Part Two: Christopher B. Zeichmann on Radical Antiquity

Margaret continues her interview of ancient historian Christopher B. Zeichmann about all the wild stuff happening in the ancient world and confirms her guesses about Spartacus and the Third Servile War

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zon Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People who
did cool stuff. You're a weekly reminder that when bad
things are happening, there are people trying to do good things.
And some of the people trying to do good things
are the historians actually trying to show that the world
can be different because the past is different than we
think it is because we've been told one way it

(00:22):
was and it's not always true. And one person who
is doing that work is my guest today, Christopher Zeichmann. Hi,
how are you?

Speaker 2 (00:30):
I'd great, Margaret. How are you doing today?

Speaker 1 (00:32):
I'm really good. I'm like maybe every time I read
an amazing history book, I'll just reach out and be like, hey,
come on the show. This is wonderful because it's very
nice to actually get to engage with these ideas. And okay,
this brings me my first point. You were talking last
episode about how the academy's in trouble, right, and the

(00:54):
social sciences are in trouble. And if you had told
me this when I was a twenty year old squatter
dropped out of art school, I would have been like, yeah, whatever,
I don't care to hell with them all anyway, you know,
And if you tell me now. Unfortunately, my sister actually
was like, that's anti intellectualism, and I was like, who cares.
And then I started reading about what that meant, and

(01:15):
I was like, Oh, bad stuff happens when you do that.
It's interesting because I'm kind of exaggerating twenty year old me.
I don't think I was that naive about how the
world works, but I have more and more respect for
exactly what you're doing and what other people are doing.
Like when you describe social sciences. I kind of grew
up with the essentially right wing idea that that's sort

(01:35):
of fuzzy and not real science and whatever. And then
you're like, oh, you're literally explaining where we come from
or helping understand where we come from to break free
of actual shackles that have been put upon us by
a dominant paradigm. I don't know how to turn this

(01:56):
into a question. I'm just really more appreciative of people
doing that kind of work.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
Yeah, it kind of build pole we were talking about
the last episod. I think that's kind of why this
is perceived as a threat under a lot of political circumstances.
Right so directly in some case where you find like
defunding of the academy by you know, the different Department
of Education or whatever is going on in the States
right now. But beyond that too, I think it's also
like a move that a lot of universities are acquiring

(02:23):
your classes where, for instance, you might have to read
literature or anything like that. Right that, I find that
increasingly a lot of students are like, oh, I'm a
business students, I'm only gonna take business management classes. Which
I've got my own opinions about that stuff. But yeah,
but I think a lot has to do with kind
of if you socialize people, you get people to read,
get people to think that, people to see that there
are other ways of doing things. I think it does

(02:45):
present at least a certain base level threat to the
social order, right Like, I think that there's often a reason,
not exclusively, but like you know, you look back at
Paris nineteen sixty eight, it's a lot of university students
are involved in kind of uprisings that are right, and
it's you know, not only them, not just them. Obviously
kind of complex reasons behind that, But I think being
exposed to kind of these range of different ways of

(03:07):
thinking and practicing can often present a legitimate threat political
or especially when it's young people who you know, may
have the time, may have the energy in a way
that they haven't been engulfed in the system quite yet,
the way that you know, once you've hit forty fifty sixty,
that you're a little bit more inextricable from you know,
the way you get your paycheck or whatever. I suppose.

Speaker 1 (03:28):
Yeah, and like you kind of don't understand death as
well yet, sure, Like, just to be real blunt about it,
You're like, I'm a live forever. I don't care if
I die young, you know, And then enough of your
friends die young, and you're like, oh, yeah, I don't
want to do that.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
No, not so much.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
And yeah, I'm probably way older than Spartacus was. Fuck,
I don't remember how old Spartacus was. Maybe we just
straight up don't now, I don't remember.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
I don't think we know exactly how old he was,
but yeah, I don't know. I would assume twenties thirty
something like that anyway.

Speaker 1 (03:58):
Yeah, I mean he was. He clearly lived a pretty
wild life even before that point. Yeah, And this idea
of like the necessity or the usefulness of reading literature,
it's funny because I don't want to hand much to
the Victorians, right, like the people who get called the Victorians. Obviously,
there's a lot of people alive during the Victorian era
of all kinds of ideas, but the Renaissance man archetype

(04:18):
and the like. That's better than someone who just takes
business classes, Like someone who desires to be well read,
someone who desires to seem at worldly and understand a
lot of viewpoints, even if they're a conservative, that is
still a better idea. And I liked reading books and

(04:38):
literature and stuff, but I didn't quite get the like
point and they don't really need to have a point.
But the thing that I more and more understand, Okay,
this just describes my undiagnosed neurotype. Wow, I'm going to
say this on air. I didn't read fiction until like
third or fourth grade because I was like, why would
I read fake stuff? That's incredible, Like what's the point
of fake stuff? And so I read like non books

(05:00):
about castles, you know, I still had all the same interests.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
That's amazing.

Speaker 1 (05:05):
Yeah, and then slowly I read some novels and I
was like, these are amazing, And the answer is that
they allow me to escape my life and the way
that you know, a kid will read nonfiction books about
castles gets treated. And so I would struggle to understand
the point of like literature as a you know, why
does a business person need to understand it? And then
the answer is, like, it's real because what you learn

(05:26):
by reading a literature book from one hundred years ago
is you learn what an author felt like their society
had to say absolutely, and that helps you understand everything,
like understanding people. This is one way to understand people,
and it's a probably more useful way than just reading
a book about people. I mean, you could do that too,
write like a nonfiction book about people. But this is

(05:50):
a complete tangent. I just like the idea of the
only reading like all that matters is STEM and I
like stem. That was what I did with my time
when I was a kid. It wouldn't show now.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
But you know, this is a good point, right, because
like I think this is one of those differences between
like sort of the fiction nonfiction. Right can you describe
something in all of its like nuances, right, like what
it would mean to live in ancient Greece and Roman
rite kind of all that, or to actually like narrate
it in a way that gives kind of attention to
all those details are not necessarily worth naming all the

(06:24):
time in like a kind of scholar work or nonfiction work, right,
But through fiction that often, like you can kind of
allow that texture to come out a lot easier in
a way that can kind of let those things that's
hard to articulate, right, those feelings, those intuitions, those things
like that, the complexities aside how we feel ambivalent about things. Well,
you know, scholarly work is often not always good at
that in a way that I think, yeah, literature is,

