The Basement: Alex Petkas | Julius Caesar's Final 24 Hours

The Why Files: Operation Podcast

Dr. Alex Petkas, a Classics PhD, joins the show to discuss his transition from academia to hosting the 'Cost of Glory' podcast. The episode

Key takeaways

• Dr. Alex Petkas uses his expertise to retell Plutarch's heroes through his podcast 'Cost of Glory'.
• The Vesuvius Challenge utilized AI to successfully read charred scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri.

Main topics

• Ancient Roman History
• Classical Philosophy

Notable quotes

I don't like an idea guy. I like an action guy.

Conclusion

A deep dive into how ancient historical narratives and philosophical f

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Today I'm talking with Alex Petkus. He has a PhD in Classics from Princeton, and he failed history in high school. He was busy being the top monk on his EverQuest server. Speaker 1 (0:08) Top monk on EverQuest? I was once a level 60 dominatrix on a Turkish gambling server. I respect the grind. Speaker 4 (0:15) Now he hosts Cost of Glory, where he retells the lives of Plutarch's heroes. He sold the family business to go all in. Today we're covering how Plato got played by a tyrant in Sicily. A coup in ancient Thebes pulled off by men in dresses. Speaker 1 (0:28) Men in dresses pulled off a coup? Did I ever tell you a story when Uncle Sal tried that at Thanksgiving? We referred to it as the incident, and I got him a lawyer. Speaker 4 (0:37) And the Roman library a volcano buried 2,000 years ago. AI just read one of its scrolls, start to finish. Alex helped produce the documentary about it with Ridley Scott's company. And the night before Caesar was murdered, he asked the dinner table what the best way to die would be. One of his killers was sitting right there. That one gave me chills. Speaker 1 (0:56) Yeah, this one time. Speaker 4 (0:57) Would you please let me get... It's the middle of the night. Will you let me... Speaker 1 (1:01) Sorry, sorry. I forgot you get chills over a guy who didn't even clock his own murder sitting right there. Yeah, but chill. Speaker 4 (1:09) After our conversation, I'll come back and break down the talk. Let's go down to the basement. Speaker 4 (1:22) Thank you for being here, sir. Speaker 5 (1:23) Yeah. Speaker 4 (1:24) Alex Petras, cost of glory. I love your podcast. I'm obsessed with it, which is why today's going to be, it's going to be hectic. So there's going to be a lot of rifling through papers. It's so much to cover. I'm hoping you'll come back and we can drill down to specific stories. Like we can, I've got Catalyne here for 18 minutes. That's not fair. Speaker 4 (1:46) So we're just gonna have to muscle through it. Yeah. What I'd like to start with. Honored by the way. Stop. I love your work. Get out of here. I won't accept it. It's a real achievement. I appreciate that. Thank you. It was a lot of luck and accident. I Speaker 5 (2:00) was a little afraid because I know you do really good research and look at that stack of papers. Speaker 4 (2:05) Why afraid? I've never hurt anyone's feelings. I've only made six grown men cry. That's not fair. Okay. Well. Are you feeling emotionally open today? I Speaker 5 (2:16) am feeling quite emotionally open. Yeah. Speaker 4 (2:19) Okay. I noticed the posture change when I asked. Interesting. I want to learn about you, but I pride myself on... being novel and asking questions that the guest doesn't expect, that are fun for you, that people won't hear on the circuit because everybody does the circuit. But before we do that, just maybe a five-minute retelling of Caesar and the Statue. Speaker 5 (2:49) Yeah, Speaker 4 (2:49) this Speaker 5 (2:51) is one of my favorite episodes, and I think that people don't. Speaker 5 (2:55) read it right. They don't interpret it the way that I do at least. So famous story, people might have heard of it. Julius Caesar is 32. He's a questor in Spain, chief of staff for some provincial governor. Paper Speaker 4 (3:13) pusher? Speaker 5 (3:14) Yeah, the document guy, the gopher. Speaker 5 (3:21) He is, you know, they're doing the whole Assizes tour, probably, you know, they're in Cadiz or Cadiz in Spain, which is an old Phoenician city. And there's a temple there. That was probably a temple to Melkart, but they converted it to a temple to Hercules. Hercules is Melkart. And in this temple, as one does, they've put a lot of art, statues and paintings. And there's a statue. Caesar's going through there with his friends. It's kind of like a museum. And they're kind of appreciating the art, maybe toss a little incense on the pyre. And his friends, at some point, they've kind of... moving along from statue to statue, and they look back and they see Caesar is not with them. He's standing in front of a statue of Alexander the Great. And they're like, Caesar, are you