Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Sparta

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why Sparta is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode. Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Sparta, known for being Greek. Famous for this is Sparta. Nobody thinks much about it. So let's have some fun. Let's find out why Sparta is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Cephalopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, the 300th episode of Secret.

A hundredth episode of Secret. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting. People think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt. I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-ist. Katie Golden. Katie. Yes. I'm going to say Siff 300 times. Sip, Sip, Sip, Sip, Sip, Sip, Sip, Sip, Sip, Sip, Sip, Sip, Sip, Sip, Sip, Sip. I'll do it later. I mean, with that raw material, I can just make it sound like you did, you know? Yeah. Just copy paste a lot. Yeah. That doesn't count. Alex. I'm, I'm, I'm going to say it 300 times. No way I. No way I. You just have, like, more fingers when you're done. for no reason. Yeah.

Well, yeah. But yeah, Katie, what is your relationship to or opinion of Sparta? Sparta, I know from the very sensual movie, 300. Yeah. That one, that was a great movie because of all of the man butts that they showed. It was, I do really like how it's become conservative-coded. Sparta and all these things when it's like there's so many man butts in it

which I think personally I think is great. I like man butts and I'm in favor of a little bit just to even out the odds a little bit of male objectification I just find it funny that it's become this kind of like like oh this is when men were men and it's just like Calvin Klein ad

for three hours. Right. And maybe they dive into a blue pool that represents the fragrance and maybe they kind of touch each other. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I have been to Greece actually and I went to the, there's like a place that is, that has a memorial, I guess, to Sparta, the, the the Spartans, the famous 300, we went and visited the site where they claim the 300 fought and fell against, what was it, Turkey? Sort of, Persia, yeah, which included Turkey. Right.

And we had a tour guide who was very credulous saying, like, yeah, this definitely happened. And I kept going, like, but did it? And he's like, yep. I was like, but did it really? He was like, yep. I was like, but didn't really? He's like, you know what? Just quiet.

Get back in the bus. Yeah, that's cool you've been to Thermopyla. That's basically more famous than Sparta itself. And we'll talk about why kind of no one goes to Sparta now and also all about Thermopylae and more. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It turns out the number 300 is even more associated with Sparta than you'd think.

I love history. And years ago, I made a popular YouTube video about Sparta and the Persian Wars. And when episode 300 came up, I thought, why not do way more stories about Sparta? Because I'm better at history than I used to be. And they're going to talk about. I'm about the same at history as I used to be, which is, you know, not very good. That's cool. But I like learning.

As cool that you've been there, especially Thermopylae, that is a mountain. and pass where there is a battle where there were 300 Spartans, but also some other people fighting the Persians. It was like a choke point, you know. But yeah, let's get into all things Sparta, because, yeah, they are just famous for these soldiers on this one battle, and there's so much more going on every episode. We lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called, I see a little numberretto of some stats. Alex Smith, Alex Smith, will you do the SIF podcast?

Number bolts and lightning, very, very counting me. A regression, a regression, a regression, a regression. Oh, there we go. Galsi and Richieo. Oh, Katie Freest out that. The name was submitted by Action Populated on the Discord. Thank you, Action Populated. We have a new name for this segment every week.

Please make a misleading as possible submit your Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com. And the first numbers are about the 300 guys. The first number is less than 20 meters wide. less than 20 meters wide is the narrowest width of that mountain pass called Thermopyla. And so it was like geographically strategically well chosen for what was a real battle. There was a battle of Thermopyla where the army of the Persian king Xerxes invades Greece. In the year 480 BC he invades with an army of at least 100,000 soldiers. There's no good estimates, but it was a vast army, especially for ancient times.

Also, we have better estimates of the size of his empire. He ruled about 14 million people. The Persian Empire, those 14 million people were about 12% of all humans at the time. It was a truly vast country. Wow. But the Spartans tried to hold them off there because at a narrowness of less than 20 meters wide, it only took about 30 Spartans with their wide shields to obstruct that whole pass. And so they could actually obstruct at 10 ranks deep with 300 guys.

