Speaker 1: Hello the Internet, and welcome to season three, eighteen, episode
Speaker 1: two of Dear Danly's I Guys Day Show My Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: This is a podcast where we take a deep dive
Speaker 1: into America's share consciousness. I just dabbed for Dannel Jack,
Speaker 1: just dab dab because I accidentally dabbed before we start recording.
Speaker 1: And I just think it's still cool when you do that.
Speaker 1: Hell in your forties.
Speaker 2: It's Tuesday, December nineteenth, twenty twenty three, less than a
Speaker 2: week away from Christmas?
Speaker 3: Oh right?
Speaker 1: Ever heard of it? What ever heard of it anymore? America?
Speaker 1: Or you too busy anyways? Trying to channel my inner
Speaker 1: Fox News hosts, it's not going well. My name's Jack O'Brien,
Speaker 1: aka do your nuts? Tang lo? Are they huge m
Speaker 1: made of bone?
Speaker 2: Where they found in Oxfordshire in the gravel en limestone?
Speaker 1: Is your scroed them like go boulder with a chef
Speaker 1: like a light pole? Do you're not hang low? That
Speaker 1: is curty christy Amagucci Mane. He wanted me to do
Speaker 1: it as chain hang low by jibs, but I'm more
Speaker 1: familiar with your ears hang low by like boy scouts.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but Anyways, it's a reference to the
Speaker 1: British doctor who fat saw the first dinosaur bone before
Speaker 1: people knew about dinosaurs and said, that is no giant femur,
Speaker 1: that is, in fact a giant's scrotum, And.
Speaker 3: Well, here we are.
Speaker 1: The rest is history. I'm thrilled to be joined in
Speaker 1: my second seat by a very talented producer, musician, streamer,
Speaker 1: esports commentator, the original editor of this show. He's constantly
Speaker 1: streaming everything everywhere because he is that bitch on Twitch.
Speaker 1: It's DJ Daniel good Man.
Speaker 3: Aka soon to be NYC Daniel. Right, I'm leaving this
Speaker 3: mortal coil of Los Angeles and putting on my most
Speaker 3: comfortable down jacket and braving the cold, bitter winds of
Speaker 3: New York City. Yeah, getting my tims?
Speaker 1: You figure, are you like lacing them up to like
Speaker 1: three loops below and then just having the tongue hang out?
Speaker 3: What do we three loops tongue out? I'm actually putting
Speaker 3: times on top of another pair of times. I'm trying
Speaker 3: to as much as possible. I brought three Yankee fitteds wow,
Speaker 3: slightly different sizees, so those two I can were on
Speaker 3: top of each other. Yeah, I'm ready I'm trying to
Speaker 3: work into calling the weather brick. I understand that is
Speaker 3: the language, so you know, working on it.
Speaker 1: The weather is brick.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's brickout. That's when it's cold for all you.
Speaker 3: Because living in New.
Speaker 4: York City for a very long time, I've never heard that.
Speaker 3: There you go, Yes, it is. It is slang that
Speaker 3: the youths are using, my understanding.
Speaker 1: At least Daniel as his ear to the to the
Speaker 1: high school playground.
Speaker 3: Now it's a thousand feet away, So yeah, what.
Speaker 1: Is that voice? That voice is someone we're thrilled to
Speaker 1: be joined in in our third seat. A prolific author
Speaker 1: of fantasy and sci fi novels and nonfiction you've seen
Speaker 1: on the Discovery Channel series Contact. His non fiction book,
Speaker 1: The Bronze Lie is about the myth of the Spartan
Speaker 1: warrior and why it's so popular with everyone but specifically
Speaker 1: white supremacist. Also why it's completely full of to quote him,
Speaker 1: so many holes that could drain pasta I don't know
Speaker 1: if that's a direct quote, but it's like a analogy
Speaker 1: he used that I loved. Please welcome Mike.
Speaker 4: Co The weather here is absolutely brick.
Speaker 1: Oh shit, sorry to hear that. Mike, what.
Speaker 4: We invited. I think, like, you know, you don't need
Speaker 4: me to price crack. I think you probably hear that enough.
Speaker 1: So oh man, thanks, No, yeah, not not anymore actually
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. But uh, I've been thinking about
Speaker 1: greeting all our expert guests with that. How how was
Speaker 1: that for you? Good?
Speaker 4: Pretty good? Yeact when I lived in DC, they came
Speaker 4: to I don't remember, they came to a bar. They
Speaker 4: were doing a tour.
Speaker 1: The guys from that ad.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, And I think that's so amazing. Is imagine
Speaker 4: that making millions of dollars for that's what you're doing.
Speaker 4: You walk in a room and you go, what the.
Speaker 1: I mean, It's not not that hard for me to imagine.
Speaker 1: To be honest with you, all right, Mike, we are
Speaker 1: going to get into the content of the Bronze Lie
Speaker 1: in a moment, but before we do that, we do
Speaker 1: like to get to know our guests a little bit
Speaker 1: better and ask them what is something from your search
Speaker 1: history that is revealing about who you are?
Speaker 4: For me, most recently, it would be the email addresses
Speaker 4: for the staff for my congressmen, because if you google
Speaker 4: Mike pull Michael with the why of course, NPR one
Speaker 4: a you will bring up me talking on National Public
Speaker 4: Radio on the crisis and the volunteer fire service something
Speaker 4: like seventy percent of firefighting in this country. And you
Speaker 4: don't notice this in La Right, you're in a big city.
Speaker 4: You see paid firefighters. That's not how it is in
Speaker 4: most of the country. Most of the countries jack wagons
Speaker 4: like me who are doing our jobs and then a
Speaker 4: pager goes off and maybe we can go, and maybe
Speaker 4: we can't. And with climate change coming on and people
Speaker 4: not volunteering anymore, it's becoming a real problem and it's
Speaker 4: become a real like cause for me. And I'm trying
Speaker 4: to get I wrote a piece about it, the Slade,
Speaker 4: I went on NPR, and I'm trying to get Congress
Speaker 4: interested in it.
Speaker 1: Nice. Oh yeah, what you said, something's coming on. I
Speaker 1: don't know climage. Is that like a weather front or
Speaker 1: something miliar?
Speaker 4: Yeah, just you know, it's I don't know if you
Speaker 4: guys have noticed, it's it's a little hotter, a.
Speaker 1: Little yeah, you know the way.
Speaker 4: I mean, you wouldn't you wouldn't know about that. In California,
Speaker 4: there's no fun.
Speaker 1: We're good out here. Things things are cool, that has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with why Daniel is leaving California.
Speaker 3: I'm sure nothing nothing to do with it.
Speaker 1: That's so what would you what would a better supposed
Speaker 1: to be. Would it be too that they were not
Speaker 1: to volunteer, that there was a budget to fund firefighting?
Speaker 4: Yeah, and this does not make me popular because a
Speaker 4: lot of volunteer fire firefighters are militantly proud. When you
Speaker 4: listen to that MPR show, you'll hear the other two
Speaker 4: guys who are around there are just like, I do not
Speaker 4: want to be paid. And I'm like, I get that
Speaker 4: you don't want to be paid, but unless we have
Speaker 4: a national paid fire service, maybe not tomorrow, but five
Speaker 4: ten years, the house that burns going to be your own, Like,
Speaker 4: it's going to be a problem. And it's it's just
Speaker 4: getting worse and I I'm starting to ring the bell
Speaker 4: on it. It's not cool. And also nothing too is Look,
Speaker 4: the fire service were tied up pretty tight with the police.
