409: Dan Carlin & NEW STORY—A Perfect Hostage
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I got a story to tell every word of it true except for the parts I made up for you just some history that has been reworded into a mystery called the way I heard it it is a catchy little number isn't it Chuck? absolutely I like it you know what I like it too but people call to say every time we play that thing they're like you know thank you now I'm walking around muttering all day to myself about stories to tell every word of it true and so forth and so on

I hope our little jingle didn't annoy you. You know what? Let's play it again, Chuck, just for grits. No, no, we're not going to play it again. I think they get the point. The jingle, of course, means that we're reverting ever so briefly to the original format where I read you a story and then I invite...

guest on to tell me what I got right and what I got wrong. The story is called A Perfect Hostage, and our guest is the lovely, delightful, and intensely intelligent Dan Carlin. Is he an expert yet? Like, would he call himself an expert, Chuck, or is he still just a fan of history? No.

I mean, as far as I know, he doesn't refer to himself as a historian, although he sure seems like one. He's an amateur historian, let's say. But I could be wrong. He could have gotten an advanced degree since the last time he was here. You know how I feel about degrees. I mean, God bless him, but all things considered, I don't know a guy who's better versed in the past than Dan Carlin.

So he'll be joining us briefly. This story is about seven or eight minutes long, maybe a little longer. And I'm going to read it for you now. And then Dan's going to come on and then it's going to be great. Chuck, that's the plan, right? You concur? Yeah, it's going to be terrific. You know, Dan is Dan. I mean, he knows a lot of stuff. And I'm me.

You know, that's right. And you know, for a while there, I thought you were me, but then I realized, no, I had that wrong. I gotta be me. And the young man you're about to meet is called a perfect hostage. Listen carefully. And if you're by yourself, go ahead and shout it out if you figure it out before I'm done. Otherwise, strap in. Story goes like this.

A very wealthy young man, 25 years of age, was cruising in his yacht on the Mediterranean Sea. He was headed for university, where he planned to complete his studies in the field of rhetoric, oratory, and persuasion, when his ship was boarded by pirates early one morning as he and his entourage slept.

It all happened very quickly. The bandits were well-armed and fearsome, and the passengers surrendered without a fight. The pirate captain, a large and hulking man with greasy hair and rotten teeth, didn't recognize his captive, but could see at a glance. He was privileged.

"'My intention was to sell you and your companions to the slave traders,' the pirate captain said. "'But you look like the kind of lad someone might pay a great deal to see again,' to which the young lad responded. "'And you look like the kind of cowardly turd who should be crucified and left for the crows to feast upon, assuming your breath doesn't kill them first.'"

The pirate captain squinted the way captains sometimes do when they don't feel they're being afforded the respect they deserve. You should choose your words carefully, young man. You are now my hostage, and your life is in my hands.

"'Please forgive me,' the young man said. "'I'm afraid I don't have much experience as a hostage. "'I do, however, know a great many words and have a reputation for choosing them well.' "'Is that so?' said the pirate captain. "'It is,' said the young lad. "'For instance, when you have a moment, why don't you go f*** yourself?'

The pirate captain might have responded by cutting his tongue out. He wasn't squeamish about doing such things and had, in fact, done much worse earlier that same week. But instead, he laughed. He couldn't help himself. The brass on this kid. Unbelievable.

"'I'll take it under consideration,' the pirate captain said. "'But in the meantime, never mind the slavers, "'I think I'll ransom you back from whence you came, "'for, say, twenty talents of silver.' "'The hostage laughed. "'Twenty talents? "'Are you as stupid as you are ugly? "'You could get twice that from me.'

The pirate captain frowned. Twenty talents of silver was worth nearly $400,000, more than he'd ever demanded for any other hostage. Who was this kid? My family would pay you 40 talents at least if I were you. I'd demand 50 and refuse to negotiate. They'll pay, I assure you. And why would you want your family to pay more than I demand? The pirate captain asked.

"'Two reasons,' said the hostage. "'First of all, I want you to treat my companions and I with dignity as we wait for the ransom to be delivered. It'll take several weeks, at least. And the second reason? Because after the ransom is paid, I'll return to my home, raise a navy, and then come back here to recover whatever ransom was paid for my release.' The pirate captain laughed some more."

"'Anything else I should know before I make my demands?' The young hostage smiled in return. "'Well, I'll have to kill you, obviously. All of you. You are cutthroats, and thus your throats must be cut. But that needn't stop us from passing the time like civilized men as we wait for the ransom to arrive. Do we have an accord?'

The pirate captain nodded, and word was sent back across the Mediterranean. Then the hostages were taken back to the pirates' lair on an island off the coast of Turkey, where they were not imprisoned, like the many other hostages that had preceded them, or beaten, or tortured, or forced to work as slaves. In fact, they were allowed to come and go more or less as they pleased.

Since there was nowhere to go on such a small island, as for the object of their ransom, he was the perfect hostage. He entertained the pirates every evening with poems and dramatic readings which he recited from memory, and songs which he sang with great gusto. He regaled them with odes and epics, couplets and sonnets, and ancient stories that stood the test of time.

Then, this most unusual hostage began to question the rules by which his captivity was governed. Over several weeks, the pirate island began to run on his schedule, and the pirates began to defer to his suggestions. The captors and their hostages dined together, drank together, and passed the time together.

Then, when fifty talents of silver finally arrived, a million dollars of ransom, their time together came to an end. True to his word, the pirate captain returned the ship to the wealthy young student. And true to his word, the wealthy young student sailed home, raised a navy, and returned to the pirate's lair one year later.

There, on a little island off the coast of Turkey, he quickly overwhelmed his former captors, accepted their unconditional surrender, and brought them to a place called Pergamon, where the authorities tried them and convicted them and condemned them all to a life of slavery.

When he learned of their fate, the former hostage entered the prison and listened as the pirates pleaded for mercy. Please, said the pirate captain, please, don't let them take us to the slave traders. Spare us from such a fate. The former hostage considered their pleas. These men had kidnapped him and held him for ransom, but they had also treated him and his men decently. Seemed the least he could do was

Show them some mercy. And so he did. He released the pirates from their jail cells and led them into the prison courtyard where the sun shone brightly upon their faces and the cool breeze blew across the Mediterranean, lifting their spirits. Then, before removing their shackles, and as his men looked on, the former hostage cut the throats of his former captors.

one at a time. It seemed a merciful thing to do before crucifying their corpses on the side of a dusty road where the crows feasted upon their flesh for all to see. That was the moment people started paying attention to the young man who made it a point to always do what he promised to do.

The man who would later declare himself dictator for life and famously proclaim Vini Vidi Vici, which is precisely what he did for the next 30 years. He came, he saw, and he conquered as he laid the foundation for the rise of a mighty empire.

And who knows what the world would look like today if another gang of pirates hadn't been waiting for him on the Ides of March. Pirates who called themselves senators and promised to rid their republic of a tyrant. A promise they kept when they stabbed their leader to death 30 years after he made good on his promise to cut the throats of the cutthroats who held him for ransom.

Such was the rise and fall of the former hostage who lived and died by the dagger, but always kept his promises. A perfect hostage named Julius Caesar. Anyway, that's the way I heard it. Please control your enthusiasm, Charles. Ta-da. I'm not going to give my opinion. Okay, fine. Let's leave that to Dan.

Let's leave it to Dan Carlin, who's standing patiently by. He and you, Chuck, and hopefully our viewers as well will understand if we need to pay some bills first. So please don't go away. Listen to this important message from one of our most generous sponsors. And when you come back, prepare to be informed by the one and only Dan Carlin.

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How is life? I mean, that's such a great question from a history fan and just from a human being. You know, I just love the grandness of it and the impossibility of providing anything close to a satisfying answer. Gives you full range to pick and choose, doesn't it? I'm going to go with fine. That's what I'm going with, too. A nice, banal answer for a very wide-open question. All right. All right.

Well, that's why we invited you back. First things first, man. Thank you for such a kind blurb for my modest little movie that hit the screen. Dude, you earned it many times over. Happy to help. You know, we all sort of go in a round robin here helping each other, right? You know, it is a strange kind of band of brothers in this place called Podcastlandia where we all... It seems a very crowded pool these days, you know?

I remember when there was nobody in the pool. Dude, it was you. It was you and I guess maybe— A bunch of college dorm kids. Yeah, Adam Carolla, who had just been fired. Adam hadn't started yet. But you know who was doing it? The VJ. What's his name? Adam— Oh, yeah. Rogan has him on as like the— He's famous. Absolutely. Adam—oh, my God. Yeah, he started it. This is brain damage. That's what this is. This is happening to—

It'll be interesting to see if this kind of recall has brought some conversation that we're about to have. That's what editing is for, I think. Julius, oh, crap. Caius Julius Caesar, yeah.

Secondly, I must thank you for protecting my honor. Last time you were on, a couple of luminaries on Reddit came back to say, how dare you associate with the likes of that? What did you do, man? I mean, sometimes I know what people did. What did you do to get on the naughty list? Well, look, I mean, I think there is a parallel here with the emperor we're going to discuss. It's rare that I compare myself to.

To an emperor. Is it rare? Well, you know, it certainly hasn't happened today. I don't think I did anything, Dan. I think what happened is the headlines caught up to some of the themes in my foundation, which are unapologetically pro-work ethic and personal responsibility and delayed gratification and all of that Horatio Alger stuff that you grew up with. Dad stuff is what we call that. Yeah.

That stuff, yes. So suddenly, I think, not really because I've much changed, but events around me changed, and the things that we'd been talking about pretty consistently for 16 years, for whatever reason, became objectionable or problematic, and I got looped into a group of right-wing nutjobs, and so be it. It's happened to the best of us, my friend. I found myself labeled as a member of the intellectual dark web, and I had to go look and see what that was. Yeah.

Can you be a member of a group you don't even know exists? Well, look, once you look for it, now, of course, you've left some awful digital footprint through the virtual cosmos. No doubt. And now the proof is the very fact that you went looking for yourself. That's right. That's right. So there you go. I got labeled in. But I get it. I don't even know how to explain standing up for other people that haven't done it. It reminds me a little of like the 50s with the McCarthyism stuff and everything.