(06:46):
I don't know. I certainly sign fiction in several of
my classes anyway, because I think, like you're saying, it's
one way to kind of at least get a perspective
on how different people are thinking about things, right from
a different context.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
Yeah, okay, this is a pivot. But it's the other
thing that I left last Well, I was several things
I still wanted to talk to you about from last time.
Last time, as if we didn't take a five minute break,
but we were talking about how the Third Servile War
and the community they it's possible that they would have
presented themselves as having an anarchia, right, and if so,

(07:19):
that's a little bit drawing on almost an Athenian idea
or at least a Greek language idea. But this is
my attempt to kind of read between the lines and
run something past you. One of the things you talked
about the introduction in your book at a decent length,
you describe if Anian democracy was much more directly democratic
than I would have expected. I'm weirdly into the idea
of ostracizing people or whatever if they present a threat

(07:40):
to democracy. That actually seems all right. There's a complications there,
but we won't get into it. But how much was
this a like we came up with a thing versus
like at to use the word thing. All over the world,
they're directly democratic structures, and it seems like and I
hate when people are like, naturally humans do this, because

(08:01):
the answer is naturally humans do a lot of things
good and bad. But one of the things that humans
naturally do is spokes councils, direct democracy, collective decision making,
defederating between equals because if everyone's an equal, then you
can't go over that other group and be like, hey,
you have to do what we say. Kind of have
to convince them right. And you can see this in

(08:24):
societies that Rome is interacting with that they call barbarians,
which were not necessarily anarchistic societies but might have had
a galitarian practices and things like that. And you see
this even more when you talk about indigenous cultures more
broadly across the world that the western world than when
fucked up right, where you see all of these practices

(08:46):
that are very galitaring and interesting to me. So, how
much was a Thinnian direct democracy like we invented a
new thing versus how much was like, oh, what if
we still kind of act almost uncivilized? What if we
still kind of act in this way that like a
lot of the cultures around us are acting, but bring

(09:08):
it into a city. I don't know the answer to this.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
I think you've hit the nail on the head with
a lot of this. So one of the things that
I arguing kind of final main chapter, it focuses on pirates,
and the first example I used that the so called
farming pirates in the subtitle of the book. There basically
it's these bunch of pirates who are from kind of
Greece and they kind of land on this island, and
they create this sort of democratic society there, right, that

(09:33):
seems to be anarchistic, right, They kind of share goods together,
they kind of rotate who's doing what property. No one
seems to really own a whole lot there. They clearly
engage in a lot of like collective decision making and
so on. And of course your first inclinations like oh,
like they're clearly influenced by like Athens Roads and these
other Greek democracies that are around there. Well, this was
happening centuries before democracy was in any of the cities

(09:56):
these people came from. And so I think that in
antiquity you can look a pretty distinct examples that before
the polists the city state comes to be a thing,
and that kind of democracy that we associate with, you know,
figures like soul In and kind of those constitutions of
Athens and so on, we still find these kind of
radically democratic practices of you know, direct democracy, you know,

(10:17):
decision making, consensus oriented decision making, ostrosism. All these sort
of different things are kind of being practiced in different ways.
It just seems to be Athens is codifying it, like
you said, bringing it to the city, right, that you know,
certainly other cultures not as well documented. Right, we don't
know quite as much about say, like the Germans before
they have extensive contact with Rome from archaeologia, but like that,

(10:38):
that's going to limit what we know there. But what
we do know about other kind of Greek cultures that
before the formation of the Polists and the city state,
they seem to be engaging in a lot of similar direct,
democratic ways of doing things in a way that's yeah,
I think you're right, just kind of bringing it to
the cities a lot of what it was, civilizing it,
so to speak. I'm doing scare quotes in my hands
the cases.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
Yeah, I mean this is like I read everything that
there is to know about the Germans. That's not true.
There is one entire book about the Germans from an
ancient historian called Germania or whatever, and I haven't read
that whole thing. But I read an awful lot about
the Germans and it didn't take me very long. Right,
And it's interesting because like the Germans, as the example,

(11:19):
are being presented well, they're being presented in contrast to
a lot of the other barbarians, specifically the Celts, the Gauls,
the Scandinavians. I can't remember then what yeah, yeah, the
Fenni and then also the Thulians. Yeah, because I remember
at one point I think it's Tacitus. Everything kind of
annoying is from Tacitus. That's not true. A lot of

(11:39):
it is. He's like, and then there's a culture even
north of the Swedes that are like the Swedes, but
they're run by a woman, you know, and like he's
like all upset by it. But then instead he's like,
but the Germans, they're monogamous, they're great, they're noble savages,
you know. And this is like kind of being contrasted
actually to the the Britons, who I didn't realize. There's

(12:02):
like almost nothing written about the Britons, and then like
one of the only sentences is like, oh and all
the brothers like share a wife. I think in your
book you talk about a different culture that does that
the yeah, yeah, you know, and you're like, well, wait,
that's a big thing to just lost past, right, that's
a totally different society, you know, and that is like
not the way that people when people are like, ah,

(12:23):
yes the noble Britons. Beforehand, you're like, yeah, no, they
were like they were pretty wild, you know, and I
say that positively, and yeah, the Germans were, like maybe
they were monogamous, but I don't know, because the person
who's writing about them is trying to present them as
a positive contrast to the evil, evil Celts, right, and

(12:43):
like it's so frustrating. That's the downside of having to
connect all the dots yourself, is that you're like, but
I want to know the truth. I've never before wanted
a time machine in my life, but now I'm like,
but I want to do anthropology.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
Absolutely go back in time and see how acrid tastes
is viewing it all these things, right, Yeah, I think
that you're pointing definitely to like this issue where like
the bias of these sources. So, like, one thing that
we find, especially in this case of the Germans, is
that like a lot of these ancient authors have their
own kind of like theories of civilization, right, and so
a lot of this tends to be like, you know,
if you're geographically closer to Rome, then this you're inherently

(13:20):
more civilized than someone who's further away from Rome. And
the further you get away from that, the less and
less civilized you are. And a lot of this has
to do with like weird theories about like climate and
kind of like very little environmental determinism, right, like right
that Rome has the perfect climate, so it's the most
reasonable people, you know, the best culture, the best political system,
and that the further you go away from you know,