Speaker 4: So there's a lot of like baggage there, especially with
Speaker 4: the young people that we need to recruit, right, And
Speaker 4: so like, I don't I don't have a solution, but
Speaker 4: the conversation needs to get started. And it's happening in
Speaker 4: New York State and little but it needs to be
Speaker 4: happening national. That's what I'm pushing for.
Speaker 3: Yeah, amen, Amen.
Speaker 1: So that was something I think that was one of
Speaker 1: the first climate like horror scenarios that really like popped
Speaker 1: into my brain and like stuck. There was the idea
Speaker 1: that it gets hotter, there's more fire like wildfires, there's
Speaker 1: more wildfires like belching shit into the air, which isn't
Speaker 1: like the main cause of climate change, but it could.
Speaker 1: It can't be good for it and help. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: doesn't help, especially when you're not doing anything else to
Speaker 1: address climate change, and then it creates this kind of
Speaker 1: vicious cycle. Just I'd be curious to hear more from
Speaker 1: you about just what climate change looks like from inside
Speaker 1: the world of firefighting.
Speaker 4: I mean, people think about fires, but I'll give you
Speaker 4: and I'll give you a perfect example. Right now, there's
Speaker 4: a massive hurricane hitting in Florida and it's sending unbelievable
Speaker 4: reins up here. My pager has been going off all day.
Speaker 4: We have floods, we have wires down, we have car accidents.
Speaker 4: Nothing's burning right, But you remember the firefires do a
Speaker 4: lot more and fight fires my pager's going off, Jack,
Speaker 4: I can't go. I have a job.
Speaker 1: You're talking to us.
Speaker 4: Get off work.
Speaker 1: There's somebody on top of their car about to be
Speaker 1: swept away, and you're talking to us.
Speaker 4: Taking a break off rework. I will be able to
Speaker 4: start answering my pager in the evening and when when
Speaker 4: those calls start coming in. But also keep this in mind,
Speaker 4: I train part time firefighting. Like one time, somebody that
Speaker 4: I can't remember a party or something called it unskilled
Speaker 4: labor almost knocked this dude out, Like what are you
Speaker 4: talking about? Like, we have to know everything from time
Speaker 4: not to running equipment, to binding used to calming people
Speaker 4: down to building construction of the physics of I mean,
Speaker 4: there is so much to know. And I'm training on
Speaker 4: nights and weekends part time. You know, if I was
Speaker 4: a paid, full time professional and this is the only
Speaker 4: thing I had to think about, how much better at
Speaker 4: this job would I be? And this is an important job.
Speaker 4: I mean, Look, I say in the slave article, most
Speaker 4: of the time when I screw something up, it's okay.
Speaker 4: Some of the time when I screw something up, somebody dies,
Speaker 4: Like that is serious. So and the thing is I
Speaker 4: think that's so frustrating about it is that like this
Speaker 4: decline of volunteerism, like I do, I definitely feel like
Speaker 4: I'm screaming into the clouds or something like nobody cares
Speaker 4: I talk about this stuff, and we always have to
Speaker 4: wait until it's a crisis. I mean, did you guys
Speaker 4: get the Hays from Canada in La You didn't dig?
Speaker 1: No, we didn't it? Okay from Canada? Calfornia, California.
Speaker 3: I think some of yeah, some some of San Francisco
Speaker 3: certainly did.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, daniell I, you were gonna love it. Here
Speaker 4: you go out man, because it looked like Mars. I
Speaker 4: am not kid. Yeah, I was in I was in
Speaker 4: dust storms in a rack and I came out my
Speaker 4: door and I was like, oh, this looks familiar. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but and like and like how much of that do
Speaker 4: we need before before we're like, huh, we might want
Speaker 4: to take this seriously.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and a lot of that stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: we we've talked before about how Joe Biden is like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we need to fund the police more because
Speaker 1: they're our psychiatrists, they're our you know, and like, list
Speaker 1: all these jobs that fall to the police because they're
Speaker 1: not funded publicly. But we've also talked about the idea
Speaker 1: that like some of the jobs that we currently throw
Speaker 1: to the police can be done by you know, skilled
Speaker 1: labor that is does not have a gun. You know.
Speaker 1: So I don't know. I guess I hadn't really put
Speaker 1: volunteer firefighters into that category until this conversation. And that's
Speaker 1: on me, Like, this is.
Speaker 4: Not something we go around teaching people, which is why
Speaker 4: I'm looking. You know, I'm very very lucky I have
Speaker 4: a small public platform. Yeah, I'm able to use that
Speaker 4: to really drum up an issue that I really care about.
Speaker 4: But what this is also pointed out is that I'm
Speaker 4: the kind of person when you invite me to a
Speaker 4: party and you want to talk about something like, I'm
Speaker 4: going to ruin it, and you should not invite me
Speaker 4: because it's going to get dark, it's going to get serious,
Speaker 4: and by the time I walk out of there, you
Speaker 4: are going to be so depressed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's what we're here for, That's right. Yeah. Similar,
Speaker 1: I think people expect a certain thing from somebody who
Speaker 1: works in comedy, and then I'm like, yeah, maybe not always.
Speaker 1: What is something Mike, do you think is overrated.
Speaker 4: So overrated is up? We are over rated. I am
Speaker 4: so sick of our faces and our opinions. I have said,
Speaker 4: and I say this on that NPR show. The only
Speaker 4: thing anybody means, no matter what they say on social media,
Speaker 4: is look at me, Look at me, look at me.
Speaker 4: And this is a question I have been trying so
Speaker 4: hard to tangle with because we have a fucking opinion
Speaker 4: on absolutely everything. Now you will find no more intractable
Speaker 4: foe of Vladimir Putin than me, and you will find
Speaker 4: no greater pro Ukrainian partisan. And every time I see
Speaker 4: someone flying the Ukrainian flag, I want to bring a
Speaker 4: map of Eastern Europe with the names of the countries
Speaker 4: blacked out over to them and said, will you please
Speaker 4: show me Ukraine? And we all know that ninety nine
Speaker 4: point nine percent of them will not be able to
Speaker 4: do it. Can you tell me the difference between the
Speaker 4: dawn and the Zupprosian Gussips. That's really important to who
Speaker 4: the Ukrainian people are. But you've got a strong opinion
Speaker 4: on what's wrong and that stuff, because we sell our
Speaker 4: asses out here right if you if you go viral
Speaker 4: for lightning.
Speaker 3: Some of us literally again I said some of us literally,
Speaker 3: well yeah, selling our asses out here.
Speaker 1: Sorry interrupt Dan following on only fans, it was a.
Speaker 3: Terrible joke, but yes, please subscribe my only fans.