And all of a sudden, you know, if you had a screenwriter friend that you knew was a good guy who was being targeted, you had to stand up for that person and then maybe be lumped in the same group with them. But it's a weird, you know what it is as a history guy, and you'll relate to this, I think it's almost connected to like patterns of the way we are when you get us in large groups. So when you see the McCarthy era, to me, that looks like a re-come around of,

the Puritans and the banishment and the, what are they, the ostracized people and especially Americans. But I think human beings just have this tendency to get into these frames of mind. And it's interesting how in some areas it can be the right and the conservatives who are the prosecutors. In other areas, it can be the left and the tastemakers and the glitterati. The dynamic is the same, right? No matter who's pushing the buttons on the receiving end. Let me get to the Caesar thing because I'm fascinated. So here's the thing with Caesar.

If we're looking at this now, the way we are, all this time later, Caesar's time period looks like it's this amazing era, but if you zoom out and you realize that Caesar's in a state, you wouldn't call it a nation, right? A state where they've essentially had stage four cancer for a long time. And Caesar is the end stages of this disease. And so some of the things that he's doing

if you're a fan of Caesar versus an anti-fan of Caesar, can be justified by the health of the patient. And so a lot of the things that Caesar's accused of by the people who didn't like him, the response would be, are you looking at where the patient is right now? Yes, this is radical surgery, but he's dying on the table without this.

And so that's why when we did the series Death Throws the Republic, we had to go back generations before Caesar for his time period to make sense. It would like if you want to use our time now as the analogy, it would be as though somebody were studying our time now and has it

intimately connected to Eisenhower and Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and that era. Because we're going to go, I was hardly born, right? I was born during the Johnson. That's not connected to now, but that's because we don't see those omnipresent strands that are still

operating on us today that date back to that. Whereas when we're looking at Julius Caesar's time, you can, you can go, oh, wow, well, this goes back to the two Gracchi brothers and Saturninus and, and Sina and Sulla and Marius. And, and somewhere down the road, they'll do the same with us when they're zoomed out to such a degree and they'll go, well, what they're dealing with in the early, you know, 2020s, it goes back to the Lyndon Johnson reform, you know, so they'll tie it in in ways that we don't because the human lifespan is

has this inability to really connect the dots before we're here, if that makes sense. Sure. Well, before we zoom all the way out into the macro,

On a micro level, do you think this story actually happened? Because everything I've read, I've read dozens of accounts. They're all pretty close, but they all go out of their way to say, look, our main source is Caesar himself. How much credibility do you put in his account?

of what happened. But that shows that you really understand history because that's the most important first question. And that's what any historian, of which I'm not one, is going to ask, right? They're going to be a detective. And the first thing they're going to say is not, when did he say it? Who said it? You're going to say, did he say it at all? And approach it from that. And the reason that a guy like Caesar or Alexander or a lot of those people are extra hard is because, and you just said it yourself, these guys had their own press corps.

They had their own publicity groups. I mean, Caesar and Alexander both had people and the names are known. Alexander's press people are basically known, right? You know, he had people who were walking around with him who are trying to put the latest spin on the press releases. And so what we're saying in the Alexander show we're doing right now is that it's very possible that unlike a lot of historical stories, we're over the eras. The information got corrupted in a story like Alexander. The information can be corrupted from ground zero.

I mean, he could have corrupted it. So I always compare it to now. Look at how hard it is to get the wheat from the chaff when we're talking about truth and falsehoods now.

and then realize it's always been that way. And if anything, it's been harder, right? No internet, difficult to check the sources. I mean, so that same issue with reliable information has always been present. And so the most important question to ask, especially with ancient history, is the one you just asked, which is, did this even happen? And the answer to the question is there are certainly pirates. Pirates in the Mediterranean have been an age-old problem, so none of that seems unlikely.

Caesar is an amazing figure, even when you discount all of the publicity. And he's one of those guys that if anybody was going to thumb his nose at the very people who could cut his throat if he looked at him sideways...

it might be this guy you have to have a lot of chutzpah to try to overthrow the republic if that's what he was really doing so the answer the question is it's in keeping with the image but there's no real way to know because this is exactly the kind of thing that a politician i mean look at it this way it's like having somebody take a shot at you in an assassination attempt and then having you able to claim with a bandage over your rear the whole time that we i mean at

Caesar gets to go back to Rome and say, yeah, not only did those pirates capture me, not only do I know what that feels like, but then I went after him and got him so they won't bother you. I mean, come on, that's a winning political issue any era you're using it, you know?

Yeah, but God, to have a front row seat as we do now and to not have to wait for, I don't know, Seneca or Pliny the Elder or whoever to like write it down, to go on Reddit, to go on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok and see yourself crucified on a cross of fill in the blank, gold maybe. Who said that? Was that Brian? Yeah, after the Scopes trial, right? Yeah.

Right, right. The gold standard speech. But whatever. It's so interesting that this guy would do exactly what he said, crucify them after he killed them, at least according to the accounts I've read, all of which seems to be designed to just, I mean, what a great viral Instagram moment. If only they had it. They didn't have it. But somebody must have written it down because here we are 2,000 years later talking about it.

What makes the guy so cool, though, I mean, we all admire different qualities in people, right? So here you have a person that is likely an egomaniac. It's hard not to be when you have people telling you how great you are all the time. We see people in our age right now that fall into the same trap, right? Flatter your ego and all those kinds of things. But Caesar's troops used to

What would you call it? Chant maybe is a good way. When you're marching, you know, you would chant and you would sing songs. And Caesar's troops, because it was a Roman tradition that showed how close they were to you, instead of revering maybe the way Hitler's Wehrmacht troops would have to revere him like that.

There was a more bawdy sort of, you know, we're all comrades. And they would make fun of their own commander. You know, lock up your children, the bald whoremongers here. The old rumor that he'd slept with a foreign king. His troops would bring that up in the marching while they're chanting his name. It was a sign of the closeness and the camaraderie. So that's like the very worst thing.

sorts of rumors that anyone could spread about you. And instead, you almost embrace them and make them your own and lean into them. And your own troops can make fun of the biggest TMZ scandals of that era. You know, it would be like, I don't want to see. I don't want to bring up. I was just going to bring up a contemporary figure in a similar situation. But it's so awful. You don't want to link their names to it. And yet Caesar could have his own troops

saying the worst gossip stories about him in the streets of Rome to the very people he needs to have vote for him. I mean, it's a wonderful sort of ego jujitsu, if you will, maybe. That's exactly the word I was looking for. It's a kind of physical passive aggressiveness where you just take this thing that's supposed to destroy you. And look, since you invoked

his presence earlier. You know, you get Nick, you survive two assassination attempts and the mythology starts to grow in real time immediately. And I don't know if you were thinking about grabbing them by the what have you, but I mean, a comment like that

We all grew up thinking, okay, that's a deal breaker. You can't run for office and say that and survive. You can't survive the press. You can't survive public opinion. You simply can't survive that. We all know it to be true. And then 10 minutes later,

We're all wrong. Now, that does not allow a guy like you to look over the vast reaches of time with all the perspective and context that comes with the passing of time. Sorry, the passage of time, if you prefer. But we're right now forced to deal with these things. Like, I think maybe if there's a question in here, I want to ask you if...

What ought we be learning, if anything, from the life of Caesar and from the fall of Rome that actually translates in 2024? I think those are two real separate questions.

First of all, the Caesar thing is hard to get your mind around until we figure out whether he was the good or the bad guy in the story. I mean, they've been trying to figure that out for years. Is Caesar saving the Republic or is he destroying the Republic? Is he saving a certain class of Romans from exploitation and being ground down? Or is he the age-old Roman nightmare of a man who wants to become king? Yeah.

So no one's been able to figure out in 2000 years whether Caesar's the good guy in this story or the bad guy. So we have to sort of put that aside because you can't really draw your conclusions until you answer that.

You can draw conclusions about Rome though. And what I always say about Rome and the reason we're so fascinated with it is it has two things that we have in our society. And when you get enough things that are the same, even with 900 million differences, we can see the similarities and they sort of call to us. And the two things that are the same is the one thing that's the same throughout all human history. And it's why we enjoy it and study it and we can relate to it. And that's people.

What Shakespeare say, all the world's a stage and all the people merely players. And these people in the story are like us. And what that means is they're motivated by the very same sorts of buttons that a good salesman's going to push on people, right? I remember a guy giving me a whole story that, you know, when he went to salesman school, they said, okay, you're going to work one of these angles, heartstrings, greed, envy. There's a whole bunch of human emotions that come with the package, right?

And that's going to be the case in any society where human beings make up the population. So you're going to see a connection there. We're going to understand what motivates these people at ground zero. And then if you stick them in a system that's like our system, another republic, right, another system where there are voters and elections and favors and offices and all these sorts of things,

So you stick human beings, which we all understand, in a system that looks very much like our own, then even with all the differences, and they are myriad number of differences, right? You look at it and you go, hmm, I see echoes, right? I see things that remind us of our time. And so I think when we look at Rome, we see by Caesar's time,

a potentially, and this will determine how you think of Caesar, good or bad, is it a system that is terminal? At that time period, if it is terminal, one judges Caesar's doctor skills, if you will, differently than if it's not terminal. And a person like Brutus and some of the senators who stabbed Caesar would say it wasn't terminal until Caesar came around. So

So I think trying to figure out what you can deduce from this is difficult because we don't really know who Caesar was. We can look, though, at a system like Rome and ask all kinds of questions about, you know, they say about airplanes, and you guys will know more about this than I will.

that pulling out of the so-called death spiral, once you get into it, is an almost impossible thing. Or when you get a top that is spinning, when it gets to a certain point and it loses its equilibrium, it's hard to imagine it regaining it. And one can make an argument that political systems might fall into a similar sort of circumstance, where they are salvageable to a certain point and then they're not.

If that's an argument that can be made, then the Roman Republic near the end is the perfect case study for us to look at and go, all right, what do we have here? So I stumbled across a podcast the other day that sucked me in in a totally unexpected way. It's called Constant Wonder.

