monuments that were built to them. And then on the side of these cliffs, they etched in huge letters, like basically their resume, all of their accomplishments, all the things that they did.

1:48:38And one of the things references this battle where they defeated the Romans. And then you go look through the Roman historical record and it's patchy at the time, right? This is one of the things about the crisis of the third century is we don't have a ton of information because it was so chaotic. But we don't have any reference to this battle. And they're specifically referencing like which emperor was defeated. So it's like, who's lying? Are the Romans trying to cover up a defeat by not mentioning it? Or did this guy just make up a battle to tell his own people, look, I defeated the Romans this time too.

1:49:12And he did beat the Romans many times. And the thing is, we don't know. Absent a time machine, There's ambiguity in the historical record at all times. And this is, again, when you become a real sicko for history, you stop needing history to be just an objective set of events. Like, just tell me what happened is something. Like, take out your ideological biases. Like, take this out. Like, just tell me the facts. that never happens and it can never happen because humans are always going to be writing in their own subconscious biases when we pick and choose what information to share when we pick and choose how to frame a certain event nobody can ever just sit down even me like and as i'm just trying to tell you the facts of roman history of course my little biases are coming into it of course my opinions are coming into it there's no there's no sort of escaping that and once you understand that it's inescapable, then it just becomes a layer to have an even greater understanding of the human condition in human society, which is, I think, what we're really after when we study history.

1:50:22Yeah, that's fascinating. I was going to ask you kind of what makes a good historian, but obviously one of the things is being able to recognize that you're not going to be able to get something absolute because it's kind of impossible. Yeah. And at the end of the day, it's impossible. Now, leading up to that, like what makes a good historian? Yeah, fidelity to the facts, fidelity to the sources. Like don't say something if you don't have a source backing it up. Go to the primary sources, read those primary sources, try to present those sources in as accurate a way as possible. And so it's absolutely not the case that professional historians are just running around out there only publishing their biases, right?

1:51:02Only doing things in the service of their own political or social beliefs, most historians most of the time are trying to do that project of like, I just wanna, I wanna examine this. I wanna examine the evidence and I wanna talk about it. It's just at the, it's an impossible dream, but moving towards that dream in a way that is rooted in the facts is really important. And that does make a good historian for sure. Yeah, we certainly got off that path in the past 20 years where it's like it felt like news outlets had – it used to feel like it was real information and it was factual and it wasn't biased.

1:51:39And then it went down this other road it felt like. But then it's always been like can you trust your government? Can you trust the reporting? Can you trust these – the councils that are running things? Who can you trust? And that feels – it seems like from listening to you that that's kind of – it's always been some version of that since the beginning, certainly through Roman times. When – you always hear people say now, well, we're going to fall. Rome fell. The society, American society will fall. What comparisons do you see between the two? Or is there any like footprints in the sand that you can follow to see a path, to see like a story arc of how societies fall?

1:52:32Do we – like are we parallel enough to Rome to even have the same trajectory as them? What do you think about some of that? There is – I mean like it's like both simultaneously, right? Because on the one hand, all civilizations and all societies are unique unto themselves. And it's not the case that we just are reliving some thing over and over again, that there actually is like a cycle to these things that is objectively true. And we're just sort of bit players in a historical force that's beyond our control. But also we are humans who have come together and humans often behave in very similar ways.

1:53:16and respond to certain things in very similar ways. And yeah, I mean, Rome is a huge civilization that we see the entire course of it from its founding to its growth, to its peak, to its decline, to its fall. Was it even a fall? Was it merely a transformation? It's probably just a transformation. Calling it a fall is probably too dramatic. And of course the Eastern empire is gonna keep going for another thousand years. And like, is America gonna fall the way that Rome did? Well, number one, the United States of America is gonna go away eventually. there's no timeline that you can extend out far enough that does not involve the united states eventually disappearing from the face of the earth that's just what's going to happen really what makes you say that well we're not going to last for 10 000 years we're not going to last for a million years the united states will eventually not be a thing anymore i'm not saying it's going to happen 20 years from now or 100 years from now million years from now are we here no no no of course not of course we're not here what's gonna happen so live it up yeah yeah live it up because We're not going to be here in a million years.

1:54:13So you may as well get your kicks in now. Exactly. And so, but like we talked about the very beginning, you know, our society is rooted in Roman history. Like, and a lot of the things that stamps our political, our economic, our legal and social culture, like comes from Rome, comes from the Roman experience. And so it's not outside – I don't think it's out of bounds to say like, yeah, like there's probably going to be some similarities into how these things progress, how great empires rise and fall. Like we've seen this happen before. So where are we in the Roman timeline, right? Like are we at the end?