Speaker 4: But the but you go viral for lightning the firefracker
Speaker 4: in your ass? You know, like your set, you could
Speaker 4: be those one love guys walking around, you know. So
Speaker 4: we are so incentivized to commoditize, to sign our name
Speaker 4: and center ourselves. And I keep thinking about for like
Speaker 4: what you guys do and for what I do. We
Speaker 4: do public facing work. We can't not use social media,
Speaker 4: and a lot of the time we are selling ourselves
Speaker 4: and in comedy is so personal. I just shot a
Speaker 4: spot for the History Channel. They didn't just pick me
Speaker 4: because of my historical expertise, they picked me because of
Speaker 4: my look, right, So how do you do that? How
Speaker 4: do you center the work?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 4: What am I doing here? Instead of crossing that line?
Speaker 4: And to look at me, I'm you know, trying to
Speaker 4: turn yourself into a brand. And I don't have a
Speaker 4: solution to that. But that whole culture, which we can
Speaker 4: all be forgiven for buying into, is what's for dinner?
Speaker 1: That is the thing.
Speaker 4: It is the most overrated in the thing I'm most
Speaker 4: sick of in this world.
Speaker 1: It's the only thing on the plate. It's the only
Speaker 1: thing that's for dinner. Yeah, and a lot of respects.
Speaker 1: It's it's tough. What's something you think is underrated?
Speaker 4: Underrated is saying I don't know. Underrated is admitting that
Speaker 4: there is a limit to what you are able to
Speaker 4: be certain about. And as in a Storian, this is critical.
Speaker 4: So you will see, hopefully you saw on the Bronze
Speaker 4: Lie that I present sources and then I go and
Speaker 4: here's what I think happened based on those sources. And
Speaker 4: I think like most the Storians that come out there
Speaker 4: and they go, the spartans were this or you know,
Speaker 4: this is what happened here, And I'm always sitting here
Speaker 4: being like, motherfucker, there is no way you could be
Speaker 4: sure about that based on the deity you have. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and I think a story is don't want to do it,
Speaker 4: because look, dude, if we keep saying I don't know,
Speaker 4: what the hell do you need us for? You could
Speaker 4: do your own research like Alex Jones, you know, like
Speaker 4: what do you need us for? But the truth is,
Speaker 4: what is our job? Our job is to be the
Speaker 4: Walking Cliff news Man. I went ahead and read through
Speaker 4: Kennedy's and Dawafon and Proditus, and went to museums and
Speaker 4: read all these boring historical journals so that you don't
Speaker 4: have to. Now I can come here and explain it
Speaker 4: to me, give you my opinion, but it is opinion.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: That ability to present expertise and be like, yeah, I'm
Speaker 4: an expert on this stuff, but man, I don't know everything.
Speaker 4: I mean, look, Robert mcnabara was an expert on defensive
Speaker 4: Bard policy and Vietnam didn't work out so well did it?
Speaker 1: Why What Haven War is an amazing documentary. Yet more
Speaker 1: and more, I think that that the way you write,
Speaker 1: the way that people who are kind of forward facing
Speaker 1: with that caveat of we think, I think people sense
Speaker 1: the truth in that more than yeah I can. I
Speaker 1: remember reading historians and it being you can tell that
Speaker 1: their editor was like, your voice is so authoritative, we
Speaker 1: love it, and it's like, well, that's speaking authoritatively on
Speaker 1: something that happened three thousand years ago is probably misleading.
Speaker 4: Like just to say the least. I had a great
Speaker 4: quote from my co author and mentor and dear friend
Speaker 4: Michel doctor Michael Livingston. I really hope folks will check
Speaker 4: out his work. His last book is as Inc He's
Speaker 4: a medievalist. He's amazing and he once told me that
Speaker 4: as in a story, and you have got to be
Speaker 4: committed to getting it right, not being right, and that
Speaker 4: is something I have carried with me into the rest
Speaker 4: of my life. Is one of the most powerful things
Speaker 4: I've ever heard.
Speaker 1: Now, this episode is not about first Contact or UFOs,
Speaker 1: but you were on the Contact documentary and I was
Speaker 1: going to find a way to shorten this in anyways.
Speaker 1: But I do think coverage of UFOs and what what's
Speaker 1: out there and what all the data means is a
Speaker 1: place where this very thing is somewhat important and missing
Speaker 1: a lot of the time is like, you know, well
Speaker 1: do we know?
Speaker 3: We don't.
Speaker 1: We actually don't know what all this means. We don't.
Speaker 1: I think that's what's interesting about it is that it's
Speaker 1: hard to like find a definitive answer given all the
Speaker 1: clashing facts and videos and I wouldness testimony that we've seen.
Speaker 1: What what is your take on that? As a part
Speaker 1: time historian, how do you think about.
Speaker 4: The uf you're talking? Yeah, yeah, so, I mean I
Speaker 4: think that of the most convincing stuff, including the mis
Speaker 4: Carrier group stuff like it's just not there's no there there,
Speaker 4: but really they're oh, absolutely, And in fact, look, look,
Speaker 4: I'll probably Discovery is not going to be thrilled with
Speaker 4: me for saying this. But one of the things when
Speaker 4: you do reality TV, they put one minute on for
Speaker 4: every hour that they shoot, you know, they could make
Speaker 4: you say anything. And Mike and I went in there,
Speaker 4: we were like, this is bullshit, this is not true.
Speaker 4: And we went ahead and there were a couple of
Speaker 4: things in there that we really were stumped on. If
Speaker 4: you look at the episode where there was soil that
Speaker 4: was rejecting water, we were we were like, this is
Speaker 4: we don't know what this is. But there were a
Speaker 4: lot of things in there were were like, this is nonsense.
Speaker 4: And when we watched the show, they were like they
Speaker 4: cut it, you know, they cut it to sell the
Speaker 4: story they wanted to sell. Now does that mean that
Speaker 4: I don't believe in aliens in UFOs, No, absolutely not.
Speaker 4: That's not a responsible position to take. I certainly would
Speaker 4: not be shocked at all if we find things in
Speaker 4: the future. There was an incredible article about poison gas
Speaker 4: emanations that we just detected and radio signals that cannot
Speaker 4: be explained. So there's definitely the possibility out there. But
Speaker 4: in terms of the mystique and swagger that that discovery
Speaker 4: portrayed in that show, I mean no way. But I'll
Speaker 4: say this, it's funny because all look, I try to
Speaker 4: be a serious historian, and all of these fans of
Speaker 4: my work will coming me and be like, how could
Speaker 4: you do this? How could you do that ancient alien show?
Speaker 4: And my answer was, motherfucker, I got twelve million people
Speaker 4: watching me. One percent of those people go look at
Speaker 4: my history. I just reached more people than you will
Speaker 4: ever reach in your entire career. I think that trade
Speaker 4: off is worth it. Also, TV is a blast. It's
Speaker 4: the most funny you could do. Is. I love it,
Speaker 4: And that's why I just did this spot for History Channel.
Speaker 4: I want to keep doing it. Well gosh, I guess
Speaker 4: I should warn networks, like, eventually, if you try to
Speaker 4: make me say bullshit, eventually I'm going to tell the truth.
Speaker 1: They were just like cutting it. You're like, I think that,
Speaker 1: like it was just carrier is sense? You think it's sense? Okay,
Speaker 1: I mean you're not.
Speaker 4: You're not far off jet.
Speaker 1: Right. All right, well, we're gonna have to have you
Speaker 1: back to explain the Kniamtz carrier stuff because that that's
Speaker 1: one of the ones that I'm like, damn.