And not only does it live up to its name, listening to it reminded me of the way I used to feel when I watched Bob Ross paint on PBS. It's soothing, in other words. Not a hint of urgency or drama or politics, just an unrelenting commitment to G-rated curiosity. I just listened to an account recently.

of seahorses and a couple of divers who have dedicated their lives to understanding why they exist, why they're important, and why they need to be preserved and understood. The host is a guy called Marcus Smith, and he's a very calm, very understated guide through science, art, history, music, geography, nature, and so much more. Marcus believes, and I agree, that

that the emerging science around the concept of wonder shows that the ability to feel awe is a skill to be developed, and those who cultivate a sense of constant wonder are more satisfied and more creative than those who don't. In other words, wonder is a muscle

that you can exercise. And this podcast is a workout you'll look forward to doing. It's not just about learning. It's about reinvigorating your own sense of curiosity. You'll leave feeling rejuvenated with your eyes wide open to the wonder all around us and a deeper conviction that human beings can, in fact, accomplish something pretty extraordinary. Listen to Constant Wonder wherever you listen to your podcast. I think you're going to love it.

Heads up. Do you think there were voices in the Senate at the time that were talking about democracy being on the ballot? Do you think Caesar was muttering under his breath and whatever the vernacular would have been that we've got to drain the swamp? Was it a systemic problem that Caesar was trying to fix, or was it still ambition and ego that was trying to

Always push him. It was never enough. Even his ransom was insufficient. Even his captors found a way to insult him by asking for too little money. The guy always wanted more from what I've read. And so kudos because you're always careful about this. I know you have opinions, but you're very hesitant to say good guy, bad guy when you're looking at

through the mists of time. And I certainly won't push you, but it does beg the question, was he a good guy?

Well, I mean, here's the problem. Insufficient data, right, is what I would say. So with a guy like Caesar— It's been 2,000 years, Dan. Well, again, and you mentioned a couple of the sources, right? We have Suetonius, we have Plutarch. We just don't have enough guys. And they're all operating from, like we say, corrupted sources, maybe at ground zero. Here's the problem with something like this when you compare it to modern times, because there are strains where you could see it. What point does Caesar's personal goals dovetail with things that are good for the republic?

One of the things that we talked about is how this is a multigenerational situation Caesar walks into. And one of the multigenerational things which we could all associate with today is an income equality problem. And the problem with the income equality in Rome specifically was that the people who were getting the unequal income in a lot of cases were the soldiers. And the reason for the unequal income was the quick growth of

of the Roman Republic from a Italian city-state to one of the larger empires that had ever existed, which of course means all this money is flowing into the Republic and all these kinds of things. But that money is not being equally distributed. And you might say, well, you know, them's the brakes. That's how things work. But the problem is, is that the people who won the empire on the ground, the soldiery,

were not the ones benefiting, which leaves a wonderful door open for an enterprising politician to go point this out to them. And that's what happens. So that's when you get people like the Grocchi brothers in that famous speech where, you know, they talk to the soldiers and they say, you who bled and died for Rome don't even have a piece you can call your own as a farm. And

You know, you lost your leg. You lost your comrade. And now you come home and the family—now this goes back to farm aid and the loss of—they come back and the family farm has been destroyed because you're in hock and you can't pay the bills and you couldn't do the farming because you were out, you know, conquering the lands that now Crassus and the rich guys have. I mean, that can all be true, but can also be wonderful fodder for an enterprising politician to then exploit, which—

a bunch of them did. And then the question in Roman history class when I was taking it was, were these politicians serious about fixing these problems or were they politicians who found something that they could exploit to get votes? Or is there a Venn diagram where there's crossover, right? Where you can argue that, yes, Caesar is helping Caesar and he's helping the poor soldiers who don't have a land of it. So this becomes the problem though, disentangling the personal motives of

of a guy, and remind me to bring up Caesar's Ancestor Room, because it's my favorite story that I feel like sort of explains who this guy is, but it's the mixture of this guy's personal requirements and the place where he happens to be born into, and the time, because there is no place for Julius Caesar to do what Julius Caesar did 400 years before Julius Caesar lived. The Roman Republic would have been too strong, too stable. The various fissures that he's

part of ripping farther apart did not exist yet. You know, that's the old line about is this the great man theory of history or the trends and forces? In other words, Caesar couldn't have happened earlier. The time had to be right for Caesar. So when you say I'm not really picking a side, I legitimately don't know. It

It's easier for me to pick the nows and talk about politicians today and what I think about them than those people from the past, because we've had many layers of civilizations in the intervening years. It's like a giant historical game of telephone. And all of those intervening civilizations have had different

societal standards. And so if you said he wants to become an emperor, we would think, what a bastard. But there's people that have been in the interim between us who would go, well, what's wrong with an emperor? We have an emperor. It works out great. You know, they would say that that's our own bias from now, which, by the way, would have been a lot like the Roman bias, because the one thing they couldn't stand in Rome was anybody who wanted to make themselves a king. And

Well, the Macedonians of Alexander would have said, what's wrong with a king? It's working out great for us. Worked out good for Philip, right? That's right. But the Roman system didn't work that way, and ours doesn't either. So, again, part of that's tied to the system. There would have been no problem having Caesar be a king in the Macedonian system of Alexander. I want to hear more about the, what do they call it, the big man version? Oh, the great man theory of history, yeah. The old Churchillian style history. Right.

Exactly. I'm curious to know where you fall on that. I think a lot of times that if, I mean, Churchill looms awfully large and favorably in the West, I imagine the folks on the subcontinent might have a slightly different...

Yeah. Exactly. But this idea that, you know, if it wasn't Churchill, it would have been somebody else because the times called for it. And he just happened to get to the front of the line versus you have a man with such a constitution, such a...

And that, by the way, since we're talking about Churchill, I don't know if I mentioned Paul Johnson wrote a great biography on him. It's the shortest biography I've ever read on Churchill. And all it focuses on was the weird idiosyncratic qualities of the guy. Like in the autopsy, his liver, his lungs were the liver and lungs of like a healthy 28-year-old. Which is insane.

The guy drank two bottles of champagne a day, smoked cigars. His constitution, like his literal physicality was so unexampled. You know, I look at that guy as a specimen and I wonder, God, could anybody have stepped into his shoes in that time?

But if I understand the theory right, the answer is, well, sure, because the times would have demanded it. Well, the first disclaimer is that there is no unified theory of history. So nobody knows the answer to the question, right? People have been debating this forever. What I, you know, Churchill had this great line, and I'm always careful about quoting anybody now because every time we quote anybody, you find out they never said it.

it. But Churchill had this great line where he said, I do believe we are all worms, but I do believe I'm a glow worm. And that sort of describes kind of the way the guy. So here's the way I've always thought about it. And this is the cheap answer. It's the cop out answer. But it's an interplay, isn't it, between the great person theory of history and the trends and forces, because without the proper timing and

You know, there was a line from a song I once liked, and they were writing about a girl, shocking in a pop song, but the line was, "She's a great soul in a small destiny." And I thought, that's what a Churchill is if the time and place is wrong, right? That's what a Caesar is if Caesar's born a peasant serf in the Middle Ages in England,

He never has a chance to do any of these things because he's locked into a mode of existence that won't give him the chance. So you could have been this amazing figure, and the stories about what Caesar could do are amazing, but it wouldn't have mattered, maybe. Somebody else might say, oh, no, with that great of an outstanding individual, even as a peasant, you would have found a way to be so important to the king that they would have found a way. So this is where the debate goes on whether or not you can transcend one's place, but it's got to be an interplay. And the reason I always say this is because there are certain people

events or eras that are unimaginable without certain single individuals. And I always fall back on the same one, and I apologize in advance, but how is the Second World War without Adolf Hitler? I mean, how? It's just, you can say trends and forces, and the guy obviously was a beneficiary. I mean, he's literally the time wrapped up in a single person.

But without that dude, you can't really—the story doesn't even work. So I find good support for both the time and the place has to be right, but not everybody you plug into that situation is going to do the job. Since we're dusting off old English quotes, I think it was Harold McMillan. The old prime minister. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, before Churchill, when I think a reporter is pressing him on his lack of certitude regarding the platform that he's running on, you know, explain the ambivalence, I think was the question, and he said, events, dear boy, events. I don't have a crystal ball, and whatever it is I think I'm going to do is probably going to...

fail miserably for reasons that I simply can't tell you. We talked about it, Chuck, a few years ago, prior to COVID. How do you have a conversation prior to COVID, not contemplating COVID? And then COVID, and then it's like, oh, well, yeah, that. That's the times, right? Those are the events. Those are the

Well, the times that try men's souls.

You have to cut people some slack for not having some ready-made plan in place to deal with it. COVID's the same way. Now, if COVID happens again, right, if we get another one in five years or something like it, well, then you have every justifiable reason to turn around and go, we should know better. I got lucky. It's a weird way to say it, lucky, with my book because the publisher rushed it because

Because it was, you know, with a podcast, I have no deadline, so I'm not accustomed. But they rushed it. I got the book out more quickly than I wanted to. But it turns out there was this one little piece where I was talking about the plague, right? And stuff from the Middle Ages. And I had said in it, will we ever have another thing like the, you know,

Right before it happened. And had I operated on my timeline, it would have come out after COVID. But it looks like a Nostradamus-like prediction. But the truth is, is it's nothing of the sort. It's like a gambler's game. And if it hasn't happened in a long enough time, the odds get better and better. I mean, how long ago was, were people like Bill Gates warning that this is going to happen? I mean, the avian flu people have been saying it's going to happen forever.

So I jumped on board the bandwagon. But it's a timing thing, right? So if you're the president when COVID breaks out and we haven't had a pandemic since the 1950s, you got to cut a person like that some slack because it's not in the area where any normal person operates as though this is reality. And this becomes a problem in certain areas. Nuclear war,

I don't know if you guys read Annie Jacobson's recent book on the nuclear war situation, but when you read it, she was able to talk to enough people who've seen what a president would see if a nuclear war broke out and he opens up the football, right? The briefcase. And once you see that, you realize that you can tell this person who's going to be president that.