1:54:57Are the barbarians at the gate? Is America about to fall? I certainly don't think so. That's not my opinion at all. I don't think we're anywhere close to the end of this. And I certainly don't think that like poor people coming from Guatemala or El Salvador are like literally the Goths, which is, you know, how they're often portrayed in media. They're like, oh, you know, the Roman Empire fell because of immigration. Now, the Roman Empire, number one, didn't really fall because of immigration. And number two, like trying to make the Huns or the Goths analogous to the kinds of people who are moving to the United States today is like wildly – it's like insanely inaccurate.

1:55:38it. Yeah. I don't know if I ever would think that the problem is at the everyday man level. To me, the problem is at the top, you know, the problem is at the, in that upper aura, you know, I think that you, we've started to fall apart of having a purpose and feel a connection to our country. And I don't know why, I mean, there's a ton of different reasons for that. And there could be different reasons for people that have even different political beliefs or different ideologies. But it certainly used to feel like we were all Americans. And now it still feels like we're all Americans, but people have a lot of different thoughts about it.

1:56:13And so I don't know how that like kind of permeates as time goes on. Well, so, so, so like when I look back on this and actually my first book, which is called the storm before the storm, the beginning at the end of the Roman Republic is about the decline and fall of the Republic, not the whole empire. Right. So that was when the Republic turned into the Roman Empire. When the Republic becomes an empire. And what I was curious about is when Caesar comes along and Crassus and Pompey come along and effectively destroy the Republic. It then goes to Octavian and Antony and Octavian wins that battle.

1:56:48Like what was going on 50 years before that, 80 years before that, that sort of starts knocking out the foundations of Republican society? The Roman Republic lasted for 500 years. They went through a lot. They went through huge wars. They went through huge upheavals. There was ambitious men coming and going left and right for hundreds of years, and the republic continued to persist. There was a senate. There was assemblies. This republican project continued. So what is it that started to go wrong prior to the collapse of the republic? And then it turns into this authoritarian military dictatorship.

1:57:26That's what the Roman Empire was? The Roman Empire becomes an authoritarian military dictatorship after the fall of the Republic. What Octavian did when he becomes Augustus, which is like, you know, he's the first emperor of Rome, though. He doesn't say like, I'm an authoritarian dictator now. He doesn't say, I'm now the emperor. They didn't even call themselves emperors. That's just something historians call them to describe the person who had all of the sort of powers of the republic. They were simultaneously a tribune and a consul and a proconsul and an edile. They themselves had – they were the pontifex maximus.

1:58:02They were the head of sort of the Roman religion. So they were the senate. They were the representatives. Yeah. They were the Senate. They were the Congress. They were the - Yeah, it's as if one person was president and speaker of the House and majority leader of the Senate and - Ruler of the military? Oh, of course, commander in chief. Of course, commander in chief of the military, four-star general. And five-star chef even? No, no, they pay for the five-star chefs. They don't cook for themselves. And then also like governor of 25 of the 50 states. Wow. Right, that's what Augustus did. Augustus did this like power sharing thing with the Senate when he was trying to settle things afterwards.

1:58:40And he's like, okay, we'll divvy up the provinces. You can run half of them. I'll run half of them. Every province that Augustus had were the provinces with armies and all the provinces the Senate was allowed to govern were the provinces that did not have armies. So, you know, like who's actually in power here. But, you know, the stuff that went on prior to the collapse of the Republic is the stuff that when I look around in contemporary American society, you know, I wrote that book because I was like, I sure see a lot of echoes here, you know, like, is it, is it going to proceed exactly the same?

1:59:18No. But, you know, can history rhyme? Yeah. I think history can rhyme a little bit. And there, there's a quote from Plutarch that I use in my book. It's just like, if, you know, if, if the stuff, if, if the sort of the constituent parts of a historical moment are the same here and the same there, it's not unreasonable to think that like the outcome will be the same or at least very similar. And if we're studying history, there is a point at which like, what is the purpose of studying history? It's a little bit to learn what happened before, what mistakes were made, what, you know, how events unfolded so that we can like maybe do it better.

1:59:56Well, for surely it's like, it's like rewatching a football game. It's like, why you ran these plays, you ran these plays, then this happened. This worked, this didn't. Let's never run that play again. Right. And then we don't do that again. And then over time you have tons of games. You're like, okay, these are the plays. And then you have a little bit of statistics. So at a certain point, yes, you could, I mean, I'm surprised it's not on DraftKings yet, whether or not there'll be a, you know, a spread on, on the fall of America. What were some of the early things that you noticed? Well, one of the biggest is there was runaway economic inequality that was happening.