Speaker 4: Let me. Let me give you an example. There's one
Speaker 4: scene where a you will see a UFO go from
Speaker 4: a completely stationary position and break off to the left.
Speaker 4: That is a bead of water of the flour camera lens.
Speaker 4: Mike and I grow like, it's that's what it is.
Speaker 4: It's not a UFO. And then there's this other scene
Speaker 4: where like, by god, it's hovering and it's like, no, dude,
Speaker 4: the cameras on gimbals and it's rotating so it looks
Speaker 4: like it's hovering.
Speaker 1: It's real interesting, interesting. Let's take a quick break and
Speaker 1: we will come back and talk about the bronze Lie.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back and we're back, and Mike, until
Speaker 1: reading your book, I hadn't realized how much the Spartan
Speaker 1: myth is just fucking everywhere. Like I of course remember
Speaker 1: the movie The three hundred. I recognize that it has
Speaker 1: been incredibly like has just stuck around and becomes this
Speaker 1: like myth and this meme or this meme that like
Speaker 1: Trump riffs on and I definitely at the time was like, man,
Speaker 1: there's some weird ideas in this fucking movie at the time,
Speaker 1: but yeah, as you point out, like I hadn't really
Speaker 1: put it together. Oh yeah, there's so many high school
Speaker 1: sports mascots, college sports mascots, and it feels like a
Speaker 1: lot of the most famous names in history are kind
Speaker 1: of obsessed with this myth. And so you went in
Speaker 1: started kind of poking at it and questioning whether Spartans
Speaker 1: are the greatest worri to ever lives, as depicted in
Speaker 1: three hundred and elsewhere. And when you wrote about that
Speaker 1: in The Daily Beast in the New Republic, you started
Speaker 1: getting death threats. So I kind of just wanted to
Speaker 1: start there because I think that drives home like what
Speaker 1: what is important here? Like how this how much energy
Speaker 1: below the surface is riding on this shit? Like who
Speaker 1: are the types of people who you think are threatening
Speaker 1: to kill you over this? What are they so mad about?
Speaker 4: Well, let me let me be clearer, like, I think
Speaker 4: the types of people who are threatening to kill me
Speaker 4: with this, I can't prove it. They're probably fourteen year
Speaker 4: olds like in their basement. I wasn't ten terribly frightened.
Speaker 4: But I think that first of all, I think that
Speaker 4: the Spartan myth it isn't just the far right, it's
Speaker 4: all of us. Our whole conception of what it means
Speaker 4: to be a man that you endure hardship, that you
Speaker 4: stoically and without complaint, you know, stand in the gap
Speaker 4: like that idea comes from the ancient crete concept of erected.
Speaker 4: It's conveyed us through the Spartan mess. This whole idea
Speaker 4: of being a strong, silent type, being a man of
Speaker 4: few words that doesn't exactly use the word Spartan. It's
Speaker 4: tied to that. So it's not just like the far right,
Speaker 4: although that was what I sought to come after with
Speaker 4: that book because it was really bothering, But it really is.
Speaker 4: It's in the air man like, it's it's how we
Speaker 4: came up. And I think that's important to recognize. But
Speaker 4: the best story about this, other than the death threats
Speaker 4: this mighty fucking cert image that dude. Wow, he posted
Speaker 4: on Twitter to his one million plus followers. Back on
Speaker 4: the Twitter, we should be careful, uh, he goes. This
Speaker 4: dude is so afraid of the bronze age mindset he's
Speaker 4: talking about me that he wrote a whole book about it,
Speaker 4: and he tweets a picture of the cover of my
Speaker 4: book to his one million followers.
Speaker 3: Break thank you, and he's thank you.
Speaker 4: Tweeting out the cover of my book to one million people.
Speaker 4: And I'm like, if even one percent of them raged
Speaker 4: by it, and they did, Jack, it was a very
Speaker 4: good day for me.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 4: So the far rights reaction to it, But what did it?
Speaker 4: What does it say? It says that this to them
Speaker 4: is a religion, It's an article of faith, right, this
Speaker 4: symbol it's so to us, it's what is three hundred movie?
Speaker 4: To them, it's the cross Man Like, that's that's serious.
Speaker 1: I think. Yeah. We we end up talking about that
Speaker 1: more and more that as religion has faded in our
Speaker 1: day to day lives in America, like things are replacing
Speaker 1: that that that that's not exactly how we view those things,
Speaker 1: but it comes up when we're talking about the unprecedented
Speaker 1: power of like Taylor Swift, or the myths and the
Speaker 1: Star Wars universe and why people view, you know, a
Speaker 1: Star Wars movie with a woman protagonist as like an
Speaker 1: affront to the very core of their identity. That I
Speaker 1: think that's right. I think more and more the stakes
Speaker 1: on these kind of non religious like things we view
Speaker 1: as pop culture are actually like life and death to people,
Speaker 1: and like their entire personas are like shot through with it,
Speaker 1: like down to a spiritual level.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, And the Spartan myth plays on this really great
Speaker 4: human insecurity. Dude, you are not good enough, you are
Speaker 4: too weak, you are not tough, you cry too much,
Speaker 4: you're not working hard enough to get after your goals.
Speaker 4: Look at these people, Look at these people who could
Speaker 4: withstand any privation, who would die rather than surrender. Be
Speaker 4: like them, And honestly, that idea of a religious avatar
Speaker 4: that's in almost every faith. That's Jesus Christ, that's the
Speaker 4: prophet Muhammad, that's the Buddha himself. Right. If you don't
Speaker 4: know how to act, just watch these people and act
Speaker 4: like them. And the Spartans the same thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, I mean there's some pretty straightforward ways for
Speaker 1: like aspects of the Spartan myth that we see in
Speaker 1: three hundred that you kind of go back and debunk,
Speaker 1: Like there's the myth of how they treat children who
Speaker 1: aren't like who aren't like born with a six pack
Speaker 1: and like immediately able to like do twenty twenty pull
Speaker 1: ups when you like hang them over a cliff that
Speaker 1: they like throw them over into the sea. And I
Speaker 1: feel I feel like that's a very potent part of
Speaker 1: the myth because it's like, well, they did it, so
Speaker 1: what are you going to do. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: it's also like a profound endorsement of eugenics.
Speaker 4: Right, just right, but like just the important thing they
Speaker 4: didn't do.
Speaker 1: It, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: They love their children and they raised them, and there's
Speaker 4: all these examples of it. King of guess Allawis the second,
Speaker 4: who was one of the most famous warrior kings of Sparta,
Speaker 4: was born with a club foot, right, he was limping
Speaker 4: like it was. It's just bullshit. It's hot buttered bullshit.
Speaker 4: And the thing that's so frustrating is that all it
Speaker 4: takes to stick a pin in this balloon is you
Speaker 4: read the sources like I'm reading the same ship that's
Speaker 4: been available for twenty five hundred years. Where the fuck
Speaker 4: is everybody you know? Like you know, all I did
Speaker 4: was keep poor, like none of this stuff is the secret,
Speaker 4: none of And the thing is people have been talking
Speaker 4: about it like I'm certainly not new to this conversation.