That's pretty wild. So I have an admission to make. I've never actually watched the whole 300 movie all the way through. Here's the thing, Alex. You get it. I get it. Like I watch a little bit of it. And I'm like, yeah, metal bikinis on dudes.

I love it. And then I get bored. So like... Frankly, that's good. You'll know more about Sparta than someone who's seen it. You know what I mean? Like, yeah. Have you seen it, Alex?

I've seen that, and I've seen the sequel they made called 300 Rise of an Empire. Right. Which is like a deeply inaccurate title for what happened in history. But yeah. Yeah, but I, like, I'm trying to remember if there was a, was there like, did they depict the mountain pass where it's like a really, because I remember it being a much larger battlefield in those. scenes than just like a little dinky, uh, hiking path. The movie tries to make it epic and sweeping because it's like not as cinematic if everybody's kind of crowded and sweaty in that way, you know? They want the,

the hot sweaty, you know? Right. I mean, man, missed opportunity. Yeah. And yeah, and it is a real battle, but also almost everything about. it has been mischaracterized, especially by the movie. You mean, you mean persons weren't like eight feet tall with gold banana hammocks and like weird, sort of a bunch of weird discs sort of all over their bodies? Right. And he's surrounded by what I can only call gimps, you know? It's not great.

It's not, come on, but. So I just before we keep going, I do want to say that I'm aware of the movies sort of being a little bit like weirdly fascist and a little bit weirdly racist and ablest and sexist and homophobic. That being said, I know that they were trying to make, what was he, Xerxes? Xerxes, yeah. Yeah, like kind of villainous in the sense of like, oh, look at this guy. but he's very cool. Right. Yeah, sort of an underdressed Darth Vader, you know what I mean?

Yeah, it's cool. Yeah. Like, I'm supposed to be like, oh, this guy is the portrait of hedonism and badness and stuff. But it's like, but he's got a presence. He's got Riz. You'll see this? But I don't think that was really historically accurate to the person. version aesthetic at the time? I don't think so.

Yeah. And like the one other thing to say about that movie is it's based on a comic, a graphic novel. And to me, the graphic novel actually reads a little more like, this is the story the Greeks told themselves. It's not necessarily realistic. And then the movie just throws that out and takes it completely literally. But I respect the Frank Miller graphic novel a little more, even though Frank Miller has turned out to be a creepy fascist, personally. Right. Yeah. I mean, it is, it's like, of course they would be like, yeah, we lost just because like the, the Persians were like 10 feet tall. And also it totally wasn't our fault.

Right. Like, we were great. We only lost because they were, they cheated and they were 10 feet tall. Yeah, and let's get into further specifics of why the movie's fake. One key source this week is an amazing history book. Depending on your country, it was either published last year or this year. It's called Sparta, the Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower. And it's by Andrew Bayliss, who's the head of the Department of Classics,

ancient history and archaeology at the University of Birmingham. He writes that there really is this battle. There really is a truly outnumbered Spartan force. And it also made strategic sense because they basically made time for the other Greeks to get ready to fight. Like it was not intended to be a victory on its own. But one of the biggest myths is that there were way more than 300 Spartans fighting for the Greeks. The real number is about 7,000 soldiers. And some were from Greek cities allied with Sparta.

Others were from cities that Sparta brutally subjugated. Sparta ran an organization called the Peloponnesian League, which was a group of cities Sparta controlled by proxy. They had overthrown the previous leaders and installed different ones through force. and then also there were probably at least some of Sparta's slaves on the site because Sparta as we'll talk about throughout the show was fundamentally a slaver society the entire thing depended on slavery I mean okay but hang on I'm trying to think of a good butt

nope never mind exactly no buts it was going to be about it was going to be about the butts in the movie 300 But even that I don't think can really, you know, justify slavery. Yeah, there's a good butt. And this is maybe the biggest way the graphic novel is okay and the movie is terrible, is that especially in both of them, it's Spartan citizens talking about what a land of freedom and greatness they are, when they are constantly oppressing slaves to make that possible.