2:00:28where, you know, like we talked about how you had to like have a certain amount of property in order to join the legions. And when they got into these like protracted wars, people would be brought into the legions. They would have to go off and fight in Spain for like five years. And while they were gone, their little plot of land back in Italy would fall into disrepair. And you wouldn't really be able to make it productive. Maybe you'd be down on your luck financially and you would sell it off to your rich neighbor. and the richest component of Rome, the senators, there had always been stratification in the wealth.

2:01:00There had always been rich. There had always been poor. But the rich started becoming like super rich. During the Roman Empire? During the Roman Republic. The later days of the Roman Republic. Okay, I see what you're talking about. Yeah, you said that's what the book is about. Exactly, it's when you start getting these large estates, like insanely large estates, as opposed to merely big estates that were surrounded by people, families who had their own individual plots. And basically the smallholders of Italy are like pushed out of the picture. They kind of don't exist anymore in Roman history.

2:01:29And so there is that – there is an economic inequality that is unfolding at the time that puts stress on the society because now they can't recruit for the legions for one thing. Because you can't recruit for the legions because they don't respect you anymore? Because they don't meet the property qualifications anymore. Oh, that's right. So then what you got to do is you got to lift the property requirements and say, OK, now we can recruit anybody and they will be paid. And who's going to pay them? They're going to be paid by the person who's organizing that legion. Where is that money going to come from?

2:02:02It's probably going to come from them conquering something or defeating something and getting the spoils of war. So now we're going off and we are conquering things not just for political reasons but also to sort of enrich the army. And then this is where you get personalist armies where the legions aren't fighting for Rome. They are fighting for Caesar. for Marius, for Sulla. I'm here to fight for Sulla. That's who I'm fighting for. And so that has a major effect on the internal coherence of the Roman Republic. I don't know if we're there in a war sense, but we're there in a capitalistic sense, it feels like.

2:02:41Yeah, and I mean, one of the things that gives me some hope is that one of the things that Augustus did during his settlements to kind of, Because the Romans lived through like a 50-year period of nonstop civil war. And one of the things that Augustus did accomplish was like ending those civil wars. And one of the things that he did was he regularized the pay of the legions. He put out these mints. You were paid by the central state. You were no longer getting your money from your local commander. You were getting it from the central state. So like a UBI kind of. Well, and it's basically like what we have in the military today.

2:03:15And one of the reasons we don't have to worry about the army or the navy or the marines like hauling off and following some general or some political leader as opposed to like sticking to the constitution is because their paycheck is coming from the centralized political authority, not from somebody else. And so dismantling that, creating private armies of mercenaries, like that's when it starts to get a little sticky. And I don't think they would even let you do that in America. Well, I mean, you know, like there's the Eric Princes of the world. Right. Things should happen. Yeah. But it's definitely not at the scale that – Right.

2:03:52Where it's popularly known. Yeah. And then like there's this other sort of thing. That's a good point. I'm sure there are people – there's very wealthy people that have their own small militaries. Definitely. But not like – But nothing that can take the 82nd Airborne. Right. Right. Exactly. And that's the thing is you would have armies that could take the 82nd Airborne. And then to tie it later to like the immigration issue, the reason why the Goths and the Huns were such a powerful force in smashing the empire is because they could take the 82nd Airborne. They were strong enough and big enough and well-armed enough.

2:04:25There's nothing that can touch the United States military right now. There's nothing on earth that can touch us. Not really. Unless the people in it who were fighting for it started to realize that they were being – if they decided that they were being used for practices that weren't good for the country. Right. But were just good for a select few. Is that right you think? Or how would that happen? Well – I've thought about this. Okay. And it's weird to say it because I have a lot of friends in the middle of it. But you start to think, well, how does the military get compromised? How do they choose to become like the people in – what does that mean with – oh, in the Patriot, right?

2:05:05How do they – you know what I'm saying? Like how do they decide that who they're fighting for isn't who they thought they were fighting for? Yeah, and that's the plight of grunts throughout time and history, right? You are ultimately just following orders and you have to go do it. and can you have a large enough mutiny to overthrow a government because you don't like how you're being used anymore it's happened it's largely the story of the russian revolution you know those guys were being so badly mistreated that the army mutinied and winds up overthrowing the czar that's definitely that's definitely a major constituent part of the story of the russian Revolution.

2:05:47So what was one of the other – there is this overarching notion that the Romans themselves often pointed to is that they had been engaged in this long struggle with Carthage as this great rival in the western Mediterranean. This is where the war against Hannibal comes. This is a series of wars against Carthage where Roman Carthage are kind of equal going into it. And whoever wins this war is going to be the dominant power in the western Mediterranean and then ultimately like the entire Mediterranean. So who wins this war is really important. And the Romans win the war after 100 years, 130 years is how long these things go on.