9,000 times what they're supposed to do, how it's supposed to go, what the protocol is. But until you really believe there are missiles on the way, none of that actual experience is going to be imprinted on the system in a way that makes it usable experience, operational experience, if that makes sense. And I feel the same way about those other questions. Like, until 9-11 happens...

They can tell you all day long, yes, the terrorists have a plan to launch planes into buildings. And you go, really? What are the odds of that? And then it happens. Well, you don't get cut slack as the next time. Right. So if somebody launches planes into buildings tomorrow, you're on the hook because we know that can happen. Happened in recent history. Well, in the spirit of quoting, I think we have to defer to the great Mike Tyson, who famously said. Everybody has a plan till you get hit in the mouth. Right. Is that the one? How would he say it, Chuck?

Until you get punched in the face. Yeah, punched in the face. That's right. I was asked, probably they wish they could take it back now. I was asked to give the commencement speech to my alma mater. And I included that Mike Tyson line in the commencement speech. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. And that was my message to graduates. Get ready.

There's just so much unassailable truth in it, though. Caesar had a plan. He was going to Rhodes. He was going to study oratory. He had a plan. Pirates came along. That's a micro event. That's a dirty job. Dude, I can't even imagine. Look, you spend a lot of time looking at epochs and giant trends through time. I'm just wondering—

I think it was Larry Ellison who said, when asked...

to explain his incredible success in life. He said, I had just the right amount of adversity growing up. And so being kidnapped by pirates, file it wherever you want, but surely in a general way, it's going under some sort of umbrella of adversity. It's bad to get kidnapped. It's bad to be held, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, when I find these events, apocryphal or not, that happen in youth,

that somehow seem to presage or foretell some sort of great event or lay the foundation for some kind of personality that's going to endure through time. That's interesting to me. I mean, we're not having this conversation right now, for what it's worth, if the pirates don't kidnap Caesar. We'd be talking about something else. And who knows? Maybe Rome doesn't fall when it did.

Maybe it falls faster. Or maybe, that's what I was going to say, maybe it happens sooner. There's a wonderful scene. I'm a fan of good acting, and I like Richard Harris, and he played Sulla.

in a movie, and you know, I can't watch historical movies because I'm completely messed up for life. I can't. But I can watch scenes from historical movies. And there's a scene where Richard Harris is playing the Roman dictator Sulla and the young Julius Caesar's dragged in front of him. Now, this is a true story. And the odds, if you were a betting person, would have been that Sulla is going to have Caesar killed. He's having a lot of other people killed.

So the time, you know, there's that old line about these are the times that try men's souls. This is the time where Caesar literally knows his life is about to be forfeit. And Sulla is a terrifying figure. The way Harris plays him is wonderful. But he essentially has Julius Caesar brought before him as a very young man and...

and asks him to argue for his life. You know, why shouldn't I kill you? And then he says something to the effect of, would you kill me if the situation was reversed? And Caesar says, yeah. Okay, well, that's right there. You kind of go, okay. Then he asks him, he says, well, you'll have to divorce your wife to live. And he goes, I'm not going to divorce my wife.

holy cow, the dictator just said, I'll let you live. So these are the sorts of things where you sit there and go, okay, you can tell right now you're dealing with an interesting guy. And he had the great line. Sulla had the greatest line about Caesar because Sulla's great enemy was a guy named Marius, another one of these important figures in the long decline of the Roman Republic. Marius just happened to be Julius Caesar's uncle.

by marriage. And when Sulla is convinced by Pompey, I believe, to let Caesar, the young Caesar, go, Sulla tells Pompey he's made a big mistake. He goes, anybody could see there's a lot of Mariuses in that one kid right there. And he was absolutely right. He also said, beware the man in the loose, or the young man in the loose-fitting toga. Because, you know, if you think of like the 60s fashions we had in the 1960s, Caesar was part of sort of a youth movement and they would, he had 50s

fringe added to his toga. It's right out of like Jesus Christ Superstar, right? He's just, you know, all he has missing is like the white guy Afro from like Room 222 when we were kids, right? So he's this really cool kind of dude with all these little, they would do little high signs to each other, all the young up-and-comers.

And a guy like Sulla is like the 60-year-old guy in the 1960s, you know, with Brylcreem in his hair and the old horn-rimmed glasses looking at him, just going, "You watch that kid." And the scene where Richard Harris is in the movie is fantastic. And when you watch what Caesar does, he's thought to have done that,

cojones you have to have when literally staring death in the face. And remember, this guy doesn't just kill you. If he wants to, if you piss him off enough, it's your wife, it's your children's, I mean, everything's on the line and you still have the guts to sort of F you and just... That's a heck of a guy. All in. If the trends and forces are lining up in your favor, that's a guy who's poised to exploit that, you know? Well, here's another

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She'll be happy and then when you get the book and read it, you'll be happy. It's just happiness everywhere my friends at Mike Rowe dot com slash mom's book Oh, no, not the home. You're gonna love it. I promise. Thank you Let's talk about the way he could exploit it Vis-a-vis oratory since that's what he was going to study and maybe if we can find some sort of parallel to today

I've been thinking a lot about the teleprompter, Dan. I think maybe it's at the root. On the one hand, it's just a tool. I mean, it doesn't know if the words on it are any more true than they are false, any more than a gun knows if it's being wielded by somebody who's good or bad, right? It's just a tool. But it seems like we've lost something here.

Really consequential in modern times the ability to persuade without notes without a teleprompter the ability to connect with the common person and I think this slow Unraveling of that particular talent. I mean you really see it in equal parts I think in journalism and in politics

The only political figure we've ever had on this podcast was Vivek Ramaswamy. And I had him on because I heard him say, if elected, he would never use a teleprompter. He would only read from notes. You know, and I just thought there's something there. Anyway, how did we lose whatever ability Caesar had? And even the Civil War, you know, Everett, what's his name, who did the... The wonderful book, Anthony, wasn't it Anthony Everett? Is that who you're thinking of?

I'll get it. Well, he spoke for two and a half hours. Lincoln spoke for two and a half minutes. And Everett crushed it. No one could do that. Edward Everett. Edward Everett. And so anyway, I guess my question is, to what degree was Caesar's ability to form a thought and persuade a room of people

consequential to his rise. Well, listen, it was huge because we're talking about an era where there was no substitute for that, right? You couldn't cut a PR commercial. You couldn't, I mean, that was the only way to get your point across, right? Even when you're talking about writing, you're still talking about, you know, who's literate versus who's not literate. So speaking was a lot more important back then and speaking extemporaneously was a lot more important back then.

It's also a subject in school. I mean, an educated person is going to take rhetoric and all those sorts of courses. They're considered the basic things one studies.

So you're going to walk out of there with the ability to make a good argument, talk off the cuff, have counter arguments, tear apart the other guy's point of view, all that sort of stuff. So whether or not Caesar, he was definitely called a great orator, and he had an unusual style. So whereas a guy like Cicero might have been imitating Demosthenes and coming up with a certain style, Caesar had a kind of his own style, it sounded like. Right.

But what a guy like Caesar is going to have that makes him different, and I share with you the whole loss of rhetoric skills. I would also throw in, by the way, this is a little tangent here, but the loss of humor. Because when you're not speaking off the cuff, you lose the humor. So when you think of the kind of things that a Kennedy or a Reagan was able to say just off the cuff that would completely disarm everybody, those sorts of things were worth mentioning.

a certain number of points in a poll. I mean, you could literally make up... First of all, it made you instantly likable, instantly less dangerous sounding. There's a whole lot of things that humor does, and that's all a function of being able to talk off the cuff. So, loss of that, though, but look at what Caesar has. What Caesar has that we don't have today, so this is where the parallel ends, is Caesar has an army...

And so does Crassus, and so does Pompey, and so did Cinna, and so did Sulla, and so did Marius. And that army owed their allegiance to that guy, not the state. And the reason that happened was because, you know, all these things, and this is one of the great lessons of history, is that so many of the things that turn out to be these horrible long-term disasters in the making often solved intractable short-term problems.

And so, you know, you'll say, "Oh my God, why on earth did the Romans ever make the stupid mistake of giving their generals armies or their politicians armies?"

Well, yeah, 300 years later, that's a horrible idea or 200, but it might have solved a legitimate crisis on the ground that made Rome survive another 50 years at that time period, right? And we do this too. We solve horrible short-term problems by doing things we know will be bad in the long term, but we worry more about the short-term problem. And truthfully,

That may be the right choice at the time. Spend money we don't have to solve something now. And you think, well, that's going to backfire and it absolutely will backfire. But the choice might backfire sooner rather than later if you don't.

So sometimes the kicking the can down the road thing or the making the bad decisions so that you survive the Teutons and the Kimbries invading, you know, so Marius has to change the way the military is organized. And a generation or two later, Rome falls because of it. There might not have been a Rome if Marius hadn't made those changes. So I think it's important to look sometimes at the way these things break. Sure. And here we are. You pick up a paper today and you can ask yourself the same thing about

Hamas and Iran and Hezbollah. And how's that going to look over a 200-year window? Right. And our orators today... We don't have any orators, but okay. Our elected officials are steeped in performance. And that's the thing that makes me anxious. Never mind for a minute whether they're right or wrong. Nobody's got a crystal ball. Nobody knows. But...

It's one thing to stand up there like Edward Everett did, or Lincoln, and speak from the heart, speak with a certain amount of spontaneity. We know that's not happening. We know that everything that's coming out of virtually everyone's mouth, not everybody, but most everyone has either been focused grouped.

It's been tested. It's been weighed. It's been polled. It's been measured. And we know they're reading. And whether it's a local newscaster or a vice presidential candidate, we know they're reading. We can see them reading. And then when they're done reading, we have this conversation about how they did. Was it convincing?

And the people who are leading that conversation are also reading. And so it all just seems so performative. I was just going to say, it's exactly what it is. Yeah.

But it couldn't have been that way during the Civil War because we didn't have the same kind of tools. We didn't have microphones. We didn't have teleprompters. So at the very least, you had to have the capacity to memorize your ideas and then connect with an audience. I'm just really stuck on that muscle and how it atrophies if you don't use it and what happens to a society if it rots forever.

throughout the institutions upon which we most depend? Well, if I had the answers to that, I'd still be doing the Current Events podcast that we used to do. I think what happens, this relates to something we talked about with not being able to foresee the unforeseeable, the 9-11s or the COVIDs until they happen, because they just seem so far off the map. We've entered into a stage in the American experiment that is also off the map.