coming? Wait a sec. Are you crying? And he looks at them, and sure enough, he is. He's got tears in his eyes. And he says, do you not think it is a matter for weeping that when Alexander was my age, he was king of so many peoples, and yet I have done nothing? worthy of renown. Speaker 5 (4:34) And that moment for me, a lot of people look at that and they're like, look at this just megalomaniac. No. Disagree. I disagree. I think you don't, there's two moments where Caesar cries, you know, that's one of them and the other is when he's presented with the head of Pompey the Great. And, but I, so he's not, he's not a big crier, but I think that to get a man like that to cry, it's not, it's not that he's a kind of, spoiled child, sad that he doesn't have his toy that he thinks he deserves. It's about this sudden realization of who he is. And almost like, I mean, kind of controversial to say, it's like who he's called to be, you know? What he sees in Alexander is a kind of... Speaker 5 (5:28) It's convicting. It's like, okay, he's pretty flashy. He's pretty well-known around Rome. But he hasn't accomplished a whole lot compared to Alexander, for sure. He's just a quester. He's just chief of staff. Speaker 4 (5:43) And Speaker 5 (5:44) he's realizing the path that lies before him. This is like a middle-age crisis. Speaker 4 (5:49) Yeah, yeah. Speaker 5 (5:50) And I have to get serious now. And Aristotle has a word for that emotion. Speaker 5 (6:00) zeal, zealos, which we usually translate as emulation. The Greek word is zealos. This is in the rhetoric where he has this catalog of the basic emotions of politics. I think there's 13 of them, anger and friendship and pity. But zealos is one of them. And it's the pain you feel when you see present in someone who's like you by nature. things good and honorable which you yourself are capable of attaining. So Speaker 3 (6:31) it's a kind of sting. Speaker 5 (6:33) And it's not envy. It's different from envy. Aristotle says, I think he's right. Envy is a different emotion. It's the pain you feel when you see somebody succeeding that makes you want to see them fail or suffer. Yes. It's the tall poppy emotion. And it's not productive. It's basically a form of malice. And it's characteristic of bad men. Aristotle's book but zeal is characteristic of Goodman of the youth okay Speaker 4 (7:08) you can Speaker 5 (7:09) you can have I mean it can be a counterproductive emotion if it leads you to the wrong thing but it's it's basically the emotion of aspiration and it hurts and and I think that's really instructive for thinking about like How how you find who you are, you know, you discover who you're supposed to be not by gazing at your navel or like trying to like listen to these whisperings of your soul necessarily that can be important but Fundamentally, I think we're designed such that we learn who we are by Focusing intently on other people mimesis mimesis. Yes, exactly and you know Being a student of Plato, he's gone through the whole philosophy of mimesis, which you see in the Republic. It's kind of this ordering principle of the universe. The higher, the lower imitates the higher. The forms up here. I think that that's how Plato saw the world structured. That's how I think Aristotle sees the world structured. The prime mover. Speaker 5 (8:17) is the cause of everything in the universe, but it's a final cause, if you know Aristotle's causality. It's not that God, if you want to call the prime mover God, it's not that he's pushing, it's that he's pulling. Because everything kind of imitates that, it's drawn toward it. So deep stuff, I think. Speaker 4 (8:37) I remember you saying that you were going through a rough patch when you were 17, there were two books on the shelf, it was Marcus Aurelius, and then I think it was like, Ways to influence people. Yeah, Speaker 5 (8:48) it was uh, it was a seven habits seven habits seven habits book. What Speaker 4 (8:51) was Speaker 5 (8:51) going on with you? Yeah, I uh, I Decided at one point that I needed to kind of get my act together Speaker 5 (9:04) There was a girl. She was too good for me. Speaker 4 (9:07) And I realized. I married that girl. I could fix that. Yeah. You had a statue moment. Speaker 5 (9:14) Yeah. I think so. I had a kind of statue moment. Like, I want to be like. At the very least, like the men described in this book, or like a Marcus Aurelius, or like somebody of Speaker 4 (9:27) character. Speaker 5 (9:27) So meditations is what you grabbed? I did grab meditations. I can't say that I got that far. But I did, for some reason, as a 17-year-old who was not used to reading a lot of ancients, well, okay, I took Latin, but it was, again, the sleeping through the class thing. It was just a seven habits self-help book where, you know, Covey describes Speaker 5 (9:52) I think he tells stories in the course of this book, the kinds of people that take up these habits. And, you know, later I realized that a lot of the wisdom of self-help books is stuff that you can pluck right out of Stoic philosophy or Platonic philosophy or the Bible, but kind of packaged in a way. I keep meditations and the Bible on my nightstand at all times and a sci-fi book. Yeah. 