2:06:25There was, between the first battle and the last battle, I think it's like 100. It's three generations. Yeah, I think it's, maybe it's like 110 years. I don't want to exaggerate. But once the Romans sort of lose that great unifying enemy, you start getting political rivalries inside the senatorial class breaking out beyond the bounds of what used to be acceptable practices there used to be a really strong elite consensus and they did stick together at all times and there were there were things that you didn't do or wouldn't do even if you like even if you lost a consulship and you were pissed about it because I hate that family over there.

2:07:08Like you did not – Break the code of conduct. You didn't break the code of conduct. You didn't go get an army and then like overthrow that person because you're pissed off that you lost an election. You just simply wasn't done. After the Punic Wars are over, this is when we – it's like this is when it starts happening. And it's like the internal cohesion of the elite ruling class breaks down. and then they start seeing their own political ambitions as something that don't really need to have a check because I'm not worried about being defeated. We're not worried about being defeated by some foreign enemy.

2:07:43So I'm just going to keep going. Like we can, we can have a civil war. It doesn't matter because we don't have to worry about Carthage. And so if you're doing this sort of like, let's unfocus our eyes and, and look at sort of the beats of history. Okay. So what, what purpose is the cold war serving for the United States of America through all of this? Is it a unifying force that enforces elite consensus and keeps things in bounds? Yeah. Yeah, it sure does. And when we lose the communists as a unifying force that keeps the political class together, is that when we start seeing as early as the 90s great frayings in that fabric and people being willing to do things that are way outside the bounds of what would have even been considered possible 10 years earlier, 20 years earlier because we don't have to worry about the communists anymore.

2:08:28We won. Everything is great from here. And kind of ever since then, there's been vague attempts to like, who's going to be the new enemy that unifies us? And nothing has really done it the way that the Cold War did. You know, it was terrorists for a while, but that never really did it. You know, people try to demonize China and try to turn them into something. But it doesn't take the same way because it's not really the same thing. So, you know, you lose that external threat and now you start having the political ruling class being willing to turn on each other. And yeah, the political environment right now is absolutely toxic.

2:09:06Like bonkers. Absolutely toxic. Yeah. And it's because people I don't think are afraid of the consequences of pushing things all the way to civil war. Yeah. I think some people you start to feel like what I say doesn't matter, what I feel doesn't matter. I don't even know if my vote counts because we don't even know if they're being tabulated fairly or not. I mean you just don't know, you know, and there's so much misinformation you don't know. There's never been such wealth in the power of such few. Um, and you start to feel like, I mean, we talk all the time on here about, we just had Mike Rowe on and we're talking about, um, having purpose, like having a job, what it means to you to have a job and to do something and to make something and be a part of something.

2:09:52And once you don't have a purpose anymore, you'll kind of fall for, you'll find anything you'll find, you'll find a purpose. Yep. It just sometimes can be kind of on the darker side of things. But I think in the end it's for some sort of form of self-preservation. Um, so I don't know what that looks like. I wonder if there would be a civil war. Where do we meet up if there is? That's my big question. Where do we meet up? Like you and me? I mean. Oh, man. Where's a good place to meet up? I think Denver. Denver? Okay. Should we go to the Rockies? I mean, here's the thing. You already said you got to get a place with some elevation.

2:10:26Yeah, you got to get some elevation. Yeah. Absolutely true. I just don't want it to come that day and it hits, you know, say it hits on a Thursday night and you've already had a long week and you're like, fuck. Yep. You know, because you had the weekend off or whatever. but now you have to do civil war or whatever. And then you're like, where do I go? I do not want that. Cause you're not gonna be able to text and find out. No, it's, no, it'll, if it comes, it'll be a huge mess. And civil wars are like the worst, just the worst thing. They're just the worst thing. Oh yeah. Even if nobody wants to do, you know, even if they're fought for a good reason, right?

2:11:02Like you're only destroying yourself. You're only destroying your own infrastructure. It's on your own front. yard a lot of times. Yeah, the English civil wars, which happened, you know, this like Cromwell era, like Stuart England, you know, they called those civil wars a war without an enemy, you know, like, because that's a lot of what it is. And so we should definitely try to avoid civil war. But also there are things that, you know, if things get pushed too far and we're also, we're allowed to have values, we're allowed to care about things. And if literally every single thing that you believe in has to be sacrificed to avoid a civil war, right?

2:11:41Like everything I believe in will no longer exist, but at least we won't have a civil war. Is that civil war worse than fighting for the things that you believe in? I think at a certain point you choose to fight. I feel like - I think so too. You know, I really believe that. And I'm saying that as somebody who like, I've studied civil wars. I don't want any part of a civil war. And I don't like people who play fast and loose with talking about civil wars. No, I I don't like people who romanticize it. I don't like people who talk about it because it is an awful, awful, awful thing. Sometimes though, yeah.