(13:41):
this kind of perfect navel of the world is what
they would have called it, the more screwy it all gets, right,
and we find different versions of this. Even Herodotus, the
first historian, has similar ideas. He's if you want to
read some wild made up shit, this is what I
always designed my students is just reads ethnographic descriptions of
like the Ethiopians or like Persians, and it's just stuff

(14:01):
where it's like they were a turban on their head
because their school is weak. It's like I don't believe
that for a moment, right, Like there were people just
like Gola pullet It take it that when they read
this or like, well it really has to this own
kind of theory about culture and like, oh, like the
environment and climate kind of affects these things, and you
have to do a lot of like parsing of these

(14:21):
weird biases that they have in these ancient authors, these
ancient texts to at least start to get a sense of, all, right,
what can we actually say with any confidence about the Germans? Right?
What can we say with any confidence about the Celtiberians
or whatever? Right? And it's a frustrating process where again
I think you're right. The only solution this is just
like getting in that Dolore and going eighty eight miles
an hour and heading back, you know, the first century

(14:43):
of the Common era there.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
Yeah, I want it desperately, Okay, but environmental determinism. I
did a couple episodes last year about Peter Krepawkin's mutual
aid theories for listeners who haven't listened to those episodes.
Peter Krepawkin was a prince of Russia who became one
of the more important an as Communist theorists, and he
also was a evolutionary biologist who kind of presented a

(15:06):
third way that modern evolutionary biologists tend to lean towards
to avoid some of the conflicts with an evolutionary biology
at the time, and he basically present a mutual aid.
As a boy, he wrote a book called Mutual Aida
Factor in Evolution and he was an environmental determinist. Now
he was wrong about some of it, right, Like some
of his theories around the depopulation of cities and China
and stuff were proven wrong. And he had like whole

(15:29):
theories about like I think he's the one who had
discovered how glaciers move, like the fact that the like
super solid.

Speaker 2 (15:35):
I didn't realize that's what.

Speaker 1 (15:36):
Yeah, Like he went to Sweden after continuing to study glaciers. Anyway,
his whole thing is he's like he went to go
find all this competition that Darwin, Charles Darwin came up with.
Charles Darwin was like competition everywhere in nature, and he
was like, I'm going to go find it and prove
it because I love science. And he goes to Siberia
and he's like, I'm going to find all the competition

(15:56):
and he's like, why are these animals hanging out with
each other helping each other? And he like he didn't
go into it being like I'm going to prove Darwin wrong.
You went into prove it Darwin right. And he was
like oh, and he wasn't like Darwin's a fool or whatever.
But what he came up with for a while is
he was like, well, I guess when life is harder,
you're more cooperative, and so the further you get away

(16:18):
from Rome, he didn't phrase it that way, but I'm
going to the more cooperative people get. And this ties
into one of the things I want to ask you,
which is that, like, is the Mediterranean just like the
most uniquely evil center of evil human ideas? Because like, absolutely,

(16:38):
I think the Goals were probably sacrificing people, but so
were the Romans, even though they had just outlawed it.
They were like, instead we throw them to the literal
lions in the fucking colisseum, Like what are you saying that?
Is that not human sacrifice? But like patriarchy, we tend
to assume the natural condition of the human society is patriarchy,
because all of the society is not all of probably,

(17:00):
but I think all of them from like the Mediterranean
area that we're like culturally evolved from, are all really patriarchal.
Like is this a was this just like the worst
time and place or was like everyone just real crappy?
And this is one of my main questions.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
Well this is a huge question, then, yeah, because it's
sort of like what those kind of questions of like
hierarchy and domination, Like how inextricable is that from sort
of the Mediterranean antiquity that we're talking about here, And
you're right, like it's stuff that seems pretty inescapable, right Like.
We find people articulating almost every wild idea you can
imagine in the ancient world, But we don't really find
people articulating ideas like the end of patriarchy in an

(17:43):
absolute sense, right like, or the end of slavery in
an absolute sense, right like, even you know, certainly slaves
want freedom, right Certainly they might want for their friends
as well. They may not like it as an institution,
But we don't find these kind of like ideas that, hey,
we could have the entire world where this isn't the case,
or like, you know, maybe we should end it everywhere, right,
It seems to be often these kind of personal quests

(18:04):
are kind of smaller scale collective quests to imagine the
world differently. You the flip size is possible that this
is only the part that's documented, right, because those people
who would be not engaging these sorts of things. Right. So,
one one kind of interlude I do in the book
is looking at the region of Phrygia, which is kind
of in a certain part of what we did they

(18:25):
called Turkey, right, yes, and this is a society where
you know you're talking about anti intellectualism earlier. Well they
kind of identify, like, hey, how do people exploit us? Well,
it's through these bureaucrats who basically make us do our taxes,
give us these laws, and do all these sorts of things.
And what if we just like forget how to read,

(18:47):
forget how to write, and what are they going to
do then? Right, if no one here knows how to
read or write, there's going to be known to create
these laws, to enforce these laws, create tax and you know,
collect those taxes. We refuse to use any money. And
for the course of like several hundred years, people in
this region seem to not really use the written word
at all, right, And this means like we don't know

(19:09):
much about them.

Speaker 1 (19:10):
And they had it before and then they had it again,
but then they missed several hundred years.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
Right exactly, so they deliberately gave it up, like they
had the written word. They deliberately gave up the written word.
And like the Greek empires, the Roman Empires are really
trying to be like, hey, we're going to create these
really cool cities. All you people in Fridgia should come
and move this great city, and like like, yeah, no thing,
We're going to live in our little houses. We're going
to keep where they are. We're not gonna have commerce

(19:35):
with you, we're not gonna come to learn there, we're
not going to really participate in our society much. And
so like these kind of larder scale collective forms of resistance,
which again it's not really well documented. We know about
this from occasional references and kind of archaeological evidence. We're
just noticing like the complete disappearance of kind of certain
social structures, certain types of inscriptions and monuments. But I

(19:55):
think that to the extent that people were resisting this,
I think the book picks up, you know, kind of
six main examples and a few kind of smaller examples,
but no doubt there is thousands of different societies, whether
it's lower scale, small scale in the ancient world who
weren't doing this, and just evidence has been lost, right
like in the same way today, right a lot of

(20:15):
those kind of radical communities that I guess today in
the world of technology and the Internet is kind of
harder to not be known. But you know, imagining just
even one hundred to hundred years ago, certainly there would
have been in North America, in Europe people living in
these kind of radical lives that just aren't documented.