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Cowboy ran an actual clinical study on this, not just testimonials. 83 % of participants reported improved gut health, 79 % experienced less bloating and inflammation, and 72 % saw improved digestion, and 62 % saw fuller, thicker hair. That's not luck, that's colostrum doing its job. Cowboy Colostrum is true first milking, whole, full-fat colostrum from 100 % American grass-fed cows. No fillers, no artificial anything. Calves eat first. Cowboy only collects the surplus. For a limited time, our listeners get up to 25 % off their entire order. Just head to cowboycolostrum.com slash Y-Files and use code Y-Files to check out. That's 25 % off when you use code Y-Files at cowboycolostrum.com slash Y-Files. Because whatever you need is in there. The lesson is in there, or it's in one of the Godfather movies. Yeah. Another great Speaker 5 (11:54) classic of power and virtue. What Speaker 4 (12:00) did you take from meditations that turned you around? Speaker 5 (12:02) I think that the idea that things, that more is in your control than you think. It's up to you. And that's what you should put your focus on rather than things that are outside your power. Like whether or not I end up getting this girl didn't. And that was good. But, you know, I can definitely become the sort of man who's worthy of, you know. a girlfriend. Speaker 4 (12:38) That was one of my primary concerns as Speaker 5 (12:40) a 16, 17-year-old. It was really empowering. And I started exercising. I started dieting. And I lost a lot of weight. And started trying to socialize with people instead of keeping to myself and sleeping and reading my sci-fi books. Big move. It was huge. It was huge. And I had also... kind of gravitated toward some old friends of mine from middle school and you know, bless them, they were getting into the things that kids get into in high school, drugs and stuff and I dabbled and I at some point felt like This like, you know, cool, cool people are doing this. They're going to parties. I mean, I think going to parties and drinking would probably be better than what a lot of kids are doing in high school now. Yeah. Well, that's another discussion. But I don't know. I kind of I got obsessive and it was like experimenting with a lot of substances. And I that was that was another kind of. moment for me where I realized I needed real wisdom and I wasn't going to get it from just talking to my peers. And how Speaker 4 (13:56) do you make the jump from substances to seeking wisdom? Uh, I mean, were you using drugs to explore consciousness or you just smoking weed with the guys? Yeah. Speaker 5 (14:07) I felt like I was, I was looking for answers actually. Funny enough. I think that that's probably not so uncommon. Nope. I mean, you know, ayahuasca clinics today it's and there's there's decent reasons for that i was you know going on forums on the internet and hearing about people's transformative experiences and i i had this transformative experience with this very legal substance uh morning glory seeds which is basically like a lsd kind of really um Speaker 5 (14:42) Maybe people shouldn't know that. No, morning glory seats don't work. Anyway, I had a psychedelic experience and then it turned really bad. And I realized the answer that I got from... Speaker 5 (14:59) this kind of mild psychedelic experience was, this is not where the answers are. Go to church. Wow. Yeah. I had been raised in a Greek Orthodox church and hadn't taken it all that seriously. But it seemed very clear to me that that was a, that was a source of wisdom, that there was a tradition there, that there was like good counsel. It was, it was like a stable rock for me that, that I, As I'm reading self-help books and stoicism, I'm also looking back at this tradition I grew up in. I'm like, oh, this is what this is for. So I think you have to suffer a little bit sometimes before you can realize how much you need. Speaker 5 (15:49) Wisdom, Speaker 4 (15:50) good counsel. I think that's true. So you finally make your way to college. You still play jazz guitar? I haven't in a while. Speaker 5 (16:02) I still play the guitar. Okay. You know, I don't have people to play with and it's hard. And I didn't get like super good that I could kind of drop it for many, many years during grad school and then come back to it. You were a music major, yeah? I was a music major for a while. Yeah, I studied. I got really into music theory. I thought if I just studied