2:12:14Yeah, well, it's a thought of like, well, how did that happen, right? Because I'm sure if you'd asked people 100 years earlier, that would never happen, right? And how do you get to things like that? And then, yeah, I don't wanna not have someplace to meet up. I do not wanna not have, and look, I'll even do, we'll do Milwaukee, dude, if we want to have two places to meet up? Because - I got some property out in rural Wisconsin. Okay, you're just going to Denver as far though, for everybody. Yeah. So you don't want people having to go to freaking, trying to think of one other spot. Well, I'll tell you this.

2:12:49Like if there's actually gonna, the shape of the second American Civil War has less to do with like territory in that way. Like these states versus these states. It's gonna be very rural versus urban. And that's one of the main political divides, I think right now. And so, so cities are one thing and sort of the surrounding environs are a different thing. And that will be the shape of things. There will be 50 regional simultaneous conflicts between people in the rural areas and people in the cities. And that's, I think, how it would go. Dang. Mikey D. 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 i was just joking that i was raising my son to be john connor to like fight to fight ai when it tries to take over i'm just like why do you think i'm trying to teach you these things man anyway let's go back to lock picking john connor for columbus we're gonna call him dude somebody's gotta go into ai and save us yeah i mean i showed him the terminator movies i'm like this is what we this is what we got to avoid man from talking it's up to you because because i i can't do it you know where will we find our allies at those times, if that were ever to happen, what do you think people find an ally in them?

2:14:04Like, how do you, how would you say this person is my ally in a civil war? Do you think? There, I mean, there are ways to do it, right? Like you're going to, you're in an area that has a lot of like-minded people. We all have our own social networks that already exist, you know, and like, yeah, I mean, my existing social network, like I'm pretty sure would all be on one side of a civil war. Um, and And I would be on that same side as them. And that's a lot of how people wind up joining these things. They join in groups. A lot of companies are sort of like self-raised from some local area. And so those kinds of things, it is that kind of like personal trust that goes a lot into it.

2:14:50But of course, it's also difficult because there are people who are intentionally trying to trick you into thinking that they're on your side, but they're not really. And then you got to have internal secret police and purges and executions. And now you're living the worst life you can possibly think of. So let's just not do it. Okay. America, let's just not do it. Okay, Mike. Okay. I hear you there. Great. We'll have to talk about that another time. We'll talk about some revolutions and things like that. I would love to get into another conversation about it, man. How did people say Rome fell?

2:15:18Some people say it's just kind of, it's kind of just took on different, like it became the Byzantine empire. Some people say different things, right? What is kind of classified as the fall of Rome? How did it fall hypothetically? Right. Yeah. I mean, if you buy into the framing, it's a lot of the central state stops being able to draw on the wealth of its own society. Some of this is the result of civil wars and ongoing civil wars. Some of it is the result of migrations and population pressures where the Romans used to be very good at fighting wars and battles beyond their own frontiers. They would expand, right?

2:15:58So you're never fighting on your own territory. You're fighting on their territory. Then you're beating them. And then you're moving on to the next territory beyond that. And by the third century and by the fourth century, the Romans are fighting wars on their own territory. And so you're not getting the spoils of war. You're not getting booty. You're not getting – You're getting spoiled. Even if you win, you lose. Yep, yep. Things are getting trashed. And so there is a long-term degradation in sort of the military and political and economic strength of the empire such that on the other side, like on the other side of the Rhine and on the other side of the Danube, you have all these like Germanic tribes who at one time were smaller and disconnected.

2:16:42And so it was very easy for the Romans to do like divide and conquer. Like we'll give this chief a bunch of money and he will be our ally and you'll be our representative there. And then these guys won't. But this guy will always be our friend because he knows that his local power is backed entirely by Roman gold. So he's with us. And the Romans could keep these groups kind of disunited. This is classic divide and conquer. Eventually, those groups become larger and larger. And they form their own like larger and larger confederations such that they're able to build up manpower, weaponry strength that can go toe to toe with the legions in a straight fight.

2:17:20And then the Romans are also saying to themselves, you know, we don't have the manpower that we used to have. And so if we want to win wars, we need to kind of outsource some of our fighting to these groups. And this becomes an incredibly – there's a couple hundred years of incredibly complicated political and military sort of maneuverings between the Romans and these groups where Alaric and the Goths, this is the people who sack Rome, right? Which is sort of one of the big moments that we point to and say like, gosh, that was a big deal. Rome had not been sacked in like 800 years. That was a big deal.