Speaker 1 (20:32):
Well, okay to push back on things not being documented now.
Last night, like a normal person, I was researching interior
design on YouTube, which is a totally everyone does that,
and I was thinking about some of the interior design
trends amongst my friends from like fifteen years ago that
I was really impressed by, and so I was like
magical decadence. It was a specific named esthetic idea in

(20:53):
the Pacific Northwest like fifteen years ago, where it was
like you paint your wall's deep dark color and everything
is covered in furs and skulls and like it's like dark, decadent,
punk hippie stuff and I really like it. So it's
like I want to find some examples, you know, And
then I'm like, oh man, the Internet haven't got that
no more, like if it ever did, like that's a

(21:16):
whole culture and name, you know, or like try looking
up for Googles, which is the word that I use
the most on a regular basis that no one I
talk to on outside of the subculture I'm in understand
what I'm talking about about, like street kids, you know.
But no, I really like this idea you're presenting, and
it kind of helps click things for me, where it's
like the people who have written all of this stuff

(21:37):
are going to be the more patriarchal folks are going
to be the more whatever, like you know, state building
and empire building folks, and so in the same way
that the gulls. That's a big term with a lot
of different cultures within it over the course of thousands
of years. But we're going to pretend like there's some
radical interesting stuff happening there, and they weren't really writing

(21:59):
stuf down, and neither were these Phrygians, and neither were
all of these people who were in this. So that's
a good argument against environmental determinism. I appreciate it, Thank you,
Okay pointing out that like no one was saying like, hey,
maybe we should just get rid of slavery entirely for
everyone forever, right, and very very few people were saying

(22:22):
anything like that. And it is interesting because I think
about how we have a hard time especially as Americans
understanding ancient slavery. It's one of the things that I
feel like I have to explain a lot on this
show because the context that I come from and the
context that most of my listeners come from, has the

(22:43):
Transatlantic slave.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
Trade in it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
Absolutely, North America is this like post apocalyptic wasteland of
one of the most evil empires in the world showed
up and enslaved and genocided and then created a society
and declared it the most free society in the world.
And it's the level of nonsense of that is like
so deep that it's hard to extricate from. And we
have a hard time picturing slavery elsewhere in the world partly,

(23:10):
and it's from both the right and the left, right
because on some level the left doesn't want to detract
from how uniquely evil the Transatlantic slave trade was, and
so therefore I run across stuff that, like paints, Greek
and Roman slavery is like a little bit idyllic, and
like Diogenes is the perfect example of this. You know,
he's a cynic philosopher. What you wrote about him in

(23:32):
this book, I'm explained to the audience, not you. You know
he was the Cynic Philosopher to a couple episodes about
him where he as a kid owned slaves and then
as an adult became a slave, but he was also
like a mentor, He was like a tutor as a slave,
and then eventually they freed him and it was his
own the people who had enslaved him. That family paid
for his funeral, and it was all very happy slavery,
right yeah, And so people will present like, ah, that's

(23:55):
Greek slavery or like Ottoman slavery where you have like
publicly owned slaves. I think Greece did this too, but
not sure. But then when people don't recognize is that
you still just had like horrible everything, bad people dying
in the fields and the mind stuff too, and it
was this horrible society. I find it so frustrating that
it's so hard to talk about because it is so
important to understand that, like all over the world, every

(24:18):
society owns people, and so it never occurred to people
that that wouldn't be a thing that can happen, right,
And I think that's the same thing we run across
in like the prison abolition movement right now for sure,
where people are like Yeah, but that doesn't make any sense. Like,
obviously prison is kind of bad, but like, of course
there's prisons. There's always been prisons, which is completely untrue.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
Yeah, this is a perfect kind of analogy there, right,
that kind of how we've come to think of this
very recent institution of like the prison as like this
sort of historical inevitability, right, that this is a particular
form that the prison takes today is very recent. And
even you look at the ancre world, they just weren't
really pre right. There was stuff where it's like you know,

(25:02):
convict labor, you know, you know, you might be sentenced
the minds and stuff like that to work and you know,
a gold mind and you know, just work your days
to death there. And I think Mark Fisher had that
kind of great saying about how it's easier to imagine
at the end of the world than is to imagine
the end of capitalism, right yeah. And I think like
there's a lot of things in our society that are similar, right,
whether it's I mentioned the end of the prison, the

(25:23):
end of the state, the end of you know, take
your pick there, right, And I think in the ancient
world there's a lot that was similar to that it
was just you make it hard for people to imagine
the world being differently by threatening them for imagining differently,
by taking away any resources that would be capable of
presenting those alternatives. You know, with slavery too in the
ancient world, right, like I think of how you know

(25:44):
it's Sparta, Right, they called their slaves helots, right, And
one of the kind of the rituals that the Spartans
had was, you know, young men, a certain class young
man every year on the way to becoming Spartan citisence.
Part of this path of citizenship was they went basically
go out and go slave hunting, go out and hunt
the helots in a way of kind of like saying, okay,
like become a Spartan, you must be prepared to enact

(26:06):
violence upon these bodies, you know, these helos, these slaves,
that this is your right and even your duty. This
is probably becoming you know, identifying with spart as a
city state, but also reminding helots like we can inflict
whatever fucked up violence we want on you with impunity,
whenever we want, and there's nothing you can do about it. Right,
So limiting their imagination, so the he loss themselves. Haven't
imagine a world with freedom without slavery and things like that, right, yeah,

(26:32):
and so I think there's kind of today this happens
in some ways with certain kind of social institutions, right,
and in the h War with slavery too, right, think
your pick, patriarchy, all these sorts of things.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Just to kind of sit on that for a second,
it's a sorry, yeah, And so like what it didn't
occur to me is that ideas need to be invented
to that, like social technologies are technologies, like to go
back to social science as a science, Like someone kind
of needed to say, what if we all vote? Right?

Speaker 2 (27:06):
Right?

Speaker 1 (27:06):
And now that might be like older than the wheel,
you know, but like somewhere along the line, people have
to kind of invent what if we like don't own people.
You know, it's very easy in the modern world to
kind of look back on some of these people who
like the First Servile War. Everything you just said is
a beautiful example of why the First Servile War was necessary.