Speaker 4: I'm just the first person to systematically sit down and
Speaker 4: in a pop narrative aimed at regular people, lay it
Speaker 4: out in a book. That's all that's not It's not
Speaker 4: like I said, it's not rocket scent.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Meanwhile, Trump just started like openly saying in
Speaker 1: campaign speeches that illegal immigrants are poisoning the blood of America.
Speaker 1: This just feels very kind of everywhere, and like it's
Speaker 1: not going away.
Speaker 4: Right, And Jack, like, I hear the desperate your voice,
Speaker 4: and I feel it too, man, Like I cannot believe
Speaker 4: we're back here. And that is part of what I
Speaker 4: did with this book, Like this was an act of desperation,
Speaker 4: like what can I do? Where can I strike a blow?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 4: And this was one of the few places where I
Speaker 4: felt I could, I can speak the truth about something
Speaker 4: I care.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you did learn the languages, which I was
Speaker 1: gonna do. But then I saw that you did it,
Speaker 1: so I don't I appreciate you.
Speaker 4: Doing that, So I'm happy.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to do that now. So I hadn't
Speaker 1: realized that one of the things that is notable about
Speaker 1: spartans from a historical perspective is that like they didn't
Speaker 1: leave that much or like they were like it's called
Speaker 1: la kana, like the it has the same like worship
Speaker 1: of Spartan's has the same root where it is laconic, right,
Speaker 1: because they weren't like giving a lot of information on
Speaker 1: one of the details that I found particularly interesting is
Speaker 1: like they they seemed to have a sense of branding.
Speaker 1: Like you mentioned this idea that they kept mystery about
Speaker 1: themselves by not fighting the same opponent more than once
Speaker 1: mm hm, which feels wildly and practical like if you're.
Speaker 4: Well, But also keep in mind that that is the legend.
Speaker 1: That's the legend, you know.
Speaker 4: They did fight the same opponent more than once. In fact,
Speaker 4: they're repeated battles against the city State of Thebes, which
Speaker 4: modern day is known as Steva. They wound up being
Speaker 4: defeated by tactics because the Fievens, I think, had a
Speaker 4: really good idea of what they were going to put
Speaker 4: into the battlefield.
Speaker 1: So it's always hard to play an opponent the second time,
Speaker 1: as anybody who follows sports would know. But it just
Speaker 1: the idea that they would only fight an opponent once
Speaker 1: like suggests like even the idea that they would like
Speaker 1: put that out there about them, suggests that they're like
Speaker 1: the Harlem Globetrotters of War, that they just like are
Speaker 1: just yeah, we we kind of put on a show.
Speaker 1: We're like a road show. But like you can't, can't
Speaker 1: let you see it more the once.
Speaker 4: So I look, and I can't prove this, but if
Speaker 4: I had to, if I had to give my educated guests,
Speaker 4: I would say that they didn't start that. Man the
Speaker 4: Athenian started that. And one of the things I did
Speaker 4: in the New Republic piece is showed that, like, we
Speaker 4: don't have any writing from Spartans, none, It's all fanboy
Speaker 4: stuff from outside Xenophon who was this like huge Spartan
Speaker 4: like this dude loved the Spartans and and and the Kennedy's.
Speaker 4: It was an enemy of them, and you know they
Speaker 4: write this legendary stuff. And I think somewhere along the
Speaker 4: way the Spartans looked around and were like, holy shit,
Speaker 4: we got something going here. We need to lean into this.
Speaker 4: This is working out. I think that's probably what happened.
Speaker 1: Mhm.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: It feels like throughout it is this fantasy of being
Speaker 1: able to, like you say, at a certain point, like
Speaker 1: people aren't machines, in the book, But it seems to
Speaker 1: be the fantasy of the Spartan myth like at the time,
Speaker 1: and of like fascism in general, like turn humans into
Speaker 1: beautiful war machines, take away the softness, the follibility, the
Speaker 1: inconsistency of humanity. But of course that's a fantasy, because
Speaker 1: that is the human condition, Like all of those things
Speaker 1: are part of the now condition. But it seems like
Speaker 1: the ideal of the fake Spartan society that made its
Speaker 1: way down to us over the decades was both their
Speaker 1: fantasy and our fantasy. So there is like something universal
Speaker 1: and powerful about it, which is what makes it so
Speaker 1: kind of terrifyingly powerful and so terrifying that it's you know,
Speaker 1: being allowed to rise back up because it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of always there. We just had a sense of how
Speaker 1: dangerous and powerful it was for so long, and now
Speaker 1: we're back to a place where it's being allowed to
Speaker 1: just kind of run rampant again across the world.
Speaker 4: Well and being marshalled to a specific political end, like
Speaker 4: here is this what icons can we use? Right you
Speaker 4: know where? You know, look, we as the modern Trump movement,
Speaker 4: you know, raising the cross is probably not gonna work
Speaker 4: for us here, although he's popularly evangelicals too. I just
Speaker 4: do not understand that. But okay, sure so, but we
Speaker 4: could pick this up, man, I mean that video. I
Speaker 4: don't know if you've seen it. It's incredible. There's a
Speaker 4: video with it's three hundred. It's the scene where the
Speaker 4: Persian messengers are kicked into that pit and you know this,
Speaker 4: and it's Trump's head over like glued on too, and
Speaker 4: and Soros and Obama getting kicked around. Man. By the
Speaker 4: time I found that video, and this was years ago,
Speaker 4: it had been watched five million times. It is amazing
Speaker 4: how powerful this stuff is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and of course that movie came out in two
Speaker 1: thousand and sixty six, when like Obama was first becoming
Speaker 1: a thing and you know, has gained popularity. And man,
Speaker 1: they love to put Trump's head on the body of
Speaker 1: just like a ripped soldier, don't they.
Speaker 4: God. I've been very, very lucky not to see him.
Speaker 4: But I am pretty sure Jack, you don't look like that.
Speaker 1: All right, let's uh, let's take a quick break and
Speaker 1: we'll come back and keep busting this myth. We'll be
Speaker 1: right back and we're back. Okay. So this one is
Speaker 1: kind of unrelated. But it's a thing that whenever I
Speaker 1: read about or hear about, like ancient Greek city states
Speaker 1: going to war with one another, I think in my
Speaker 1: mind for most of my life that those are like
Speaker 1: mad of armies of people. But aren't weren't the communities
Speaker 1: like fairly small?
Speaker 4: I think it varied. You know, you see figures of
Speaker 4: ten thousand thrown around all the time. Certainly the armies
Speaker 4: are bigger in some battles and smaller in others. I know,
Speaker 4: failings on failings battles and a few hundred I certainly
Speaker 4: compared to modern armies, you know, modern professional armies. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's a totally different game in terms of the number
Speaker 4: of personnel that can be marshaled, but it does vary.
Speaker 4: I mean, we do have battles of tens of thousands,
Speaker 4: twenty thousand that we that we see it. It's quite
Speaker 4: a few.
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's just like the idea of like how many
Speaker 1: people were in Sparta at the time when they were
Speaker 1: at their height, Like just in the society in general.