music, practiced guitar, maybe I'd become a rock star someday or something. Speaker 5 (16:34) And really enjoyed it. Speaker 5 (16:38) But what ended up kind of tanking my jazz guitar career was ancient Greek. Yeah, what the Speaker 4 (16:46) hell is Attic Greek? Speaker 5 (16:47) Yeah, that was what I was wondering when I was looking at it on the course catalog. Did you sign up by accident? It was the only Greek course they taught in my school. Why Speaker 4 (16:56) did you want a Greek course? Speaker 5 (16:58) Well, I had gotten interested in the history of the early church. Okay. Speaker 5 (17:08) you know, like, cause I had, I was going, I was back at church, you know, the Orthodox church locally. And then I had all these friends who were like Presbyterians, like, and the Presbyterians are, they have like a pretty serious intellectual tradition. They were like really into arguments and proving the five points, the tulip of Calvinism. And like, what do I really, like, what are my arguments for why I am in this tradition and not theirs? And so that kind of drove my interest in church history going back to like, well, what was it from the beginning? Reading the Bible more seriously and then looking at kind of these things that they would, you know, some of my Protestant friends, and not just Calvinists, but like evangelicals would question, like, why do you need the bishops and the liturgy and all this stuff? But Speaker 4 (17:57) even your dad's interest in Byzantium plays in here as well. Yeah, Speaker 5 (18:02) definitely. Like, I knew where to go start looking. picking books off of his shelf. And Yaroslav Pelikan and Brunson and, you know, some great books have been written about the Byzantine church, the early church. I got into that stuff. And I kind of thought also, maybe I'll spend a year or two doing youth ministry or something while I'm figuring out what's next after college. Well, I better learn Greek. I was, you know, I'm like, fourth generation and only like part Greek and I'd been surrounded by it and never knew hardly a word of it like well why don't I learn some Greek on the side as I'm doing my jazz guitar thing or whatever and I just that was all they had added Greek Speaker 5 (18:52) So for people who don't know, what is Attic Greek? Yes, Attic Greek. It's funny that they called it that in the course catalog because it's so kind of niche. Why don't you just call it Ancient Greek? Anyway. But wasn't it a specific Athenian dialect? So the standard way you teach Ancient Greek, there's a lot of phases of the Greek language. And I think... A lot of people don't realize modern Greek is way closer to Attic Greek than modern English is to Middle English. It's comparable. It's the longest continually documented living languages in the West. And because, I think to a large extent because of the church, because of the Bible. The Bible is basically written in ancient Greek. There's a lot of continuity. But Attic Greek is essentially the language of like Plato and Thucydides and Aristotle and high and Greek tragedy too. And they usually start with that because that became the sort of canonical language. It became the like standard official dialect of Greek. in the Roman Empire later and in the Hellenistic period. I mean, the Bible is, they call it Koine Greek, but it's like a simple register of standard Attic Greek. It's not that different. And if you learn Attic Greek, then you can read Plutarch, you could read Speaker 4 (20:27) the New Testament. But hold on, Attic Greek is very different. You've got three genders. Words are different based on singular, plural, or dual. Inflectionism. This is a hard thing to just jump into. But you're just saying like, yeah, I did this. You learned how to Greek? I got obsessed. Speaker 5 (20:48) I was the kid in the music theory class who was always asking these like recherche questions about, you know, why parallel fifths? Why don't we do that? Like Bach counterpoint. I found it fascinating. I do too. Learning these, the system. The math of music. That was what was really interesting about jazz. There's this great book that I poured over. I think it was called The Jazz Language. But I, so I like, when I started taking at it Greek, it was like. Speaker 3 (21:17) oh, Speaker 5 (21:17) another system, another abstract system I can drill into. And it seems to promise, sort of vaguely promise these rewards. You know, music theory, there's the vague promise that you'll be a rock star. Okay. It's kind of like the underpants gnomes. Right. Steal the underpants, question mark, money. Right. Learn music theory. Question mark, right. Rock star. And with Greek, you know, there is this, Speaker 5 (21:45) As I kind of like, I didn't really realize this when I was doing Latin in high school in my half-ass-ed way. Bless my Latin teacher, great guy. But I kind