(27:27):
And even if I want to be like, eh, just
kind of reinvented the state again, but like, you know what,
he's still the I don't remember that Seer's name, but
he was like, hello, I talked to a god who
tells me that I am going to become king over you.
And they were all like ha ha ha ha, you silly,
you know, entertaining house slave. And he was like, yeah, totally,

(27:50):
and then he did. So I can't say he was
wrong or that his god was wrong, because he sure
like took over, you know, and someone needed to. And
so the third servile war is you alluded to, probably
doesn't happen without the first two. That's interesting.

Speaker 2 (28:07):
Yeah, I think like a lot of this has to do.
I guess part of the goal of writing this book
too is sort of like to just say that there
are these precedents for ways of doing things right kind
of One thing that I talked about in the conclusion,
for instance, is that how we imagine America and its
democracy right, that when we tend to think of democracy,
whether here in Canada or the United States, right, we

(28:28):
tend to think of you know, at most, you go
and vote for politicians and then you're just annoy the
next four years, whether because you're unhappy with the result
or because you have to call your politicians, et cetera,
et cetera, and nothing happens what you want it to.
And when we look at kind of a lot of
early American democracy, right, it's a lot more radical and
kind of anarchistic in this Greek sense the word, right,

(28:48):
that we find kind of accounts of people having these
kind of town hall meetings where they would just like
go out and like find the local tax collector who's
like try and take money from these broke people and
say like no, we're just going to burn your ledgers, right,
or we're going to prohib you from entering this to
that area. And I think that even what we think
of it as democracy United States, it wasn't always this way.

(29:09):
It doesn't have to be this way, right. I think
we tend to think of these things what our society is,
even at large scales, kind of like ossified, like it
can't change, it's written in stone. Now, it is often
hard for us to imagine the US Empire becoming something
different except by way of like nuclear apocalypse, right, right,

(29:29):
and whatever that might look like, it's going to take
a crashity to get there.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
My money is on NATO invading us, but I don't know,
cray it'll happen.

Speaker 2 (29:37):
Who knows, right?

Speaker 1 (29:38):
Unfortunately, badly everyone hears a lot of guns.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
Yes, absolutely, and so like, one are those possibilities for
like how a different version of American here? I don't
necessarily mean the United States of America as a country,
but like, how can those ways that we organize our
politics be different? And just remember like it wasn't always
as wayted on definitely this way. There are mechanisms, whether
it's official legal mechanism or kind of more revolutionary mechanisms too,

(30:02):
to create a different society within the United States too,
write large scale, small skill whatever that might be. No,
that makes a lot of sense to me.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
One of the things that doing this show has really
changed some of my perspective on modern politics is around
like you know, a lot of my earlier episodes because
of my own interests and whatever around like Irish history, right,
and you know Irish rebellions, and my great uncle fought
on the Easter Rising, and I shook his hand on
his hundredth birthday, and like, you know, I'm like pretty

(30:32):
excited about that. That's like I'm taking that with me
till I die, you know, And that was eight hundred
years into colonization, was the Easter Rising, right, And like
I am certain that a large chunk of Irish society
saw it as a done deal. They're like, I guess
we're just kind of British now, you know, and like

(30:52):
you have a lot of obviously there's like cultural divisions
and religious divisions, but there was still kind of those
ethnic divisions are a lot blurry. You're there, right, So
it felt like probably done until in the nineteenth century
people are like, what if we like really set out
to figure out how Ireland could not be in the
empire anymore? And that was like a technological idea, like

(31:15):
that was a social technology. I'm probably using the word
technology wrong here, but like you know, someone had to
kind of invent the idea of like, well, what if
we're not like this anymore? Right?

Speaker 2 (31:25):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (31:25):
And also North America has been colonized for five hundred years, right,
it's not too late. You know, it's never too late
to actually see decolonization. It just there's no easy blueprint.
This is where social sciences are, like you know, revolutionary sciences,
like some versions of Marxism or whatever that fall flat

(31:46):
is that they're like, ah, we figured out the AB
and C method of doing this, and you're like a
that's that's there's a lot more of an art to it,
you know, I don't know, it's not too late, and
I like the idea that that's part of the point
of looking at the past.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
So I appreciate that absolutely. Yeah, I think a lot
of these groups again, you know, you point to some here, right,
I don't know. I think of with David Graeb and
David Wendrow and their book The Dawn of Everything, Right,
they have some great examples of, you know, throughout the world.
But I think some of that's striking me is they
think about here, even within kind of a North America,
right when there was like an indigenous empire along the
Ohio Valley and stuff like that, and that was not

(32:21):
a nevill right that basically their argument is sort of
that empire had collapsed at a point and then shortly
afterwards Christopher Clumps arrives and screws things up for the
people who managed to get out of one empire, and there,
I guess, out of the frying pan into the boiler
in that case. But again that these things may last
long time, they may look like there isn't any other
option there. But I think identifying those weak points as

(32:42):
a big parts, right, and even a lot of what
these these holidies, the states, these empires is they often
project power that they don't have, right. A lot of
this is convincing people that it's a Neville right. So
again with an antiquity, we really see that it's very
easy to escape the state, you know. Kind of one
example would be sort of in the Black Desert, so

(33:04):
kind of pars of what today be called like Jordan
and kind of like Lebanon area, we found all these
really interesting inscriptions in the language that hadn't previously known.
It seems to be kind of proto Arabic in some ways.
We call it Stephietic. And what's clear is like this
is the Black Desert. This is like not part of
the Roman Empire's definitely like the periphery of that. But

(33:24):
people are living like really complex, sophisticated lives there. They
don't have cities. They kind of like just cultivate. They
you know, travel wild and they come back at the
end of the season to get their plants. And we
find that like there's a striking number of like Greek
and Roman names among these people. Oh shit, which suggests
like people are leaving the Roman, the Greek Empire, saying

(33:47):
this looks way more appealing than what we're doing in
Athens in you know, yeah, Constantinople, I guess coconstant Hop
a bit later. But things like that, right, that that
people can find these alternatives and recognize, like you can't
get these points where these things you don't like about society,
whether it's the state or patriarch, and finding those weak
points and be able to operate within those spaces and

(34:07):
find what you can get away with their you know,
kind of like you're talking about, was the magical decadence, right,
the escape the grasp of YouTube, and yet was still
a thing, right, you know, aesthetic that had a profound
impact on you. There. Yeah, we can do this in
other ways too, right, that elude the grasp of the
state of powerful people. Things like that.