Speaker 4: Here we go, Jack, and I will tell you I
Speaker 4: don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I can find out, but I don't city or for dead,
Speaker 4: I have an answer to that question. I have a
Speaker 4: military history and focusing on this, but one important aspect
Speaker 4: of ancient Greek warfare that I do think is worth
Speaker 4: mentioning that people are very confused about, specifically when it
Speaker 4: comes to the Spartans, is this idea of professionalism, is
Speaker 4: that the average ancient Greek hoplight, which is what we
Speaker 4: call the you know, the heavy infantrymen with the bronze
Speaker 4: armor and the shield and the spear. That was not
Speaker 4: what they did, man. They were farmers, or they were
Speaker 4: leather workers or whatever it was they were doing, mostly farmers,
Speaker 4: and you would the horn would sound, and you would
Speaker 4: run to your ollar shed and you would grab a
Speaker 4: rusty old spear and shield your grandfather had hand down,
Speaker 4: and you would muster in the square with no training
Speaker 4: and almost no command. And the way they thought this
Speaker 4: fail anx, this block of dudes with shields overlapping was
Speaker 4: designed so that amateurs could pull it off. And that
Speaker 4: belief that professional warriors of any kind and certainly not
Speaker 4: the Spartan's.
Speaker 1: On Huh So they how did did they just get
Speaker 1: the reputation through sheer tyranny of like, of will of
Speaker 1: people like wanting that to be a real thing or.
Speaker 4: No, no, I mean they did one thing different. So
Speaker 4: in most ancient Greek city states, you have populations of
Speaker 4: young people, right they grow up, they start jockeying for power,
Speaker 4: and you send them off to found a colony. Here.
Speaker 4: You go, go get a boat, go make a town
Speaker 4: over there, do your own thing. And that's how most
Speaker 4: Greeks dealt with that, but not the Spartans, and largely
Speaker 4: because they weren't on a seafaring people, so they were
Speaker 4: the first, or maybe not the first, but among the
Speaker 4: first to subjugate their neighbors. And when they subjugated them,
Speaker 4: they enslaved them in a cast based slave system, which
Speaker 4: is to say, your kids will be born and die
Speaker 4: as slaves. And that was almost unique. The Sallians did
Speaker 4: it too, And because those slaves were doing all the
Speaker 4: agricultural work in the housework, well, the knights of Spartan society,
Speaker 4: who we call them oil, they were free. They were
Speaker 4: free to and people think they were free to train
Speaker 4: for war, but we have no evidence that they actually
Speaker 4: trained for war. We'd see them playing sports. In fact,
Speaker 4: Aristotle tells us that the Spartans were tougher than other
Speaker 4: Greeks in the field, not because they trained hard, but
Speaker 4: because they trained at all. And the reason they were
Speaker 4: able to do that was because there were a whole
Speaker 4: society of slates and on all their ship form.
Speaker 1: Wow. But just digging back into the film, like it's
Speaker 1: so thoroughly coated with eugenics. Like the the person who
Speaker 1: dooms them is like this hunchback who is mad at
Speaker 1: them because he wants to get to fight, I guess,
Speaker 1: and they're like, or just like join their society, and
Speaker 1: they're like this ain't no. Everyone gets a trophy as society.
Speaker 1: We are Sparta. And then he's like, all right, well
Speaker 1: then I'll cheat and like get you all killed and
Speaker 1: like So that's on top of the baby's all being
Speaker 1: thrown into into the ocean for not being able to
Speaker 1: do push ups.
Speaker 4: It's nonsense. It's nonsense.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The whole thing that fialtis, which by the way, is
Speaker 4: the modern Greek word for nightmare. That's how fucking famous
Speaker 4: this dude is, This dude who ever existed, is that
Speaker 4: it's a secret path across Cali Dromo. I have been
Speaker 4: to KLi Drome. I found every path over that mountain
Speaker 4: in a few days. There's no secrets there. And you're
Speaker 4: gonna tell me that Xerxes, the king of accumented Persian,
Speaker 4: which was the biggest and most sophisticated empire in the world,
Speaker 4: do the basic reconnaissance to find the paths over the mountain.
Speaker 4: Of course not, they knew, and they hired local malley
Speaker 4: and guides the people who lived there to show them
Speaker 4: a way. And that what was considered a betrayal by
Speaker 4: the Greeks. Right, these fuckers they went over and worked
Speaker 4: for the persons. They could blame them in a lot
Speaker 4: of cases. You have a much better life working for
Speaker 4: Xerxes than be different from Leona Dasser or any other
Speaker 4: Greek king that became this figure of fialities, this deformed
Speaker 4: punchback who was who is a betrayer? No, No, this
Speaker 4: was good intelligence on the part of the Persians.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a part where you talk about a poet
Speaker 1: having to emphasize these values because they need these values
Speaker 1: to actually be held up like they need them to
Speaker 1: be more. I remember writing about this back in at
Speaker 1: Cracked that, like a lot of the samurai myth some
Speaker 1: of the misconceptions about samurai are based on like the
Speaker 1: laws of the Samurai that were written because samurai did
Speaker 1: not like. The idea that samurai were super loyal to
Speaker 1: their master is based on these laws which are were
Speaker 1: put in place because they were not loyal to their master,
Speaker 1: like they were free. It was like be the equivalent of,
Speaker 1: you know, a modern day professional athlete. Like they're like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm going to go to whoever pays me money, because
Speaker 1: that's and so they wrote these laws to be like,
Speaker 1: you must be the most loyal And it's like reading
Speaker 1: the high school student handbook and being like, man, those
Speaker 1: high school students in the United States in the seventies
Speaker 1: were incredibly obedient. It turns out it's like, wait, what
Speaker 1: the fuck.
Speaker 4: It's like the student the student conduct code. You know,
Speaker 4: you should not playgiarize. Wow, man, these people never plagiarize.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it seems like there's some of that happening
Speaker 1: in Sparta as well.
Speaker 4: Right, Oh, absolutely, you're exactly right. And to that point
Speaker 4: on the Samurai the TV show Showgun is about to
Speaker 4: come out, which is a fictionalization of the actual real
Speaker 4: life Showgun took a galleys and his conquest of Japan
Speaker 4: turns on a betrayal. It turns on switching signs. So
Speaker 4: like all of that loyal onto death stuff, I guess
Speaker 4: there's some exceptions.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, turns out, but what what are some of
Speaker 1: the values that get emphasized with Spartans that weren't actually
Speaker 1: there beyond throwing their children over right?
Speaker 4: And I want to be I want to be clear here.
Speaker 4: You know. One of the things that kind of bugged
Speaker 4: me about this book is I absolutely wrote this book
Speaker 4: to deflate this icon for the mic Cernoviches of the
Speaker 4: world and for the real far writers. But what's happened
Speaker 4: because of the erosion of discourse in this country is
Speaker 4: that a lot of people took that book and we're like, yeah,
Speaker 4: the Spartans sucked, and like trying to use it to
Speaker 4: clobber people. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 4: The Spartans did not suck. They were humans, right, They
Speaker 4: were extraordinary sometimes and they were wame sometimes, like we
Speaker 4: all are. And that's the thing I'm driving at. So
Speaker 4: when we look at the poetry of Turteos, that's the
Speaker 4: poet you're talking about, and the things he extolled us,
Speaker 4: Certainly some Spartans were not doing those things. He was
Speaker 4: not exhorting them to press to one of the things
Speaker 4: the values. Don't get hit in the back right, That
Speaker 4: means you're running away. If you're young, don't let the
Speaker 4: old people fight. Get out there in front of it
Speaker 4: and get up in your enemy's face, put your shield
Speaker 4: on his shield, your foot next to his foot, close
Speaker 4: enough to kiss him, and do the job. There. These
Speaker 4: are the kinds of things that the Spartans are legendary for.