2:17:58It's not the case that this was Alaric and the Goths marauding into Italy and mindlessly destroying Rome and looting it of its wealth. Alaric had been off and on allies and auxiliary and a general who commanded armies for Rome for like 20 years. So he'd been a contractor for a long time. Long time, long time. And was actually a vital component of the Roman national security state, if you could call it that, at the time. And he was just looking - Alaric the ambitious? Alaric the Ambitious. Is that his name? No. Is it? Is that what they call him? I don't call him that. I call him Alaric the Goth.

2:18:35But he was trying to get what was owed to him by the emperors. They had promised him. They had made promises to him. And what he really wanted was to be more formally integrated into the society, to not just be a mere auxiliary, but to be entered into the fabric of Roman society. And they wouldn't let him? Which by this point they're hiding in Ravenna because it's like behind a swamp and like, yeah, no, they didn't let him because of prejudice, partly because of ethnic prejudice against him. And he said, look, if you don't follow through on your promises, you got nothing protecting your most important city.

2:19:10I can just do this if I want. Anytime I want, I can just go and do it. So follow through on your promises to me and I won't do it. It's pretty simple. They didn't follow through on their promises. So he said, fine, I'll go do it. I didn't want to, but I'm going to. So that sack is a very sort of calculated political move on his part. And that's part of the story about how Rome doesn't just fall. It's transforming into something else. It's not just mindless barbarians destroying civilized life. Like in that sense, I think that Alaric was acting in a more civilized way than the emperors in Ravenna were acting.

2:19:47Because they were acting like petulant little liars. And Alaric was trying to do something. what is it is it greed that yeah yeah greed greed prejudice um just sheer myopia you know just myopia mean myopia means an inability to see outside of your own little narrow circumscribed world and by that point like i said like the political powers that be had left rome like they like for a while milan was was the capital of the empire because it was closer to the alps which put them closer to the borders, which allowed them to like run things better. Rome is kind of deep in the Italian peninsula. And then when things really started getting bad, they moved over to Ravenna because Ravenna is on the coast.

2:20:29And so you can supply it really easy. It's difficult to besiege. And then also it was surrounded by swamps. So it's difficult for a land army to get in there. And so now you've got like the imperial court planted like in the middle of a swamp, just disconnected from everyone and everything. And they didn't know what was going on. It's like We got child emperors who have no idea what's actually – yeah, yeah, yeah. What's actually happening out there in the world. And so this – the story of the collapse of Roman civilization is a lot to do then with like really poor leadership and poor leadership.

2:21:01Disorganization. Yeah, poor leadership decisions on top of all the material reasons why it collapses. Who was one of the most gangster like children emperors that they have? gangster of the children emperors who was somebody that was like oh this dude should not be in there oh i don't i mean i mean one of the great lessons of the history of rome is don't give teenagers power like don't do that right like no like no bad but you know like honorius um oh yeah who who are the other guys that were oh yeah these are the classics gordian the third was pretty good gordian the third yeah gordian gordian the third was actually pretty good i'll give i'll give a shout out to Gordian III.

2:21:42Emperor at age of 13. Wow. He emerges from the year of the six emperors, in case you're wondering how crazy things got during the crisis of the third century. In one year? Yeah, it's the year of the six emperors. And Gordian emerges as the last of them because the Praetorian Guard supported him and liked him. And actually, the people of Rome supported and liked him. And what were his vibes? Did he have a pretty good vibe or what was it like? I think he did have a pretty good vibe. Yeah, he had a really great advisor who was with him for like four years. This, this particular guy who I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce his name because every time I try, I completely fail.

2:22:20But he had, he had good advisors, right. And he had good people around him and he seemed to be sort of educated and chill enough that he wasn't just like, I'm here to just use this power that I've been given, you know, any way that I see fit. Like there did seem to be some sense of like, I have a civic duty and my role as an emperor matters. And I think that was true with him. And I think that was true of this guy, Alexander Severus too. And who was a psycho? Any of them? Well, if just like, you know, just self-absorbed. Yeah. I mean, the list, the list is Carcalla, Nero, Elagabalus, Caligula.

2:22:58And then those guys at the end, Honorius, they're just, they're just completely out to lunch. So crazy. It's completely out to lunch. And my big theory is that as they are – as Rome is falling into disrepair and they are resisting fully incorporating the Goths into Roman society, that it was that resistance to incorporating the Goths that is what meant that the power of the Roman Empire just ceased to matter. You know, like the people who would come along who were heirs to the Roman Empire were often still acting under the auspices of like the emperor back in the East that like the guys who come along after like, oh, I'm doing this because so-and-so told me that I could be in charge over here.