Speaker 1 (34:26):
I really like that, I really and that ties. Okay,
So this idea that you know, Greeks and Romans were
just going to this area and black desert and they
were like, yeah, no, I'm good. I don't remember my
source on this, but like when white people would leave
American culture to go join indigenous culture in North America,
they never came back versus like when Indigenous people would

(34:48):
end up in American culture, they'd often be trying very
hard to get back, you know, and like, yeah, there's
just like some life in its nice.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
So well documented too, right, Yeah, you read these texts
from like you know, the sixteenth seventeen to eighteenth centuries,
like oh, it's just like they were, you know, maybe
a white person's capitial of war. And then there's like, oh,
like actually I really like living with the huron when
dat like this is dope, I know, like yeah, sure
I missed my family a bit, but like this is
a happier way of living, right, And yeah, you find
this pretty consistently too, when you know, like you said

(35:18):
that the flip side, right, And I think in Canada
there's been a lot of reflection on this too, where
it's like when you find the reverse and Native people
have been kidnapped by you know, the settlers, right, they
don't really want to go back. Right, Certain ways are
kind of almost inherently more appealing than other ways of living.
And like you said, I think in kind of the
comments off screen at one point, but like we've convinced

(35:38):
ourselves that like we were in the freest society that's
ever lived, and yet like any look at other ways
of living will like say, this is the monsterbly not true? Right,
Like I'd rather live in the US or Canada than
North Korea, right yeah, But like there's also so many
better ways of doing things than the way we're doing

(35:59):
things right now. And you know, we've just often you
hear people say things like, oh, it's just like that's
how things get done in America. It's like, well, it
doesn't have to be that way, right, Like we can
do things different.

Speaker 1 (36:08):
Right to just continue to reference the ghost of poor
David Graeber. One of his most famous quotes is, you
know something like we all wake up and make this
world every single day, and the great truth is that
we could wake up and make it differently. I teas
at the end of episode while we're talking about Diogenes,

(36:29):
so speaking of someone who wanted to see the world
be in a different way. I did a couple episodes
about diogenies and the Cynics, but largely about Diogenies, and
my kind of takeaway was I probably will like the
rest of the cinics more than I like this one
crotchety old man, and I see that you have a
chapter about this in the book Look Behind the Curtains

(36:51):
for the audience. I have only read some of the
chapters of your book yet, I've already told you this,
but I'm telling the audience this because of the way
my brain works, I kind of have to engage with them,
like I've skimmed all of it, and I have read
several pieces of it, but I kind of need to
engage with it, like piece by piece as I deep
dive things. Otherwise my brain will spiral into a million
different things and never accomplish my job. But I saw
that you had a piece about Diogenes and the Cynics.

(37:13):
I was really afraid with that episode because Diogenes is
a lot of people's favorite, right, and he's he's got
some fucking bangers, like in a rich man's house, there's
nowhere to spit but his face. Yeah, and he's not
quite a throw. He doesn't have his mom bringing him lunch,
you know, but he like he feels more in that
tradition than I expected. And I don't know, I'm curious. Well,

(37:36):
I could go on my rant about why he's complicated,
but I'm curious your take on Diogenes in the Sinics
before I'll get into the more specifics.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
Sure, yeah, so I think I would agree to your sessment.
They're definitely a mixed bag, right, Like I think that
this is I think what I would characterize them are
sort of like disaffected intellectuals, right, like people who come
from a certain amount of privilege. There's usually people who
are like not always, but often, I think the better
known ones anyway, pnnicover a certain mind of privileg and
then they go to like Athens were like, oh, hey,
like I can't vote here because I'm from a different

(38:04):
city and I don't have Athenian citizenship or whatever. Right,
this isn't always the case. I think a lot of
cynics are kind of like, you know, foreign slaves and
then end up you know, becoming philosophers along the way there.
But I think that there is like a pretty profound
critique of power and what they do. And I also
really like how they're very like practice oriented personally, so

(38:25):
whereas like a lot of I guess one of the
difference between ancient and modern philosophy is like that some practice, right,
so like be a stoic, to be a cynic, to
be an Epicurean was focused on like this particular understanding
of what the good life looks like and how to
go about doing that. Of course, now we think about philosophy,
what we think about like these really abstract debates that
verge on meaningless, like a theory of justice that you know, okay, great, right,

(38:48):
this near law journal review, so no one can read
it type thing, right, right, These kind of ancient philosophers
where it was like very practice oriented, and I think
like this sort of ideas of like boldness, this ideas
of like speaking truth to power. I think those are
things that I find appeeling about cynics, even if like
there's still difficult to separate from a lot of what's
messed up in antiquity. I'm curious to hear what your

(39:10):
problem with them is. I don't know if you want
to give that now or later.

Speaker 1 (39:12):
Now, No, I'm into it. Let's talk about it. I
think what it is, it's my own. You hate the
things that are closest to you when they're like slightly wrong, right,
Like my audience knows this. I don't know if I've
told you this. My background is I was a traveling
street kid activist, right. I lived out of a backpack, I,
you know, hitchhiked and I was voluntarily homeless. I come
from a middle class background, and I was just like,

(39:33):
I want to change the world, and the way to
do it is to not work a job so I
could do activism full time. And the culture that I
fell in with that is like punks who travel and
squat and dumpster dive and like do a lot of
very cynic things. And for anyone who's listening to these episodes,
a cynic in this case is not the modern definition.

(39:53):
It's about as useless as like what anarchists are versus
what people think anarchists are. You know, but all of
the critiques that were accurate at the street kid culture
of anarchists in the early aughts are accurate as critiques
of the cynics. So I have a bitterness. And it's
specifically that lifestyle changes. It's individual solutions to systemic problems. Right,

(40:19):
It's the equivalent of change your light bulbs to led
to stop global warming.