And what that means is, you know, different types of people organize the way they interpret reality differently, right? I have a friend who's a math genius. His entire way he interprets the stimuli around him is through a mathematical lens.

Mine is all history based and that makes it sound more educational than it is. It just means it's in a timeline, right? This happened and this happened and this and I can't imagine how other people organize their reality. And because that's how I see things, the way I make sense of things that have happened is to compare them to other things that have happened.

But this is only useful while you're still sort of on the map. Once you go into 9-11 territory or COVID territory, then the useful tool of being able to compare to like situations is less useful.

I find that's where I am because I feel like now we're in territory where I can't say, wow, this is just like when John F. Kennedy did blah, blah, blah. So the American experiment is an interesting place. Now, this is another topic for another day. I zoom out and try to associate it with things like, uh,

The technological changes. I'm very hung up on this idea that my generation was the last analog generation that will ever exist. And yet every generation that has ever existed up until the time of mine was an analog generation, which means that we're in guinea pig territory now. And it would be one kind of guinea pig if we just said, OK, we're going to give this guinea pig the Internet.

and Facebook and a couple of other things. And then in 200 years, we're going to check and see how this guinea pig's descendants are doing with Facebook and Google and all those things. But that's not what's going to happen. In the lifetime of that guinea pig, we're going to move from Facebook to TikTok and from TikTok to the AI. And so there is a crossed pattern at some point where the human ability to change is going to be outpaced by the speed at which things are changing.

If you are a person who lives in the ancient world and they develop a new plow, right, that is going to change agriculture, you will adjust to the new plow reality. But then things might not change that big again for 20 generations.

And that means so many different things. It means that what you learned growing up is still valuable through your entire dying days and that your experience that you pass on to the next generation is also valuable. So when the old timer in the Native American tribe teaches you how to find information

you know, deer, the information is still totally useful to you. And the longer he lives, the more useful the info is. Whereas my children already have to help me check into airliners because I don't, because I can't. So there are a lot of things that have always been true for human civilization that are now not true. To take this back to what I was saying, I have nothing to compare this to. And so the way I sort of figure out what the stimuli that I'm receiving mean

isn't working anymore for me. So how about that? How about that for a non-answer? No, it's great though, but it opens the door not just to whether or not we're able to adjust. We always adjust. You know, when John Deere perfected that self-scouring mortarboard, it did change the plow again. I mean, the plow's gone through God knows how many iterations, but that was a game changer. And

And the country adjusted, but they adjusted over a period of a couple of years because John Deere couldn't bring out his publicist, who didn't bring out the phone, and create an amazing viral demonstration of what this new thing did. It had to sort of matriculate. Grow organically. Through technology.

Yeah, it took time. It just took time, Dan. And in the scope of things, it probably assimilated faster than it would have, say, 2,000 years before.

But I think you're saying that we don't have a moment. We're like in an episode of Star Trek, and the prime directive has been violated in our own story, right? Some existential third-party force has showed up and dropped off, call it AI, whatever it is, call it the teleprompter. It's like, wait a second, we're not quite ready for

to digest the consequences of this thing. I mean, the prompter is such a stupid example, but I'm going to stick with it because it was designed to make people more human, more persuasive. It was designed to foster a deeper connection to allow people to use this new media in a more human way. It has had the complete opposite effect.

And I just feel like we're struggling on virtually every level to get up to speed with the latest tech, whether it's an AR-15, whether it's a new weapons design, whether it's a whatever it is, man. The time that we need to get up to speed, to adjust, as you said, that's what feels different to me if I'm looking back and trying to imagine how our ancestors dealt with a better plow.

Well, but this has been a long-running problem, right? Ever since nuclear weapons were discovered, we've had some of the greatest thinkers of our time discussing the problems with the fact that the weapons technology grows a lot faster than human wisdom grows. And if those things are out of whack—

you're going to end up with problems. And here's the thing, and you mentioned it and we talked about it with the plow. If you drop AI on a civilization 2,000 years ago and then tell them that they're going to have 100 generations to learn how to live with it,

That's different than saying, here's AI now, and in five years, you won't even recognize what we'll have for AI. You're becoming outmoded. Instead of the old days, you become outmoded in several generations. Now we're becoming outmoded several times within a generation. I don't know where the logical wall is that you run into with that, but there's a wall somewhere.

And the weapons systems are a perfect example of something where it's so black and white you don't have to really spell it out for anybody. But let's back it up and turn it to something that's, you know, you have to extrapolate a little bit more, but it's just as obvious if you look at it a certain way.

When I was a kid, when you were a kid, there was something called Radio Free Europe, right? Radio Free Europe, for those who don't know, was a single radio stream signal that went over the Iron Curtain, right, to the big bad communist folks. And the whole point of it was to have sort of a beacon of freedom that went in there and then exposed those people to the beliefs of the West and the ideas and the point of view and the news stories and everything else. Right.

and both the Soviet Union and the United States were so worried about things like this that they worked very hard to try to keep those signals from their people because of the destabilization that that could cause.

OK, well, look where we are now. Forget one signal going across the Iron Curtain. Everybody's on message boards with each other now. We have troll farms that are run by intelligence agencies of nation states that are communicating with our citizens through the comments after news stories. So in other words, something that was considered so dangerous, you had to have

all kinds of countermeasures in place to keep the radio-free Europe signal from impacting and destroying and undermining your civilization.

What we do today is nine bazillion times worse than that. But what it can do is the same. That's the part we've forgotten. We've lost the fact that if one radio signal can completely destroy a civilization that can no longer control the message to its people, we're way past the control the message to its people standpoint. In other words, the better way to put it is

We have an analog legacy system that we're stuck with, nation states, in a digital reality. Can the analog system change itself enough to operate in this digital reality? And if it somehow can...

And the odds are not good. But if it can, the problem is going to be that 10 years from now, that digital reality is going to be unrecognizable from the digital reality today. And so even if you can one time or two time, this is a Star Trek thing to evolve to deal with it. You have to continually evolve and you have to continually evolve at an ever increasing speed. There, I got it out. Do do do do do do do do do do dum.

Hey, man, did you see the Facebook post I put up from Wichita? Yes. What'd you think of it? Be honest. I thought it was really great. You're talking about the one about noble whiskey, where you signed all the bottles and stuff like that? I've been in a lot of liquor stores. I've signed a lot of bottles, Chuck. But what happened in Wichita was unlike anything that's ever happened to me before, at least in a liquor store. I was supposed to be there from 7 to 8. We put out the word, and the people from Wichita came to say hello. And I was like,

And when I say the people from Wichita, I mean all of them. Everybody. Everybody in Wichita came. Yes. Because you were there all night long, just about. Yeah. Oh my God. 600 people filled a total wine and more. Putting the more in total wine and more. They formed this line and I stood there signing bottles of my granddad's whiskey, saying hi and taking selfies.

I was so hungry. I had reservations at this great French bistro at 8.30. But you know the deal, man. You can't leave. You can't leave. And you know what? Once I got past 10 o'clock...

I didn't want to leave. They closed the store. They locked the doors. And, you know, another 300 people stayed there. They got to know each other. They formed their own Facebook page. Wow. I opened a couple of bottles and passed them out. So we're taking selfies. I'm sipping my granddad's whiskey, and I'm making friends with the entire city of Wichita. I left there at 10 after 12. And I'm telling you this because, um...

My grandfather's whiskey just brings people together, Chuck. There's no other way to say it. There's no other way to say it. There's no explanation for what happened other than that. Your grandfather's whiskey did it. You're right. Amen. I just wanted to use a couple of minutes here to thank the people of Wichita for coming out and everybody for supporting my foundation. When you order Noble Tennessee Whiskey online, the proceeds benefit MicroWorks. When you sit around for six hours in a liquor store, that's another story. But look,

It's all of a piece and it's all super gratifying. We've got a new single barrel that's out that is just off the charts good. And this thing has been so much fun. So, A, thank you for your support. B, go get a bottle for the holidays or, and by holidays, I mean Halloween. Just get a bottle for Friday. Noblespirits.com.

Noblespirits.com. Thank you, Wichita. Soon may the nobleman come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waiting is done, we'll take a drink and go. I'm thinking of the Maxim gun. Yes. I'm thinking. We have got the Maxim gun and they have not, right? That's right. Like one minute.

I'm on my horse. I got my plumes. I got my men. We're fighting it the way we've been fighting it. It was the Franco-Prussian War. That's what they called it. Exactly. And it's like, hey, man, I don't know if you missed this press release, General, but these guys, they've got this thing. It's called a Maxim gun, and it's over. It's just over. You make the point so well in Blueprint for Armageddon.

Which, by the way, you guys have to listen to. It's so good. Thank you. But no better example. Maybe the Civil War, but when you talk about tactics not keeping up with technology, that's the thing. Revolution in military affairs, the RMAs, yeah. The RMA, that's it. What was the RMA in Caesar's day? Legions. Legions.

What Caesar did – so there was a wonderful series came out about 1979, 1980, Gwynne Dyer, the journalist, a military historian. It was a series called War.

And he examined all these kinds of things from the beginning, and he showed how you go from essentially a bunch of cavemen fighting each other, and then how it progresses from there. And it's linear. So the Romans were one of those great stages in development. And what they did was break up the solid line of human beings that formed a phalanx. So if you fought the Greeks when they fought the Persians and the Spartans and all that stuff, the Greeks would line up in what, to the naked eye from a distance, would appear to be a solid body of human beings.

a giant rectangle of guys shoulder to shoulder. The problem with a group of people like that is it can't really move effectively and keep its formation.