2:23:47They were still referencing the power of the emperors. But if you're going to keep all your generals and the people who are actually running your society on the outside and not giving them any real political power, eventually they're just going to stop caring because force is power. Force is what underlies everything. Every society, all political power is rooted in brute force. And if you can't command brute force and they can, they're going to take over. And so what the Goths wanted was to be fully integrated, which the Romans had been so good at. It was – it's one of their greatest strengths.

2:24:24Like you said in the beginning, they would take over lands. They would incorporate the people, incorporate the religions, everything. Yep. And like – and if – they weren't an inventive people, but if they find a better sword that you were making, they're going to take that along. If you have a better way to build an aqueduct, they're going to copy that. And the book I'm writing right now is about the crisis of the third century when the Roman Empire nearly fell but did not. It's, you know, who saves the empire? It's a bunch of guys from Illyria, which is the Balkans, right? It's a bunch of like dudes from Croatia and Bosnia who are the ones who saved the empire because they had been fully integrated into the system and they believed in Rome and Roman-ness.

2:24:58There was never an ethnic component to Rome, not really. And certainly it's not the case that when Rome stopped being, you know, like fully pure blood Italian, that that's when things started to go wrong. Actually, like in many cases, the thing that stopped things from going wrong was that we weren't listening to the full-blooded Italians anymore. We were giving power and authority to people who would not have traditionally been in power. But because of the way that Roman society worked, it could now be in power. And to have not done that at the end with the Goths. Like I think there's a, there's a, there is a moment when there is a, there is a, a sister of the emperor and a brother of the chieftain of, of Alaric's brother.

2:25:41They get married and they have a kid. And if that kid, that kid died because kids die in the past, right? We've talked about this. And if that kid had lived and gone on to become emperor and integrated the Goths into Roman society, I think, I think that buys them a couple hundred years. Wow. Easy. Man. But that's my own little pet theory, which I came across by studying the collapse of Roman civilization on a practically like a day-by-day level. And just being like, yeah, you guys fucking blew this one, didn't you? You didn't have to, but you did. It just shows you every day counts, huh? Every day counts.

2:26:21You have a series that you're working on now about in the future. Yeah. Yes. Yes. will radically bounce 2 ,000 years into the future. Yeah, so the other show that I have done is Revolutions, which each season of Revolutions covers a different great political revolution in history. And it is the case, I have found, that a lot of revolutions do follow a similar trajectory. There's an ancien regime that's falling apart. There's discontentment among the elite. There's new ideas that have been entered. And then there's like a liberal nobility. There's pissed off lawyers and journalists. Like a lot of these things are similar.

2:27:03There's a first wave of the revolution. And then there's a second wave of the revolution that often throws out the people who started the revolution. This is kind of how the French revolution goes and the Russian revolution goes. It's where like the Jacobins come from. And then there's always a war. There's always a civil war. Like these – so these things, these large structural beats of the story of a revolution, there's a lot of similarities. And so what I've done is I have taken those structural beats and I'm writing a completely fictitious future history of a revolution on Mars in 2247. And I walk it through day by day and I'm 20 – I am 23 episodes into it.

2:27:46I love it. What is that? Where are you getting that from? It was a revolution. That's fan art. That's not me. Oh. well it's still nice pretty nice yeah it's nice fan art yeah my fans are good um wow i just think it's so fascinating because you have to take such a breadth of history and information and then put it into something that's like um so uh like uh imaginative you know and but also quickly coming with the future yeah and then and then a lot of the things that are happening in the Martian revolution, if you listen to it, you'll be like, oh, I see he's also commenting on present society and where we are because all good science fiction is not actually about the future.

2:28:31It's about the present. And so the Martian revolution is that too, but it's, it's a pretty, you know, when, when all is said and done, it's going to be 125 ,000 words that I wound up writing in like six months to crank out this massive epic history of a science fiction revolution, which if you're into that kind of thing, come along for a ride. It's pretty fun. And every part of it, you know, is, is like constructing like a mosaic where sort of every constituent part, like has a reference point in history somewhere. Like I'm trying to tie all of these different things together and like, oh, this is an element from the Mexican revolution combined with an element of the Russian revolution combined with an element of, you know, the French revolution and then moving on to the next thing.

2:29:13And, oh, I'm going to take this thing from the english civil wars and well we just go through it i've got i've got six episodes left i don't know by the time this thing airs there'll be like three probably left congratulations yeah i'm coming down the barrel of it it's gone really well i've really enjoyed writing it oh well it's just fascinating man it's interesting to talk to a historian it's interesting to talk someone with so much knowledge um yeah i'd love to talk about revolution sometime i appreciate it man thanks for taking it yeah just it's just interesting to be like because you always fantasize in your head like Like, you know, oh, I think about the Roman Empire, man, how could have been.