Speaker 2 (40:23):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (40:23):
Sure, Now it's a little bit more complete than that, right,
It's more like the equivalent of sell your car, ride
a bike, grow all your food organic, you know, like
kind of like drop out culture right where you stop
adding to the problem. There's a value to that, but
it doesn't fix things. But I actually need to forgive

(40:43):
Diogenes and the cynics more because as I've been talking
through these episodes, I'm like, oh, yeah, someone had to
invent these things, right, and like we should have known better.
But Diogenies doesn't necessarily need to know better because he's
like he's anti slavery, but he's not anti like the
institution of slavery. He's anti slavery because he's anti like
decadence and owning stuff. Yeah, he's anti slavery the same

(41:04):
way he's anti like having nice clothes.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
I think it's an aura characterization.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
Yeah, and it's interesting because I'm like he probably on
some gut level was like also just actually anti slavery,
you know, but maybe not. I can't tell. So there's
a lot of like not questioning the larger structure and
only questioning like the individual. And yeah, this idea of
like how do you live the good life? We now

(41:28):
associate that with decadence, right, like if you care about
self care, and I mean I do care about these
I literally wrote an essay that went up on my
substack like two weeks ago called the punk rock good Life.
So this is some pot talking about the color of
the kettle thing going on, right, But like it doesn't
solve these things, and so that's okay, right, he doesn't
need to. He's still a more interesting character. I'm mostly mad.

(41:53):
And the thing I kind of want to talk to
you about if you know much about gender in like
Roman and Greek society, because there's a couple points. Okay,
one my big conjecture I made about him, the big
red Strings theory. I Drew did an episode about the
I'm going to not remember how to pronounce this, the galley,
the trans priestesses of Rome who were oh yeah, yeah,

(42:14):
and of Greece before that, and then I think from
Phrygia originally that particular goddess, although there's less evidence one
way than other about whether or not her priestesses were
trans in Anatolia versus when they came over to Greece,
by that point they were trans women, right, and very
actively trans women. Historians historically were like, we don't quite

(42:36):
know what to make of these guys who dressed as
women and cut their dicks off, and you know, lived
as women and had a sisterhood and you're like, ah,
it's because they're women, and modern historians have solved this
because modern historians include trans women who are like, this
is actually a very easily recognizable thing. Sure, Like this
is not complicated to us, you know. Yeah, But Diogen's

(42:58):
famous earned that he lived in was outside the temple
of Sibylly. Siby is the name of the goddess that
they were the priestesses of, and was given to him
to live in by the priestesses. So Diogenes was housed
by trans women, I think, because I haven't found evidence
of the cult around Sibylly not including a lot of

(43:21):
people who weren't trans women. Sure, So I've never seen
anyone make the point that Diogenes was housed by trans women.
But he has a lot of really specific anti trans statements,
and they're complicated, Like he complains he sees a young
man like shaving his beard, and he's like, oh, you're
too good for what God gave. You're right on, VI
said God, But like what nature gave you, you're better

(43:42):
than the animals. You're going to change your face to
be more effeminate instead of being a real man like me. Like,
it's also telling that he loved Sparta, he never went there,
which I also think is telling. I mean, I think
he probably went there, but like he mostly lived in
Athens and another city immediately western. Yeah, you like walk
back and forth between. But he was like, ah, Sparta,
where the men are men, you know. But he would

(44:04):
complain about men effeminatizing themselves, right, even though he had
been housed by these women, and that annoys me. But
then the more complicated part is that his homophobia is
tied into anti pederasty and so this is like the
like I'm just literally looking at this in a modern
lens instead of you know, but like I'm very anti pederasty,

(44:26):
but I'm like very pro gay, And that was a
dichotomy because like homosexuality didn't exist in the same way
that we think of it today. Then I don't know,
I don't know where I'm going with this. I just
I find it fascinating.

Speaker 2 (44:38):
Yeah, No, I think you're right. And like a lot
of work that's been done in kind of like fear
antiquity is like super complicated because like it's not exactly
like nothing corresponds perfectly what we're talking about today, Right,
we can find resonances of certain source. Right, I think,
like the trans women connection that I think you're drawing
is like a great except like a pretty strong kind
of like you know, there's resonances there, right, But like
what we talk about, like what do we think about

(44:59):
like a gay relationship, right, like two people peers right
like roughly the same age anyway, consensual relationship, et cetera,
et cetera. Like that just wasn't a thing for Greeks
or Romans, right, right, it was precisely that power imbalance
is what made those things function in antiquity, right, Like,
it was not really what we talk about it today

(45:19):
for them, right, Like it was really that what made
a relationship proper is that like, Okay, I'm a Roman man,
so I can be in a relationship with a younger
person of a foreign person, a man who's less masculine
me or a woman. It's like that's kind of what
made sexual relationships acceptable for them, right, which doesn't correspond
all of what we think about an acceptable relationship today. Yeah,

(45:40):
And this is, as you know, also tied up with
like these kind of preoccupations are like proper gender too, right,
Like to be a good man against scare quotes around
all of that is to like express your domination properly, right,
And so this means like people are respecting right when
you tell someone to do something and they're your slave,
your wife, your child, your employee, that they're obeying, right.

(46:01):
There's things like that that make you a proper man,
along with like how you comport your boy or are
you dressing properly your body here? All that sort of stuff, right,
And this of course changes over time, and Diogenes is
certainly not separate from any of this, where I would
maybe hint at possibly he wasn't as bad as you're
hinting at, is I think that Romans were much more

(46:26):
preoccupied with these questions around proper gender than Greeks were.
And most of the sources we have about Diogenes are
written during the Roman period, such that I can imagine
again this is not certain. Well, actually I'll say this
for sure. What we do know for sure is like
it was a regular part of Roman education that you
would like invent stories about Diogenes and other kind of

(46:47):
Greek philosophers Like this is just like you go to
school and just like write a story about Diogenes doing
this or doing.

Speaker 1 (46:53):
That to express them as a character.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
Exactly right, what's the type of thing he would do? Right,
So it's kind of liked libs in its own way, right,
where like, okay, we need to tell a story where
like this is happening. And so I think a lot
of these kind of stories about Dioshnes are written in
a context where Romans had disliked, you know, with certain
parts of like Greek conceptions of gender and stuff like that,
and would kind of put those into the mouth of Diogenes.