So what the Romans did was eventually, this was a series of steps, but they started by breaking up that giant group of men into smaller, they called them maniples, which means handfuls. Maniple might be like 150 guys. But what that meant was that within this body that to the naked eye from 100 yards away looked solid are a bunch of 150 guy handful units that are capable of maneuvering by themselves. I think Gwen Dyer said it was articulating the phalanx.

and it's a mobility issue. So a lot of the battles that the Romans won against the Greek-style warfare of Alexander with the big pikemen in those solid bodies of troops is the Romans would get them in bad terrain, which messed up the formation because it's a solid body of people. And then the Romans would find a little...

part of the ground that was all messed up or there was some foliage or there were some rocks and they could get one of those small little maniples of guys and just sort of get them in that little area and then move around the flanks of that big unwieldy formation and all of a sudden it was like a bunch of bees that had surrounded a giant group of wildebeests if you will and had them just all trapped and so it was

It was a mobility issue more than anything else. I mean, there's a lot. A military historian would say you left out this and you left out that. But by and large, if you're a Roman commander and you're looking at the advantages you have over that, it's your ability to move. Interesting. Just as our ability to adjust is time contingent, so too is your ability to fight. Or move now. It's all mobility, right? When you talk about space force and the stuff in the air, I mean, it's mobility and detectability. Well, yeah.

The whole business of fighting back in the old days. I mean, I've lost a lot of sleep thanks to you, man. There's just so many wretched ways to die in so many different wars. I know. I know. That could be a show, couldn't it? Yeah, the worst way to die. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's go with that. Of all of the great battles...

Where would you least like to find your reincarnated self? Oh, yeah. I've answered this question before. That's why it's on the tip of my tongue because I've lost a lot of sleep myself over just this. I've decided it depends on what bothers you the most. And we all have different things, right? So here's the way I look at it. Well, what's the old Woody Allen line? He doesn't mind dying. He just doesn't want to be there when it happens. This is my two-pronged answer. They both score 100 out of 100 on my terrible scale, but for different reasons.

One is a Roman battle. It's the Battle of Cannae where Hannibal surrounded the Roman army. Supposedly 80,000 guys. It's an afternoon. He's got these people surrounded within an hour or two.

but you got to kill them, right? You're not just going to sit there with artillery in a classroom, or if you were in a war game with somebody and you surrounded the enemy, everybody would just go home. It would say, okay, game over, you win, right? But in the real world, just because you've surrounded them and just because there's no way out and just because you've won, you actually have to go kill them all. And that will take an afternoon. And

And the people in the center of the trapped Roman mass will know for hours what their fate is, but they still have to go through it. They don't have the Woody Allen luxury of not being there when it happens, right? So I have a—there was an article for Military History magazine once that tried to imagine what it was like.

in the center of that group of people, what they could see, what the sensory stimulation was like. They were talking about how you wouldn't be able to see much. The noise would be like multiple 737s right by you. The disorientation, the Roman authors say that at the center of that mass, when the Carthaginians cut their way into it, they found Romans who had simply, because you can hardly move, right? Everybody gets packed

together. They say, you couldn't even raise your weapons. I'm claustrophobic. That would drive me crazy. But they said they found Romans who had literally just then hunkered down where they were sitting and covered their head up with sand.

And just killed themselves that way because they couldn't face the prospect of what was to come. And so for me, on one level, that's the battle where I just go, okay. And plus it was hot and dusty. If you're going to die, can't you die in the Pacific in Hawaii and enjoy yourself first, right? Is all I'm saying. Then the other one is that the First World War battlefields were –

You're never going to see shelling like that again. I always try to tell people, they'll say, this is as bad as World War I, fill in the blank. It was not as bad as World War I. And the reason why is we'll never have to fire that many shells to hit a target again. It was a function of the technology of the era.

They had developed all these big cannons. They had developed the ability to produce millions and millions of shells. They had not developed the ability to hit a target reliably. And what that meant was you have to fire thousands or tens of thousands of shells in the hopes that you will take out what you're shooting at.

Nowadays, you will hit that target on the first or second shot. You don't need to use millions of shells. What that means is the experience of drum fire, real drum fire, is nothing that anyone's ever going to experience again because they're never going to use...

tens of thousands of artillery pieces firing at breakneck speed for days again. Why drum fire? Why'd they call it that then? Because at a certain point, there are so many weapons firing so close together that the shells are landing so quickly together that you cannot differentiate one from another. It sounds like a drum roll.

It all sort of fades. And when I did the virtual reality exhibit we did on the First World War, what we tried to show was what drum fire sounded like. Because you can hear people explain to you, I love the way Ernst Jünger, the German soldier, experienced what it's like to be under shelling like that. He described it as being tied to a pole and having somebody swing a sledgehammer at you.

And then every time they swing it at your face, they just barely miss. And then they pull it back to do it again. He says that's what being under shellfire is like. So that's the other thing. So either the claustrophobia of being in the center mass at kidney waiting to die or spending a week in

24-7 while they fire millions of shells that you just lose your, it discombobulates all your neurons. That's what battle fatigue and shell shock was. You're in a trench. Yeah. With rats up to your waist and your dead buddies. Yeah, pieces of your dead buddy. Here's a little bit of Bob. That was the old line they said. They were sending dirt to each other. Here's a little bit of Bill. Here's a little bit more Bill. I mean, you're living in that carnage. It's unbelievable. I'm a little bit of a germaphobe too, so claustrophobic.

on one hand, germaphobe on the other. Those are my two nightmares. What do you think of Peter Jackson's, I'm sure you saw the documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old? I felt like he was hamstrung by having to use the Imperial, I think it was the Imperial War Museum's footage. So much of what Jackson showed, and I don't think it was his fault, I think it was the footage he had available, was stuff where the fighting wasn't going on.

A lot of it was like, okay, here's behind the scenes. Here we're getting a mess. Here we're waiting to be – and I like all that stuff. Don't get me wrong. But if you go online now and you go to YouTube now, you will find stuff that will just make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. And none of that kind of stuff was in Jackson's thing. And again, it's not – God, I hate to even ask you, but what should my poor listeners start Googling, right? What, Passion Break? Yeah.

I remember a colorized scene specifically that's jumping out in my head where it's a trench that has just been overrun and the, you know,

Let's digress for a minute and just talk about how they get these shots. This is the stuff you guys do. You'll understand this. But I had a professor who was trying to teach us how we should look at old movies and old photographs. And there's a whole way he says you're supposed to glean information out of it. For example, with old photographs, look into the background at the stuff maybe the photographer wasn't trying to shoot, right? With war footage, with actual combat footage, he says look into their eyes.

and realize that this cameraman is capturing the most intense moment probably in this human being's life and maybe all the human beings around them. And so you have to ask yourself, so where's the cameraman standing when they're getting these kinds of shots? And the main thing is, is that normally they're not standing near where the danger is because who's going to want to do that? So a lot of the footage that Jackson was using is the kind of stuff a cameraman could shoot without endangering their own life. But there's footage, for example, from...

I don't remember if it's Peleliu or Tarawa in the Pacific, where there were a couple of U.S. Marine Corps photographers who were there with the troops, and they were right there. And the stuff that you can see, even though there wasn't a lot of footage to be shot, it's

it's a whole different level of footage, right? So part of what we're trying to figure out here is where the camera is, what they're shooting. But I saw colorized a moment after a trench had been overrun and the cameramen's clearly with the troops that overran the trench and they are walking on bodies.

So I don't know how stacked these bodies are, although I have read that they can't stack. This is the sort of crazy carnage like minutiae people like yours truly get into because you're wondering what an ancient battlefield is. And some of these ancient sources will say the bodies are stacked, you know, like 12 deep. And physically, I guess that can't happen. But in a trench where you've got two walls that are sort of bolstering the pile of bodies, it can get very deep indeed. And so this footage shows

was of these, and I don't remember if it was Germans overrunning a British trench or the opposite, but they're walking on the dead bodies of the people that they just killed to take this trench. And I'm just going to tell you, had I ever walked on multiple dead bodies for a while, that's something that as you're dying on your deathbed decades later is going to come back.

And so those are the kind of things. So when you say, did I enjoy Jackson's thing? Well, it was wonderful. But all I could think about was, oh, my God, though, it gets so much worse than this. And if part of what you're trying to show people is the intense experience that these people went through, you kind of want to dial it up to 11. Right. You really want to show what they dealt with. So that was my problem.

Well, then paint me a picture. Two questions, really. The first is a stupid one, I think. But I want to ask you about PTSD prior to the First World War, because shell shock is

back when the language still mattered, was the perfect thing, as George Carlin riffed on, right? That's what it was, and that's what caused the thing. I mean, I'm sure people have been traumatized forever. But the other thing I'm wondering now, yeah, walking through a trench full of people that you just shot bad, back to Hannibal.

You got a long afternoon of slaughtering 80,000 people and you finally get done. What's next? Is it a Budweiser? Is it a rest? Like, what do you do with 80,000?

thousand corpses. This is embarrassing to admit, but these are the kind of things that I'm fascinated by. And the thing is, is this is the history detective thing that we started with to wrap this into a nice bow. But this is the detective work that a historian is going to do. He's going to say, OK, where are the bodies? So there's a book that just came out not that long ago. I wish I had the name on the tip of my tongue. Twenty years ago, I would have. But it's a book about what happened to the dead people at Waterloo.

Because there was a lot of dead people at Waterloo. Well, apparently a lot of those people at Waterloo ended up in the equivalent of like glue factories, industrial usages for the bones. And the reason why that became an interesting sort of book to read is because you can extrapolate that if the cadavers of people killed in warfare were useful in the early 1800s for industrial usages, they probably always were.

And so when you sometimes wonder where all the dead people are from these battles, there may be some recycling going on would be a good way to put it. And so when we- Corn tastes funny, huh? That's right. But you kind of have to pick out the little bits that tell you, oh, this was going on. Well, if it was going on in that one case, I bet it was going on in others. And we did a story, it was in Death Throws of the Republic, I think, where one of the authors we were using had talked about

people having tours of the battlefield afterwards. So I'm sure you've heard the Civil War stories about how at the Battle of Bull Run, the picnickers came out because they thought there was going to be something to see. And then, of course, when they were overrun, it was this nightmare. But that seems to maybe have always been the case. And so even after some of these horrific battles where you cannot physically imagine what it looked like, I've studied this my whole life. I still cannot

in my mind's eye, imagine what this would have looked like, but people would come out to see it afterwards and they would pay money to come out and see it afterwards. If I told you that I had a battlefield where 80,000 guys had been slaughtered with Charles Manson-like weapons, would you pay to go take a walk through that? That's a dirty job of a very different caliber. How much? I

What are we talking about here? Three easy payments, $19.99. No, you have to make it like that sub visit to the Titanic where it's so much money that it's a status symbol that you got to go. It'll be Bill Gates. It'll be Elon. It'll be a few other people and they'll get to go.