So if this is the story the Greeks tell themselves, that's what the top Spartans would have told them. themselves. Right. And another key source this week is writing by Professor Paul Cartlidge, who's the chaired professor of Greek culture at Cambridge. And he says that the dominant feature of Spartan society was that you have a small, tippy, top tier of people who were the only holders of Spartan citizenship. And then at least two tiers below them of people who were oppressed or fully enslaved in a really brutal way. So the movie doesn't show any of those. slaves usually carrying the gear of the army in real life. Yeah.

And then lots of other scenes are either invented or are ludicrous stories from Spartans. There's a ridiculous story by a Greek named Deodorus of King Leonidas personally charging Xerxes throne on the battlefield and forcing him to flee in cowardice. It's impossible for that to have happened. Leonidas also was 60 years old at the time of the battle. He does not have a 60-year-old physique in the movie. Was he like, was he like Liver King 60? Honestly, potentially.

We'll get it to it. But either way, he's not the actor who's, I think, 36, Gerard Butler when they made the movie. And in real life, Leonidas's wife, Gorgow was more than 10 years younger, was also his niece. The movie skips that. You know, look, for back then, that's like the least that they're. our worries, I gotta say. Yeah. Still wrong.

Still gross. But that's true. Gosh, there was a lot of gross stuff happening. It's hard to keep track. No, I agree. 2,500 years ago, that was not that weird, especially for royalty. Yeah. Right.

I mean, again, not saying that's cool, but. And the other other weird thing about the movie is maybe the most famous scene is before the battle when a person. The Persian ambassador visits Leonidas, demands tribute, but then Leonidas shouts, this is Sparta, and kicks him into a well and he falls to his death. That's kind of a meme and stuff, you know. It turns out in only one way that's extremely accurate. The Persians really did send ambassadors to demand tribute. The typical tribute was symbolic earth and water, just dirt and water, but it means you've surrendered.

And Spartans really did throw that guy down a well to his death when he did that. That's actually real is weird. Oh, like, did they kick him in the chest and did he go down in slow mo, though? Oh, I wish. But almost everything else about it is fake, especially because that meeting was long before the battle, and apparently Leonidas was not king yet. Leonidas's father and his co-king were the two kings of Sparta, who would have done that negotiating and killed that guy. They had co-kings back then?

like King 1 and King 2? Yeah, we'll talk all about Sparta's government. They had two kings. Hmm. Was the dominant feature of one branch of the Spartan government. What if the kings disagreed on something? Then kind of whichever king could convince the rest of the government got to do what he wanted to do. Hmm.

It's weird, yeah. Yeah. And then another thing is Sparta was not special in this. Apparently the city of Athens also received a Persian ambassador. and chucked him into a deep pit that they used to execute criminals. So this is not like unique about Sparta. Greek cities were hardcore kind of across the land there. They seem to like to throw people in holes.

That chuck-in-a-well thing seems so faken for a movie, and it's actually kind of realistic. I love that. Right. That's like the one thing. That's the one thing pretty realistic. That battle, but also later events, the Spartans really were celebrated.

across Greece as leading the fight against Persians. It ended up being a lot of Athenian Navy doing more of the actual victories, but Thermopy and other stuff really did kind of win the day in the end. Another major issue with the Thermopyla story is that's not how Spartans always acted, because the big hook basically of 300 is that all 300 of them were willing to die for Sparta. But in many battle situations, Spartans just surrendered. one number there is 120 soldiers. That's how many Spartans surrendered to the Athenians at the Battle of Spacteria in 425 BC.

That's just one of many stories of Spartans surrendering and not fighting to the death. They were humans. Not everybody wants to fight to the death all the time. Well, you know, I guess it depends on how much your leather sort of thong chafes. because I think at a certain point you're like, you know what? Death is just fine. You know how stinky it must have been, Alex?