(47:18):
So it's that I think certainly some of it's made
up later somebody. He may well have said, you know,
so kind of like the example you talked about, like
the shaving and kind of like oh, you're not a
real man because you you know, don't have your full
beard or whatever. Right. I think that one is like
kind of a pretty well Roman I can't remember who
exactly said that. I can't remember which author wrote that anyway,
but I have a recollection of that I've had that
I remember thinking that might have been one that was

(47:40):
made up later. And we certainly find other accounts of Diogenes.
We're just just like straight up racist stuff, right, Like
they're written in the school exercises, like we only find
them in the school exercises, where it's something where it's
like super sex is super you know what we say
call racist, where it's like, you know, Diogenes saw a
woman giving advice to another woman about a relationship. He says, oh,
look at viper giving poison to an asp or.

Speaker 1 (48:02):
Something like that.

Speaker 2 (48:03):
Right, Like, this fits well with kind of like later
Roman values, and at least there's a number of these
stories we can say pretty confidently we're invented later. It
may not be authentic to Diogenes. This create kind of
further questions though about like what can we know about
this historical Diogenes? Right, Like it's right because he's a
Marvel character at this point. Yeah, it's like you know

(48:23):
that Spider Man movie. There's like the three different Spider
Man and like which Dioghne is already talking about.

Speaker 1 (48:27):
Yeah, oh interesting.

Speaker 2 (48:30):
So again, this is not to defend any of those
things that are attributed to him, but like, I think
it's likely he did not say all of them. The
part of me that likes Diogenes wants to imagine that
a lot of that's just stuff that you know, is
like homophobic transphobic, you know, followers invented those and put
it in his mouth. But like I undermine my own

(48:51):
argument here, but like in same way, like a lot
of Christians say, oh, Jesus didn't say this messed up
thing about this or that or whatever, So it's it's possible.
But like, we don't know a lot of this for certain.
I think in some cases we can say these are
invented later. I think some of them it's possible. You know,
those sorts of mess up things about gender and so on,
I think possible that was made up later anyway, But
this is my effort to rehabilitate Diogenes here.

Speaker 1 (49:13):
No, no, this is really interesting to me because he
already was a challenge to me about recognizing that like
like all this show cool people did cool stuff, and
then like by like episode like three, I'm like, it
really should be called complicated people who did things that
overall I think were positive. You know, like because when
we try and expect everyone to be perfect, we're you know,
we're not going to create a better world if we

(49:34):
say everyone who's done anything wrong can't be part of
the better world, right, That's not a way to make
anything interesting and I think part of it was that
Diogenies felt so real to me because I was like,
I've like met this guy, like I've met a thousand dirogenesies,
and like so I read some modern folks talking about
being like he was such a wild character. We have

(49:55):
nothing like that today, And I'm like, have you been
to a food not bombs feeding?

Speaker 2 (49:59):
Oh?

Speaker 1 (49:59):
Well, like kind of slightly neurodivergent homeless person who like
is really fucking smart and has really good politics about
eighty percent of stuff and then really incorrect politics about
twenty percent of stuff.

Speaker 2 (50:11):
I'm like, it's just like super snappy answers to like
you say something like they got a quick comeback or
everything absolutely right, if you ever hung up by the
railroad tracks, yeah, and stuff like that. You've met people
in many ways like this, right absolutely, and they they.

Speaker 1 (50:24):
Are kind of awesome. Like to use the trans priestess
as an example, to use my own oppression category as
the example. You know, people are like, oh, trans women
are sort of magical, and there's some people are like, no,
we're like everyone else. And I'm like, I don't know, man,
maybe we're a little magical. Fuck it, like a little
bit crazy a little bit dangerous fuck it, you know.
And I think that like the Diogenes character, like yeah,

(50:46):
there's like there's something about that guy who like you're
walking down the street and some guy tells you something
startlingly useful about your life and then says something really
annoying and offensive or like keeps talking to you well after,
you know, and he's like he really just actually needs
a warm place to sleep or whatever. You know. But like,
I don't know, do you have any like final thoughts
about antiquity, about your book about people imagining better worlds

(51:11):
in the past, or like any final thoughts.

Speaker 2 (51:14):
I was glad to hear early on you said this
kind of fit well with the goals of the podcast.
And I think for me, a lot of it is
like when we think about kind of recovering those interesting
parts of history, right, it's not just for the victors,
it's not just for the white men and so on.
I think this book for me came from a place
of one, say, you know, what, the left is screwed
up in some ways on antiquity, and that we're happy

(51:37):
to say like oh, like slave owners, it's rich white dudes,
it's all that stuff. I think that there's something worth
recovering there in its own right, beyond sort of this
question about like you know, Elon Muskin, the so called
Roman salute that he did that was you know, yeah,
exactly right, so or kind of this broader appropriation of
like antimitious part of like you know, against Karek was here,

(51:58):
the Golden Age, the white Man that we all from
finding racist groups kind of appropriating the past. I think
that there's genuinely stuff, even on taking it away from
those kind of nefarious elements of our society, that like,
there's stuff that's genuinely interesting there. It can provide food
for thought. And this is what I would hope people
would come away from these sort of you know, your

(52:18):
previous episodes about Diosnes and thury I and Spartakiss and
hopefully this set of interviews to there. So those be
kind of my final thoughts on this right, that there's
something there, and I think it's important to not to
sort of let you know, these racist elements of society
claim it is their own anyway.

Speaker 1 (52:34):
I love that one of my favorite things in the
world is taking cultural ground away from fascists. Yeah, absolutely,
or at the very least not seeding it like I'm
in a black metal band, Like I can't just let
Nazis have that fuck them, or like the romantic ideas
of the rural past is complicated and you should always

(52:55):
side eye someone who talks about how all of these things.
But also there's into Euphrygia or the black desert and like,
you know these things, and so yeah, I really appreciate
you doing the work of not letting them own the
past because they try to colonize it.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
Well, thank you so much, Margaret. I've really enjoyed the conversation.
Really appreciate Yeah, the work.

Speaker 1 (53:19):
Well, what's the name of your book and where can
people get it?

Speaker 2 (53:22):
Sure? So the name of the book is Red gal Antiquity, Freelove, Zoroastrians, Farming,
Pirates and Ancient Uprisings. It's out from Pluto Press. Came
out twenty twenty five, wherever you can order. Books should
available through independent bookstores ordinate their audiobooks should be available
pretty soon two if it's not already. And yeah, thank
you once again for having me on here.

Speaker 1 (53:40):
Yep, thank you cool people who did cool stuff as
a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool.

Speaker 2 (53:55):
Zone Media, visit our website at goal zonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever

Speaker 1 (54:02):
You get your podcasts.