That was the first part of your question. It was about the PTSD. Okay, yes, the PTSD is fascinating. There is a book called Achilles in Vietnam that goes and tries to pull out the little references in, say, ancient Greek plays and stuff that refer to the equivalent of this. This is a long-running question. You're going to get me all excited now about these are the kind of things I regale my family with, and they cannot get away from me fast enough.

But it is... Is Dan coming to Thanksgiving again? This is how hardcore history got started, man. That is actually the secret. He was trying to divert me from a horrible dinner conversation. The question then is, is there a cultural... What's the word? A cultural prophylactic that...

that can defend you from getting PTSD. So, for example, one of the arguments is sort of the Native American argument, that if you build into the culture something like warriorhood is a rite of passage, that as a young man you want to count coup, you want to get a feather to show off. In other words, when the carrots and sticks in the society reward you for this kind of behavior, does that insulate you from PTSD?

or if it violates everything you've been taught, in other words, war is a violation of all your religious principles, but we turn that off for this special thing called war, does that come back and haunt you later? There's a whole book, because there's a book

from every single angle on Alexander the Great you will ever find. But there is a book that suggests that much of his life that is inexplicable is explainable if you add PTSD to the occasion. And when you realize what a guy like this would have seen, it would give any of us PTSD. The question is, is if you were raised in a different society. I mean, I had a professor, Victor Davis Hanson will talk about this, like,

He'll talk about how farmers made better warriors than city kids in the ancient world because you literally had to kill people by hand and farmers killed things by hand more often. So things like that come into play when we're not shooting people from a distance the way we do now. And so the PTSD question is always sort of filtered through this lens of, well, if you killed animals every single day of your life.

and you've killed a bunch of people already, does it matter? Are you insulated from getting what a kid who'd never even seen blood who has to go to Vietnam and shoot somebody would feel? These are long-running questions. There are no answers, but those questions are the kind, like I said, that I regale my family with at Thanksgiving.

Well, then try this one on, too. I want to be respectful of your time. I promise Chuck I wouldn't keep you on for two and a half hours. It's more Chuck's problem than mine. Poor Chuck. Oh, dear. Oh, God, what was I going to say? I was glad it happened to you, too.

I told you, my Generation X website makes me feel better about that. Well, while you think about that, I want to remind Dan about the Ancestor Room with Caesar. Oh, yeah. Okay. Hit me with that one. I'll come back with my great big story. My friend at Game of Thrones said, I got that from, I shouldn't say that, but I think he got that from Death Rose, but I got it from somebody else. So the Romans...

I'm fascinated with the carrots and sticks in their system. They had a carrot and stick system that was designed with a crabs in the bucket dynamic.

where it essentially incentivized the most august people in the system to try to outdo each other in ways that would end up benefiting them and the system. So a guy like Caesar is a perfect example. When he's growing up, we are told that he had in his house an ancestor room, which I guess was a common thing. And the ancestor room had either like death masks or wax figurines, probably painted

imagine that on one side of the wall are his most recent relatives. And so you have a death mask of dad, right? And underneath dad is his name, his accomplishments and everything else. Then tied by a string or something is dad's death mask to grandpa's death mask. And he has the same thing, right? So along this wall, you're going back in time as you walk down the wall, seeing all these people you're related to, how you're related to them and what they did from an

early age. So what do you think that's incentivizing you to do, right? You've got achievement is everything. And this is how we measure achievement. Well, if all these young Romans have the equivalent of an ancestor room, and if the entire society's set up for what they called a race, it was an honors race. There's a Roman term for it means something like, you know, the race for the honors. And they're all trying to outdo each other with these triumphs, these, the number of times they can be consul and all these things that that's what matters to

And that the society benefits from that. When these people push the Roman frontiers farther, they are both making themselves a bigger member of their ancestor wall, but they're helping Rome at the same time, right? So there's a benefit. That's actually the thing that turned around and hurt Rome in the end. We talked about how something might be a benefit early on. Well, this race to the honors worked in Rome's favor for so long, and then essentially it leads to Caesarism eventually.

But if you're in Rome 200 years before that time, it's working out great for you. Yeah.

So is it fair to say that the Ancestor Room was effective PR in the effort to justify the fact that you might spend an afternoon killing 80,000 people or being killed, as opposed to the same kind of PR that was happening around recruiting issues during the First World War, which was still very much steeped in honor and glory and adventure? But...

We had entered a different time with a different media and obviously up through Vietnam. Suddenly, ancestor rooms don't have the same kind of appeal today that they would have once upon a time, I don't think, which goes back to the PR thing and the way you promote war and the way you might have to deal with whatever they called PTSD back in Caesar's day, if in fact it was even a thing. I just think that

You know, not to drag the teleprompter back into it, but it's one more artifact of delivering kind of a bullshitty message, kind of selling an idea.

Step right up Uncle Sam wants you this that or the other no value judgments I'm just saying that there's always all war is preceded by some kind of persuasive oratory to really bring it back to where we started and it sounds like the ancestor room was a tool in the state's box of keeping the next Legion on its toes and

Well, I also think there's another angle, and I think it has to do with modern warfare. I think you can kid yourself for a long time about bravery. And I think at a certain level, those things are very important. I think what ends up happening, though, when you get to the First World War, 1914, when everybody leaves for war, they had the ancestor room mentality, right? They were going to do that.

And what they found out is that they were in an industrialized war where the sky was literally going to be filled. I mean, it's the title of Ernst Junger's book, The Storm of Steel. Hitler wrote about it in Mein Kampf. The air is filled with so much lead that if your head pops up above the parapet, it will be taken off.

That takes away the idea of mano a mano, the two gladiators fighting David and Goliath. I mean, this is a whole different—this becomes a random game of chance, right?

And so all those other elements that said, for example, if I am the greatest badass sword fighter in the world, the likelihood of my dying on the battlefield is diminished. It doesn't matter what kind of a marksman you are with that rifle. If you stick your head above the parapet in 1914, it will be gone. So I think there's that clash between values that used to have a lot more applicability encountering a world where, okay, you're

You might get PTSD in ancient Greek times. You will get PTSD if you spend more than two weeks or three weeks on the front lines when they're shelling with drum fire. You see what I'm saying? So I think it changes things. And I wonder if the PR machine will ever figure a way how to pivot. It's doing it right now. I mean, we still look, we have war now. And the PR machine is just the modern day version of what's always been.

Another time to go off on the tangent, but it dovetails into what we were talking about, about can we continue to do the things that we've always done and

with the changes that are already happening and get away with it, this is your Star Trek episode. It almost sounds like the great filter, right, that societies have to get through or they blow themselves up. Never had the ability to blow ourselves up. We've only been living here. It feels like we've lived 70 years. We have 70 years. Seems like a long time. 500 years from now when they're writing the histories of us,

What do you think they're going to classify as the really scary early years of nuclear weaponry? We categorize this from like 1945 to 1960 or something. They're going to say, oh, yeah, that whole period from 45 to about 2140. That was really, really dicey, man. You know, so we're not going to be able to sense that. Today, I read that...

Twitter had eight and a half billion more videos posted per day than a year ago. And you made the point earlier. We start with Caesar, a guy just going for a sale to learn to be a better orator. And now we're drinking from a fire hose. The mainstream media, I was just telling Chuck earlier, in May, during one seven-day primetime period on CNN,

The total number of viewers between 8 and 11 in seven days running was 83,000. Right. Break it down per viewer, what they're spending per viewer. It's so not sustainable on its face. And when you start to say, well, there's this whole world. Well, let's look at MSNBC with 111,000 or Fox with 186,000. It doesn't matter. It's all tiny. It's tiny. It's tiny.

This is over. We're watching it, Dan. We're watching the collapse of one of the largest integrated, as James Burke would have said. A legacy media system. We're watching it die. And billions of videos are going up every day on Twitter and TikTok. And that's where the 30-year-old is right now. That's where they're getting their history. That's where they're getting their current events. That's where they're getting everything.

Let me brag for a second, because there was one area where I saw that future ahead of time. And I want to tell you how few people could envision what appears to be obvious now. The reason I'm in podcasting today was because when the dot-com stuff was happening and it just made sense to start a company and sell it for some ungodly amount of money, I started a tech company with some buddies. They were in the tech business. We got together. And the podcast grew out of that because what we were working on was what we called amateur content at the time period.

This is the 1990s, so there is no broad... There's not even broadcast.com yet, right? None of this YouTube exists, no. Amateur content. And...

My job, like all of our jobs, was to go to venture capitalists and get them to invest in this idea. So I had to explain the idea. So I had a whole pitch, right? And none of these Mark Cuban types out there could see it, although Mark Cuban did broadcast.com at the time and sold it. But none of those people could see it. So I had to go make an example for them. I mean, so I would explain it. They couldn't see it. So I came back with a podcast. This is before they had a name.