Speaker 4: Did they all do it? Hell no, some of them
Speaker 4: probably did, And that's important to remember too. And the
Speaker 4: poetry is so what makes me crazy is that there's
Speaker 4: so much that's fascinating about the Spartan It's like, look
Speaker 4: three hundred Jack, it's about a disaster they lost, you know,
Speaker 4: all these friggin nra guys come and take them, you know, like,
Speaker 4: come and take their weapons. The great quote of the
Speaker 4: autotos Jack Xerxes came and took them. After day he
Speaker 4: cut that dude's head off, He took their weapons away,
Speaker 4: and he paraded his head on a skin. So that's
Speaker 4: the cry of a loser. Why are you shouting that?
Speaker 4: Why not talk about real Spartan successes. Why not talk
Speaker 4: about the times they really work? Straud in there and
Speaker 4: that poetry of Tourteus. I'm so glad you brought it up.
Speaker 4: It's beautiful and it talks about real valor, it talks
Speaker 4: about how to be a warrior, and admitting that not
Speaker 4: everybody lived up to it doesn't make it any less extraordinary.
Speaker 4: And the fact that for most people they will never
Speaker 4: even know about Tritastes except listening to you on a
Speaker 4: top of their podcast talk about it breaks my heart.
Speaker 4: All they know about is just freaking bigoted, shitty movie
Speaker 4: which tells us craft story about people who ever existed.
Speaker 3: Going back to the movie, you know, three hundred is
Speaker 3: not it's by far not the first movie to glorify
Speaker 3: soldiers or this kind of training style or fighting in
Speaker 3: a way that you know, Ben's history a little bit
Speaker 3: or a lot of it, and just portrays this lifestyle
Speaker 3: that has you know, been co opted by right wing
Speaker 3: people or just in general bad actors as it were.
Speaker 3: And what I'm kind of curious about is, I know
Speaker 3: you are a real history historian, maybe not a pop
Speaker 3: culture historian, but what do you think is the inflection
Speaker 3: point for this kind of narrative that allowed three hundred
Speaker 3: to exist? Like before this, we had movies like Gladiator.
Speaker 3: We had movies like Braveheart. We had movies now, of course,
Speaker 3: not the exact same thing, but these movies that portray warfare,
Speaker 3: portray this kind of very like, you know, powerful, strong,
Speaker 3: prow warrior fighting for their people, et cetera. What is
Speaker 3: the inflection point that allows three hundred to exist? And
Speaker 3: why isn't that the thing that people held onto Why
Speaker 3: is it spartans these days?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that is a really fascinating question, and like, I
Speaker 4: don't know that I have an answer for it, but
Speaker 4: I do see one positive sign in a pop culture reference,
Speaker 4: and it is John Snow fighting. I don't know if
Speaker 4: you remember in Game of Thrones that scene with shields
Speaker 4: pressing in and all of them being crushed together and
Speaker 4: the absolute bloody, futile chaos. The what George rr. Martin
Speaker 4: e voked throughout Game of Thrones, both in the books
Speaker 4: and in the television shield, the capricious randomness of how
Speaker 4: ned Stark was killed, This idea that these great events
Speaker 4: and the turnings of them are so chaotic and random,
Speaker 4: and that that violence and the unpredictability of it and
Speaker 4: what it does to people, that is a change I'm seeing.
Speaker 4: I mean, there have been books before, also white on
Speaker 4: the Western front. There's that famous poem Delgat to Korum.
Speaker 4: As people have been talking before about how truly horrible
Speaker 4: war is, and I speak as someone who's been rocketed
Speaker 4: and shot at it, and I certainly look, you know,
Speaker 4: I went to Iraq a true believer, right Like, I
Speaker 4: went there to do something and had a first hand
Speaker 4: experience of how futile that was, and how when you
Speaker 4: introduce violence as a means of policy and try to
Speaker 4: change people with it, how that is completely not going
Speaker 4: to do what you want it to do and not useful.
Speaker 4: And I do see something in the pop culture that's changing.
Speaker 4: And as we live through Gossip, as we live through Ukraine,
Speaker 4: as we live through Africa on fire, you know, and
Speaker 4: like it looks like the straight of Taiwan might be next.
Speaker 4: Right with what China's doing with the Philippines, there is
Speaker 4: I feel a shift in the public's tolerance for that myth.
Speaker 4: And I see that in the push for a ceasefire
Speaker 4: right now and the sickness with Hillary Clinton coming out
Speaker 4: there and go look kind of have a suspire ale
Speaker 4: mostery group and people being like, all right, well, that's
Speaker 4: nice for you. In an air conditioned office. There's people
Speaker 4: dying here, how about that? And that is something I
Speaker 4: didn't hear wrong, I never heard it, or if I
Speaker 4: heard it, I heard it from peacenicks and hippies, and
Speaker 4: now I hear it from everybody. So maybe the inflection
Speaker 4: point is now, Dan And if so, Man, God, look,
Speaker 4: I have spent my entire life either at war or
Speaker 4: studying war, and you will not find someone more committed
Speaker 4: to endgames like it is just an absolute evil.
Speaker 3: Amen.
Speaker 1: Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining us on
Speaker 1: the Daily zeit Geist, for writ in the book, and yeah,
Speaker 1: where can people find you? Follow you all that good stuff?
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, thanks so much for having me. I'm easy.
Speaker 4: My name is spelled m y k E c O
Speaker 4: l E. So if you go to Mike Coole dot
Speaker 4: com spelled that way, you'll pull up my website. I
Speaker 4: am using social media. Look, social media, you got to
Speaker 4: use it when you're in public facing work. But it's poison.
Speaker 4: I don't care. Oh, Fred's is gonna be better than X.
Speaker 4: Threads are gonna be better than X. And here's all
Speaker 4: the people I'm gonna block. Threads is not gonna be
Speaker 4: better than X because the problem is us and we're
Speaker 4: on threads. So you will find me in all of
Speaker 4: these places and variations of that name x, Facebook, Threads,
Speaker 4: Instagram as Mike Cole, but don't expect me to post much,
Speaker 4: and certainly don't expect me to weigh in on political
Speaker 4: and social issues about which I know knowledge.
Speaker 1: Is there a work of media that you've been enjoying, Yes,
Speaker 1: So I.
Speaker 4: Would like to direct people to the Instagram account of
Speaker 4: an author named Christian Cameron, and you can find him
Speaker 4: at at Christian c h r I s t I
Speaker 4: A and Underscore Cameron c A m e r O
Speaker 4: and Underscore author.
Speaker 3: A U t h O R.
Speaker 4: The reason I want you to check him out is
Speaker 4: not just for his writing. And he paints toy soldiers
Speaker 4: and he's a total nerd, but he is a real reenactor.