of realized this in college. There's a lot of cultural prestige to classics. Or there was in the past, at least. There was. There was. There was. I don't think it's there anymore. Speaker 4 (22:10) It Speaker 5 (22:10) went through a dark phase. I think it might be coming back, but it's not there yet. Agreed. There's a potential there. But because I think it's kind of inescapable, the fact that our civilization is so much founded on this stuff. But it was definitely not obvious in a public high school in Houston, Texas, that the classics were some source of prestige. But somebody... I got reasonably good at this stuff. Within a semester, I realized this is really fun and really illuminating on how society is structured. Plato is way cooler than I thought. The military history, like Salamis and Thermopylae. Then somebody said, you could go do a PhD. at one of these fancy schools. I was at a good school, but not a fancy school in Texas. And so I had this kind of, there was enough of a kind of reason to think that there was something behind that question mark between studying classics and like having a respectable job. So I got super into ancient Greek and it's very difficult. The way we teach it makes it harder, learning all the grammar. You never speak it. It's always translating. You never speak it? Well, that's changing somewhat now, but it's, you know, you don't approach it like a living language. And your brain is actually not good. Most people's brains are not good at learning language like an abstract system. No, absolutely not. That's how we learn our mother tongues. It's like you learn by mimesis, really. You learn by, and your brain is like a language learning machine. But if you give it the right input, if you, you know, messages, talking to people, understanding things, having real situations where, like when I was in Greece a while back, I was learning modern Greek and I was driving along in, I think it was in Argos. It was somewhere, some small town. And this driver, he's like signaling to me, my wife's in the car and he's signaling to me, rolls down the window. He's like, Inemonodromos. He's like, it's one way. And I was driving the wrong way. Never forgot that word. But that's not how you learn classical languages typically. And the grammar is very complicated. Yes. So, but I love that part of it. And that was, you know, the rest was history. I picked up Latin again, of course, and went on to the PhD and so forth. Speaker 4 (24:56) Psychics swear they can predict your future for 50 bucks a session. I've never seen one nail it. but Hungry Roots Smart Cart predicts my dinner for free, and it's right more often than any medium I've fact-checked. That's why I built my own digital cookbook, Gertie's Hump Day Recipes, proof that an algorithm beats a crystal ball every single Wednesday. Inside, Smart Cart keeps stacking my cart with a 15-minute garlic shrimp stir-fry, a black bean turkey chili, roasted salmon with lemon greens, and their black bean brownie batter for dessert I don't feel guilty about. Also, sliding in staples I actually run out of. Greek yogurt, sourdough, snack bars. Because Hungry Root isn't just a meal kit. It's a full grocery store with an AI brain running the register. Every pick is based on what I've actually eaten and liked, which is why nothing goes bad in my fridge and my future tastes better than any tarot reading. Explore my digital cookbook on Hungry Root today and find recipes that are right for you. Go to HungryRoot.com slash TheBasement to access my cookbook. Gurney's Hump Day Recipes. You were on a tenure track job at Fresno. And a student writes an essay that floored you. What was that essay about? Yeah. Speaker 5 (26:08) Yeah. I, um... First I had been teaching for a couple of years as a lecturer Temporary job in San Diego. It was a lot of fun. This is my first like at last proper like academic appointment and I was I was doing a It's like a survey course one of these gen ed check the box the Greeks, you know and I I packed the syllabus with stuff I thought would be fun for me and also like helpful for people potentially and Speaker 3 (26:42) you never Speaker 5 (26:42) know uh you usually assume that it doesn't matter i think that's there's a kind of um blaséness about anyway uh wait what do you mean well i think i think a lot of academic a lot of people who teach these great texts sadly it's not by no means the all of them and they're a lot of really good people they don't really take seriously how Speaker 5 (27:10) profoundly impactful something like Plato can be. Not just on expanding your mind and making you want to study more, but like, wow, I'm not living the kind of life I should live. It's like me with Marcus Aurelius when I was in my late teens. And so I had this student, we did some myth and whatever. One of the texts was Plato's Republic. And