I got my big voice announcer friend who had one of the great voices. He's the guy who did all of our... And so you could hear what it would sound like, right? So I'm setting the table for you. And these guys still said to me, this is never going to happen. They said, I said, you'll have 16-year-old kids doing content for other 16-year-olds. They said, if anybody was talented, they'd be making money at it. This is never going to happen. They're telling me this seven years before it all became a reality, right? So the point is, is everything you're seeing was foreseeable.

and could have been rerouted around or taken advantage of. Instead, the legacy, like they always do, the legacy systems go in kicking and screaming, try to defending the old way of doing things. And now you turn around and those people who could not envision how amateurs would be able to make content that other people would want to see,

don't understand why their investments in CNN aren't paying out when they're only getting 118,000 views or whatever. This is sort of the fallacy about investments always seeing the future and the money always going to... It just goes, like you said, a fire hose. If you put your money on everything on the roulette wheel, some of it pays off. But the amount of roulette wheel money that was badly spent is crazy. And so, like, when you look at today, what you're talking about, how my podcast can have more people...

and my podcast is not even a big podcast anymore with some of the podcasts out there, but how it can have more people than CNN, just as an example, who's spending a fortune for each of those listeners

Like, where's their payoff? How are they making money off that? More people will watch this. More people will watch this episode when it drops than the entire UCNN timeline. And you produce it on a per-person basis for, I mean, if you're looking at these numbers and trying to scale them, they make no sense at all. I heard somebody say that the reason, and I just,

we're picking on CNN, but it applies to a lot of places. The reason it matters is because it's a valuable piece of cable real estate, usually at a very good number of, but you know what I'm saying is that's a little like saying, oh, we're not going to pay you for this, but you'll get plenty of exposure. It's the same argument, right? You know, I can't pay you, but think of all the people who see your work, which is about what I'm going to offer a new artist if I can find one. Yeah.

Think of the thing, though, in spite of their biases, in spite of all of it, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, what do they all have in common, aside from their own biases and aside from their inexorable relationship with corporate America? The teleprompter. They're all sitting there.

looking into a lens with their makeup and their lights and their dramatic music. Nobody has to be Christopher Hitchens there and say real things. That's it. They're all performing. They're dying hard. They are dying as surely as those poor Romans surrounded by Hannibal, unless I got it the other way around. It's going to be a very long, sweaty afternoon, but they're going to die. Okay.

And the people who are going to replace them, I don't know, but whoever they are, they're going to be having conversations like the ones Joe Rogan has, like the ones we're having right now. People might not like us or even agree with us or whatever, but no one's looking at this going, Mike's reading. No one's wondering, right? I mean, we're actually having a conversation and we're talking about something that impacts anybody who's still fogging a mirror. That's missing, right?

It's missing, and that's why you're kind of a big deal. That went south fast. I happen to think part of this all happened, you know, I focused and I just did focus on sort of the amateur content side of things, right? Look at the tools that we have available that allow us to do this. In the 70s, this would have been a hard thing to do, you know, try to be Art Bell in the 70s at some point.

per rump radio station, right? So the tools are here. But all this was made possible in part by the very legacy systems that are dying right now because they cut back on everything. For example, when I was a kid in the 70s, any news outlet worth its salt is going to have bureaus all over the world. And I grew up in the news industry in the 80s, which is where I made my bones and we had rules.

And rule number one is you don't mention the other guys. Because it was a zero-sum game in media back then, right? If you're watching NBC, you're not watching ABC. So don't ever tell anybody to watch NBC. So that meant you had to rely on your own people. You couldn't do what they do now, which is to say NBC News is reporting when you're ABC News.

So it had to be your people. So you had to have people there. And so in the old days, the amount of money that a place like ABC, which is where I was, would spend on bureaus and getting stories from one place to another, all that stuff, it was a system. It was like the systems you have to get food from the farms to the markets, right? An integrated system that was encapsulated and whole and was, you know, ABC's system, right?

But that also meant that if ABC was wrong about a story, they were wrong from start to finish. And it was assumed that what you were trading there, what you were selling was credibility. Right?

Right? So if you got too many news stories wrong, when it's your people on the ground and on the entire supply chain to the viewer, that was considered to be something that would push you out of business or lose you the game. In other words, when you're competing against the other guy, what you're competing against is who's more right, more often, the quickest. Right? That was the game. So the game changed into a game where it was about heat. Right?

And heat was the word. You guys will know this. The listeners may not know this. Heat. I used to come off the radio and get hammered by the consultants and the program director because I wasn't generating enough heat. Heat was what Howard Stern was supposed to have when they came out with that famous line that the people that hate him listened twice as long as the people who liked him. In other words, it didn't matter that they liked you. What mattered is that they were still listening through the commercial break.

And heat generates that. What generates heat? Controversy, argument. It's the sort of things that instead of having news reporters on a news set now, we have arguers because they're cheap. In fact, you can get them. What did we talk about earlier, right? You'll have engagement. So it's instead of actual money, you'll have exposure. And you can have two people who for free will come up there and argue in a 24-hour news cycle where you have to fill time anyway. But that has nothing to do, one, with...

really, with the truth at ground zero of the story. And two, what this heat is doing is there's no compensatory thing in our system. Think about it like climate change. We have something that is making the greenhouse in which we live hotter, and we have no safety valve that is letting any of that heat out.

So there's no corresponding thing in our system that counteracts the amount of temperature raising we're doing because that generates engagement, more commercial breaks, more people watching, more argument, more discussion boards, more YouTube clips.

So I understand that we've incentivized financially fighting with each other, but we don't have any way to diffuse that anger that we've generated. Yeah. So where's again, we talked about Venn diagrams and logical points where the two parallel lines cross. At what point does the amount of heat we're generating just to keep people watching more commercials and entertained eat us alive? Right.

If that were the end of the metaphor, it would be great. But add one more thing to it. Add Ben Shapiro. Add Tim Pool. Add these jagged little pills, these guys who dabble in some level of reportage who now have a new weapon far more powerful than a prompter. They have this, man. They've got their device. They've got their internet connection. They have the ability not just to podcast, but to broadcast on a whole other network. And so...

Maybe the way to land this plane is to somehow take all of this together, this performative thing, these ever-changing tools, this constant tension between technology and tech, and what you mentioned earlier, plays. The Romans understood a version of performative arts. It was the Colosseum. It's the gladiator.

In some way, it seems like we are doing a sanitized version of that maybe on an even larger stage today. But if you could make some sense out of what the – did the Coliseum and did the gladiator class let the air out of the tire once upon a time? Oh, that's an interesting question.

I don't know that the Romans would have seen it as an issue to be solved, if that makes sense. I think that's our modern-day sensibilities thinking, well, what are they going to do about that terrible gladiator thing when they're sitting there going, oh, my God, did you hear who's going to be fighting next week? You know, it's a very different sort of mentality. I'm more thinking in terms of maybe...

It's a little like the analogy we used earlier about radio-free Europe. It's a quantity one. So, for example, when I got into radio in the early 90s, it was the real Rush Limbaugh era. There had been a fairness doctrine that had been reprieved relatively recently before that. So we were starting to see what the real world ramifications of that was, right? You take away this rule, what springs up as a result of that?

So there was a lot of talk about people who used to do what we would call shock jock political type stuff back in the day.

So you guys may remember a guy named Joe Pine. Joe Pine was from the late 60s, early 70s, had a wooden leg, was a Marine, fought in the—and he was used as sort of a—it was almost—it was very Morton Downey Jr.-ish. But before its time—again, that's something that the kids won't know about. But the point was they generated a lot of the same controversy. You know, you'd mentioned some jagged pills recently.

Joe Pine was like one of those people, but he was one, right? So there was a Joe Pine. There wasn't 10,000 Joe Pines, and they weren't all trying to outdo each other and stand out from the other Joe Pines, you know? So I think there's a dynamic here where you can say, hey, we've always had this, but we haven't always had this the way we have it now might be a good way to, like you say, land the plane.

Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right.

Did you like my story or not? I didn't ask you. Well, first of all, I love that story. The part that I like best about it, but this is the twisted weird guy that I am, was the way you led off. Was it even true? Because that's what a true fan of history is going to ask first, especially about ancient history. What's that line we quoted from the book? He said, even if it's not true, you have to believe in ancient history. You know, what the hell other choice do you have? So I love that story and I love the way you presented it.

Thank you. It is the way I heard it. And if life is a pool, to leave you with one last metaphor, I'm in the shallow end. I write short stories that interest me. And I know that if anybody gives a damn, they can treat it as a portal and get to the deeper end of the pool where they will find you.

waiting to take them on a more luxurious and more exciting trip. And that's what you've done today. And I am once again in your debt. You are very kind. Thank you. I appreciate it. It was wonderful. I enjoyed myself. I am a nice guy. Ask around. Reddit says so.

You know what? Say nice things, Reddit. Come on, man. I'm a nice guy. $12 million in scholarships. I'm doing something okay. Now you're just assured it's going to be some interesting comments. Plug something shamelessly real quick and in closing. What would you most like people to dive into who aren't familiar with your oeuvre? Oh, God, man.

I wish I had some introductory level stuff. It's all, you know, just... You're a terrible salesman, man. Dude, I am the worst sale. I've never done retail in my life. You don't even have advertisers on your podcast. You know what? Because I can't stand it. Why do you hate money, Dan? Is it the filthy lucre? I literally do it the way that they used to say everybody does it. If it's something I use already...

crappy thing is you've gotten to the point now where it's real money. I mean, you know, I mean, if I wanted to go that route, they're paying lots of money, but I just, I can't sell beer and I can't, we did audible for a long time. Cause I always think I'm helping people read, but I just, I can't, I can't. So I leave a lot of money on the table, man. I need a lot of help.

Let me show you how to do it. Since we went over two hours, we've got time for one final ad. My mom's latest book is now out. It's called Oh, No, Not the Home. Observations and Confessions of a Grandmother in Transition. That's going to be her fourth bestseller. She's 86 years old, Dan. She wrote her first when she was 80. The woman's on fire and an inspiration to me. Go to MikeRowe.com slash mom's book and get a copy.

I'm going to send you one for free, though, even though you didn't ask. I appreciate that. My mom is 86 also, and now I'm starting to think she's slacking. You don't like it? You might be right. All right, well, put her in touch with mine. She'll straighten her out. Or vice versa. Be careful. My mother's an Irish force of nature.

Hey, thank you again. Don't hang up. We've got to make sure it's uploaded. You're the best. You're a lot of fun. One day we'll do it in person. This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry it went on so long. But if it made you smile, then share your satisfaction in the way that people do. Take some time to go on.

And leave us a review.

I hate to ask, I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge. But in this world, the advertisers really like to judge. You don't need to write a bunch, just a line or two. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. Not four. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. And not three. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. Definitely not two. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. We need five. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. Even if you hate it. Five-star review. Especially if you hate it. Five-star review.

Thank you.

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