Speaker 4: He is a guy who gets every stitch of thread,
Speaker 4: every scrap of metal and rivet in the armor that
Speaker 4: he wears exactly right. And he goes out there and
Speaker 4: he fights. And if you want to understand how ancient
Speaker 4: medieval people fought, you can read every book in the world,
Speaker 4: you can go to every museum in the world, but
Speaker 4: until you put on that gear and you get toe
Speaker 4: to toe to someone, you will not be able to
Speaker 4: ask and answer the critical questions. And he does it,
Speaker 4: and he does it right. And if you see those pictures,
Speaker 4: you will be looking into the past and it is amazing.
Speaker 1: Don you give an example of like one of the
Speaker 1: things that you feel like you figure out from the reenactment,
Speaker 1: because you kind of mentioned that in the book and
Speaker 1: that was kind of new to me. I wasn't really
Speaker 1: familiar with yet the idea of using historical reenactments to
Speaker 1: actually do research.
Speaker 4: Sure, so one of the big questions among ancient warfare
Speaker 4: nerds I don't thin anybody else cares about this is
Speaker 4: this idea of that when the phalanx clashes clash, did
Speaker 4: they push shield the shield and push against each other
Speaker 4: or did they stand off and fence with their spears?
Speaker 4: And that actually makes a big difference on how those
Speaker 4: battles were fought. And then you can check that again
Speaker 4: it's the written sources and tell if these guys are
Speaker 4: full of shit or not. Well, when you get behind
Speaker 4: a shield, I have discovered some people disagree with me,
Speaker 4: but this has been my experience. Man, I do not
Speaker 4: want to be three feet away from me. I want
Speaker 4: to be right up there where I can use my
Speaker 4: ass and where my face isn't exposed because I'm up close.
Speaker 4: Like when you're what happens when you're boxing with someone
Speaker 4: and you feel outmatched, you grapple man. You don't stand
Speaker 4: back and get punch in the face. And the point
Speaker 4: is these kinds of little questions you can only answer
Speaker 4: them by doing them. And for years, professional historian scholars
Speaker 4: PhDs they really and they don't do it anymore, but
Speaker 4: they used to really look down their nose at nerds
Speaker 4: making the armor. Well what do you guys do? And
Speaker 4: this is costplay? No, no, no, it is not costplay.
Speaker 4: It is history and that account I just give him
Speaker 4: Christian Cameron, author, that is the best example of it
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 1: All right, amazing Daniel, Yes, sir, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for joining. Where can people find you? Follow you? And
Speaker 1: what's the work a media you've been enjoying? Honestly you can.
Speaker 3: I deactivated Twitter, I'm barely using Instagram anymore, and I
Speaker 3: am divorcing myself from social media entirely. So I'd prefer
Speaker 3: it if you didn't find me to answer my question.
Speaker 3: It's not really a question from earlier. But when you're
Speaker 3: talking about being in a public facing kind of area
Speaker 3: or a public facing business like we all are, I have,
Speaker 3: and I'm very lucky to be in the position that
Speaker 3: I am right here. I love working with Jack, I
Speaker 3: love working at iHeart, I love making podcasts, and I
Speaker 3: found that using my position now to platform people who
Speaker 3: would like to use their voices and be out there
Speaker 3: is the best use of my work in forward facing media.
Speaker 3: So instead of being like, here's what I think about something,
Speaker 3: I'm in the business of here's what this person thinks
Speaker 3: about something, and trying to do that as opposed to saying,
Speaker 3: whatever the hell I think, because truly it doesn't matter
Speaker 3: because what I care about is smash Burgers and who
Speaker 3: is currently winning Dancing with the Stars even though the
Speaker 3: season just ended, so honestly, my opinions are so it
Speaker 3: was Soshi Gomez. Did you see the Do you see
Speaker 3: the Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness she plays?
Speaker 3: I can't I literally can't remember the Marvel superhero's name
Speaker 3: because there's so many at this point, I can't remember.
Speaker 3: But she was in that and she was great, and
Speaker 3: she was really good on Dancing with the Stars, anyway,
Speaker 3: that's not the point. A piece of social media or
Speaker 3: a piece of media that I have been liking that
Speaker 3: is not. That is the new Miyazaki film The Boy
Speaker 3: and the Heron. Go see it. Go see a movie,
Speaker 3: Go see an animated picture. Go to the movies and
Speaker 3: participate in the culture of Japanese animation of Hyo Miyazaki,
Speaker 3: an incredible director. Go see the movie. And if you
Speaker 3: haven't had yourself a nice meal, go to someone who's
Speaker 3: cooking food on the street and go get it. If
Speaker 3: you're happened to me in Los Angeles, go to Brothers
Speaker 3: Cousins Tacos, my favorite taco stand in Los Angeles, because
Speaker 3: I will be deeply missing it when I leave for
Speaker 3: the East Coast. But yeah, other than that, go support
Speaker 3: your local business. Go see a movie, and then go
Speaker 3: follow Mike there you go, Thank you my pleasure.
Speaker 1: You can find me on Twitter at Jack Underscore Obrian
Speaker 1: liking things like this tweet from Jesse McLaren, who tweeted
Speaker 1: shout out to the Beach Boys for landing on the
Speaker 1: festive lyric Christmas comes this time each year, and then
Speaker 1: Andy Ryan tweeted two elderly English ladies greeting each other
Speaker 1: and it's alo Vera and evening Primrose Oil. Alo Vera
Speaker 1: Evening Primrose Oil. I just enjoyed the good, wholesome Twitter fun.
Speaker 1: You can find us on Twitter at daily Zeikeeist. We're
Speaker 1: at d Daily Zeikeeist on Instagram. We have a Facebook
Speaker 1: fanpage and a website Daily zeitgeist dot com where we
Speaker 1: post our episodes and our footnote food doors where we
Speaker 1: link off to the information that we talked about in
Speaker 1: today's episode, as well as a song that we think
Speaker 1: you might enjoy. DJ Daniel Goodman is there a song
Speaker 1: that you would recommended people?
Speaker 3: There? There always is, and it might be a little
Speaker 3: much for some people, But since I rarely get to
Speaker 3: come here, I'm going to I'm going to sing a
Speaker 3: song of drum and bass that I love so much.
Speaker 3: A British group, Chasing Status, just released a new album
Speaker 3: called two Rough, Volume one, and one of the songs
Speaker 3: on that album, called on the Block, is such a
Speaker 3: massive tune. I am just in my car, gritting my teeth,
Speaker 3: driving the speed limit, but with my hands tightly gripped
Speaker 3: on the steering wheel, just banging my head. So if
Speaker 3: you are into something that is going to keep you
Speaker 3: up at night, or power you through a long drive,
Speaker 3: or get your workout going, whatever it is that you
Speaker 3: need something driving to get you going. So listen to
Speaker 3: Chas and Status' new album Too Rough, Volume one. The
Speaker 3: song on the Block is a real like ooh, it'll
Speaker 3: get you moving songs. So anyway, that's my recommendation on
Speaker 3: the block with Chasing Status.
Speaker 1: We will listen to that in the footnotes. The daily
Speaker 1: es Eite Guys is the production of iHeartRadio. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio ap Apple
Speaker 1: Podcasts or wherever you go to listen to podcasts. That's
Speaker 1: going to do it for us this morning. We are
Speaker 1: back this afternoon to tell you what is trending and
Speaker 1: we will talk to you all then Bye bye