2:29:48And you always fantasize yourself as – I never fantasize myself as one of like the slaves or anything like that. Of course not. I don't think – you always kind of fantasize yourself at least somewhere in the middle or upper echelon, you know? Yes, yes. Why does our brain do that, I wonder? Because we want to be safe and protected. And so we put ourselves in a safe and protected environment where the society is working for us rather than us working for the society. Nobody wants to imagine themselves as a slave. And so, yeah, when people fantasize about being in the Roman Empire and they're like, oh, it would have been so great.

2:30:22It's like, yeah, for like 27 guys, you know, like for the emperor and some people around him, everybody else, it was kind of rough going. And there's a very good chance you died at the age of three. And if you didn't die at the age of three, there's a very good chance you died at the age of seven. And if you didn't die at the age of seven, there's a very good chance you died at the age of eight. Right? Like you're, you're probably not living very long. So was it that great? So like as a historian and sometimes people are like, would you want to go back and live in some period in the past? And mostly I'm really, I really like modern medical technology and a lot of the things that we have, like I am pampered that way.

2:31:03Like if I get sick, I want antibiotics. I don't want to just die of some like festering wound because we don't have antibiotics yet. Like I love all those things where I would really go. if I had like a time machine, I could go anywhere. I'd go back to those primordial forests before like humans were even a thing. Like I'm from the Pacific Northwest. It's beautiful up there. It's beautiful up there. And like, I would go to like, you know, like basically like where Lake Washington is right now, or like the Puget Sound before humans were even a thing, just these ancient primordial forests and just hang out there for a little bit.

2:31:33Get a nice little cabin. And hear the sounds that, and I bet animals made cooler sounds before we came around and I started listening to them. They would certainly behave differently, you know, because right now, like, there's no interacting with wildlife, not really, because they all learned to stay away from humans. Yeah, and a lot of the parents have been locked up, too, in zoos or whatever. So I think a lot of them it's gotten – Yeah, so, like, yeah, you go out to the Olympic Peninsula and you kind of get a glimpse of what that stuff used to be. Or, like, when I was writing about Russia and, like, you think about, like, these huge primordial forests that, like, stretched all the way from, like, Europe all the way to China.

2:32:07You know, just these amazing, you know, just this amazing number of trees and, you know, animals and plant life and stuff. Mother nature. Yeah, just go chill with mother nature. And then once humans come along, it's like, yeah, all right, I'm going to head back to where I can go to the hospital if things get really bad. Sometimes I wonder if we're helping things or hurting them. Mike Duncan, thanks so much, man. I appreciate your time. and yeah, everyone can check out. If you wanna hear more about Rome, you have two books. Your second book, the new book that you have out is? The book I'm writing right now, which is, I'm not turning the manuscript in until September.

2:32:46So it won't be out till 2026. But yeah, these are the ones like Storm Before the Storm, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, which is a lot of what we talked about today. Like if you're interested in those sort of like parallels between what kind of trajectory it feels like we're on as a society and what trajectory the Romans were on, That's my best stab at sort of talking about that. The storm before the storm. Yeah, storm before the storm. With the storm being like the civil wars that destroyed the republic. Yeah. And then out of – outgrowth of my work in revolutions, I wrote a biography of the Marquis de Lafayette who is a guy who had like a 50-year-long revolutionary career.

2:33:22And we only ever think about him as this like 19-year-old kid who like hung out with George Washington for a few years and we like him because we all like a Frenchman in a uniform. but he actually lived like this insane 50 year life in and out of revolutions. And, you know, as I was right, as I was writing the show, I was like, God, this guy just keeps popping up. So I wound up writing a whole biography about him. He was a gangster, huh? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There he is. There's my boy. Giber du Montier, Marquis de Lafayette. There he is. Mike Duncan. Thanks so much for your time, man. I appreciate it.

2:33:55Thank you very much for having me. Yep. Now I'm just floating on the breeze, And I feel I'm falling like these leaves I must be cornerstone Oh, but when I reach that ground I'll share this peace of mind I found I can feel it in my bones But it's gonna take...

From the publisher

Mike Duncan is a historian, author and podcaster known for his shows “History of Rome” and “Revolutions”. He has also written several books on these topics including “The Calm Before the Storm” and “Hero of Two Worlds”.

Mike joins Theo to take a walk through the History of Rome. They discuss the religious traditions that guided their culture, what day-to-day life was like for a regular Roman, and the political similarities between their empire and America.

Mike Duncan: https://www.instagram.com/mike_duncan_history/

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Tour Dates! https://theovon.com/tour

New Merch: https://www.theovonstore.com

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#589 - Roman Empire Expert Mike Duncan

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