Speaker 4 (27:35) I had Speaker 5 (27:36) this student. And at Fresno, a lot of the students are coming back to school, doing it part-time. They're older, and they've made choices, some of them good, some of them bad. And I had one student write this essay for his final paper on Plato's Republic, basically explaining how Speaker 5 (28:01) Plato had made him realize that injustice, that being a dishonest person was bad for his soul and bad for his life and was making him unhappy. And so he had decided to stop cheating on his wife. This was in the essay? In Speaker 3 (28:16) the Speaker 5 (28:16) essay. I was like, oh my God. That's awesome. It is. That's really heavy. That was a moment where I felt, man. This is what this is for, you know, this that's what I care about with all this. That's why I was drawn to it because it it can profoundly change the course of any individuals life it could you know and and depending on how many employees or or voters or or How many soldiers such an individual is in charge of? Speaker 5 (28:53) dramatically affect the course of history and whether people live or die, whether they're miserable or happy. And I just think that the way that we arrange our curricula often just kind of pretends like that's beside the point. That's nice if that happens for you. Let's get back to, you know, the argument here, or let's get back to the scholarship on this question. So that really bothered me. It was Speaker 4 (29:25) encouraging and kind of disturbing at the same time. Well, that essay was validation. Like, someone gets it. Speaker 5 (29:30) Yeah, yeah. It's like this guy was a classics major. He wasn't trying to, you know, get me to write a rec for him. He was just like, this really mattered. And, yeah. Speaker 5 (29:47) It was confirmation that there's gold here that hasn't really been, that's being kind of buried under Speaker 4 (29:55) something else. Totally agree. I've heard you give four reasons for leaving academia. Anger at institutions, wanting to know more, and sort of being stuck. Speaker 4 (30:07) wanting your dad to retire with dignity. I believe all those reasons. But the day that you decided, what was the one driver when you said, okay, that's it? Speaker 5 (30:21) Well, I've been toying with the idea for a while. As you learn studying history, so often events are multi-causal, over-determined. I think, well... Speaker 5 (30:47) One of the things that really made me say now's the time was we'd just come back from, it was like Christmas break, living in California. My wife and I come back to spend some time with our folks. Speaker 4 (31:12) And she Speaker 5 (31:14) doesn't mind me saying this, but like. She had a miscarriage. Speaker 4 (31:18) Oh, wow. Speaker 5 (31:18) Yeah. And... Speaker 5 (31:22) And it just like something like something tragic like that happens. We have, we have three beautiful children now. Something like that happens. We were around family. I think, I think we realized, I realized, I guess how much I was, I was giving up by sticking in it in this, you know, foreign land of, I liked Fresno a lot. I liked my colleagues a lot, you know, They were great people. We were close to some of the most beautiful places in America, Redwoods, Sequoias, Yosemite, the Bay Area, all this stuff. But really the reason I was there was kind of for my career. And where was that career pointed? Even if somebody kind of let me. past the filters that I could, you know, when I got this job, it's bothered me. It's like, oh, it's a good starter job, Alex. Like, man. Speaker 5 (32:29) I don't like the idea of treating any job as a starter job. I want to join a team and I want to stick with that team and let's go. Let's build the skyscraper. Let's defend the fatherland, whatever it is. I don't know. The professionalism, the careerism. Speaker 5 (32:51) Even if they let me kind of ride that horse up to go back to a place like Princeton or something, I Speaker 1 (32:59) kind of Speaker 5 (32:59) realized like, wow, even at the top, I think a lot of people are kind of lonely and demoralized. They don't really have, they don't embrace this calling. They don't see it as a calling necessarily. Not everybody, but like. A lot of people you meet at the higher echelons of academia, like famous scholars you might know, you go to dinner with them. They talk about their kids, whatever. We went on this trip and the pasta sucked. Speaker 5 (33:41) It's just like these are just normal folks. There's not like a mission here. There's no zeal. There's no zeal. And I think kind of getting past the veil of being a grad student to being a professional academic just for a year or two, I don't know. It's like, why am I doing this rather than like building a legacy or something? There was some kind of pull, I think, when you get older. Speaker 5 (34:08) You look for permanence. Like, what is going to be permanent about this? Some book that I write that nobody reads? Speaker 4 (34:14) I think working for your dad had a lot to do with this because you had to learn the hustle and the sales and the energy. And it's binary. He says yes or no. And I got to work it. And then you're in academia and it's just floating. Yeah. And you're not made for it. Did you close the sale? Right. No. F. Right. Speaker 5 (34:37) You know, there's no kind of like. There's no great inflation in selling Speaker 4 (34:42) paint. There's something pure and noble about that. There's no shame in that. And you learn great lessons doing that. You do. And I would Speaker 5 (34:52) wish that upon, with benevolence upon the worst of my enemies, that they would get some contact with the real world. Yes. I think that's one of the big things it's lacking with. Practitioners of history. And it didn't used to be like that. I mean, look at Polybius. I mean, Plutarch's a man of action himself. Thucydides is like a general, like, Plato himself. I mean, Plato was not an academic, you know? risk taker. Sometimes it went really bad for Plato, but he took some real risks and was around men of violence and power and prestige and virtue. So I just wanted some more realism in my life, maybe. And so suddenly I realized how grateful I should be that my dad was... you know, ran this kind of blue collar-ish industry business. And I was like, here, I can get in the ring and somebody can just kick my ass. I Speaker 4 (35:47) needed that. I felt Speaker 5 (35:48) like I needed that. Everyone needs it. Speaker 4 (35:49) Yeah. A lot of those academics never got that. Speaker 5 (35:52) Yeah. Speaker 4 (35:53) I mean, that's why it wasn't going to work for you. And that's why your podcast empire is growing so fast. Your first published essay after you left, April 2021, Homer on paying attention. And there's a line in there where you said, You learn from your own mistakes. And I think you were talking to Chris about that, but you never said what the mistakes were. What mistakes did you make and you learned from? Speaker 5 (36:21) Yeah, I guess in that essay, I was looking at the story of Odysseus. There's so much that I think is an unlock for you when you realize that the story is for you, that like Homer. even if you just kind of take it as an article of faith, that Homer's trying to teach you, he's trying to help you grapple with your own problems. And there's this moment in the Odyssey where, Odyssey's just left the island of Calypso. And she helps him build his own raft a little. She gives him some tools. And then he goes sailing off, hopefully to Ithaca. Who knows? And then Poseidon has other ideas, smashes the ship. And Odysseus gets approached by the sea goddess, Eno. And she says, Odysseus, you have to take off that gaudy crap that Calypso gave you to wear. She gave him perfumed robes. And strip off all of your clothing and swim. Stop trying to hold on to the boards of this raft that's just been smashed. Like, land is way over there. It's going to take you a while. You've got to swim or you're going to sink. And she gives him this, like, ribbon. It's like a... what's it called uh kratom non and it's um you know hold on to this until you get to shore and he like ties it around himself and i think that so much of like it takes a lot of concentration that ribbon is a kind of like symbol of his trusting the god to to get him through get put all your effort in and and then Maybe it'll work That ribbon kind of symbolizes that for him and he gets to shore finally and he takes it off and throws it back in the sea gives it back to her but a lot of the Odyssey is about resisting temptation the distractions of the sirens distractions of You know and any fails often like, you know braiding making a little money clobbering these Thracians, the Siconians. I think I have had to learn a lot from, as somebody who's got this Speaker 5 (39:00) kind of cosmic curiosity. Like it's really easy for me to get fascinated and obsessed with something. Just give me the littlest excuse, like ancient Greek. Sometimes that can be very good, but there are so many distractions that assail you if you're that kind of person, really anybody, different kinds of distractions. For me, they're intellectual distractions often. I have great, great ideas. Let me tell you how many great ideas I have. Speaker 5 (39:31) You know, if you have one good idea and you stick with it, it could work. But if you have five good ideas and you do all of them, none of them are going to work. I don't like an idea guy. I like an action guy. Yeah. And that's learnable. Speaker 5 (39:47) I Speaker 4 (39:47) learned it after lots of failures. Yeah. Well, same. Right. In so many ways. Speaking of the Odyssey, so the Sirens, they're on the island. They have knowledge of everything,