Extraordinarily stinky. Right? Yeah. So just all crammed in there like with only 20 meters wide all these men with like, you know, nothing but twixt the skin of their butts

except for leather. That, you know, that's not going to be good for anyone. The Persians are. like, don't fight to the death. We invented ointment. You can just have some. You can just have some, but they don't hear. You know, it's hard to hear with the helmet. Yeah. Yeah, that's another thing. Because, like, the Spartan helmet with the, like, feathery business on top, is that realistic? Yeah, apparently that's realistic. And then there's a lot of art, like, statues, especially, of Spartan soldiers wearing that kind of thing. And then also, apparently there's a trope in

archaeology where Andrew Baylis says a lot of those statues have been found and just been described as statues of King Leonidas. But the people who did the dig didn't actually check. It could have been kind of any Spartan. But Leonidas is so famous from this story. It's made the like art historical record kind of fuzzy. Right. Because I know like helmets are often, that's like a point of contention often where helmets are not exactly accurate. And it's just like whatever is the coolest, most iconic helmet that you can find that's like vaguely from that era is used to kind of like describe like hundreds and hundreds of years of different armor styles. Totally. Yeah. And another weird thing about these Spartan citizen

soldiers is their gear actually would have matched in a lot of cases in a way that was kind of unique in the ancient world. We'll talk about why a little bit later. But the last super bizarre thing about the 300 Spartans at Thermopyla is our takeaway number one. There is more than one story about a specific group of 300 Spartans fighting to the death for their values. Hmm. There was a different 300 guys 65 years earlier. Okay. Because I was going to say, if it's like, if the true number of soldiers for this was like 7,000, you could always, well, how many times does 300 go into 7,000?

Because then you could be like, now it's these 300 guys turn. But you were saying 60 years earlier, there was another 300 situation. Yes. And this story was famous enough in its time that it might have even kind of influenced the documentation of Thermopyla. People were like, oh, the trope of 300 Spartans. Sure, sure, sure. Interesting. They had TV tropes back then.

Carving.org into stone. Yeah. Backslash. Yeah, this is, it's an. event 545 BC, so it's 65 years earlier. It was nicknamed the Battle of the Champions. And it's because Sparta and maybe their greatest rival before they fought with Athens, another Greek city called Argos. Sparta and Argos were going to fight a whole war. And then they said, wait a minute, everybody dies in a whole war. What if we each pick 300 guys?

and then a battle of R300 versus year 300 decides it. I mean, that seems actually pretty sensible. Right. It's like pretty normal, honestly. And if folks know a little ancient Greek history, they might know there was not a comprehensive like Greek empire. Unlike Egypt, Rome, China, Persia, Meso-American empires, Greece was a bunch of different city states. And a lot of them had bitter rivalries. and this fight in 545 BC was over a pretty tiny amount of land called Thyrea.

So they said, okay, let's just have 300 guys on each side fight less people die. But unfortunately, the rules were not clear. And so what happens is there's a total bloodbath. Oh, dear. 597 guys die, which leaves three guys left. It's two argives and one Spartan. And so when there's just two argives and one Spartan, Spartan left. I'm on the Spartan side, honestly. I think the two Argyves needed to kill the Spartan to

win. But the two argives said, we're up two to one. We have won the battle. We are the victors. We're going home. We're celebrating. And then the Spartan says, they ran away. I am the victor. I'm also going to despoil the corpses of my enemies to prove that I've won the battle because they would be stopping me if I lost the battle. Wait, what does despoil mean? Was he peeing on people? Alex? I really want to know. The sources were not clear. And I think because it's like gross or sacrilegious or bad or so, you know, like it's not great. Was he like posing them in sort of embarrassing ways? Like, what does this mean? If anyone played the video game Halo back in the day, I just think of that like making your guy crouch a bunch over your defeated enemy. It feels like

one of those. Yeah. So anyway, both sides decided they wanted. a battle even though you would think it would have been clearer. And I'm kind of on the Spartan guy's side. They needed to kill him. But after this, both sides think they won, so then they fight a whole bitter war after all, which kills many, many more people. And apparently Sparta won but received massive losses that they didn't think were worth the piece of land.

Okay. And then the other other thing with it is allegedly this one Spartan soldier, his name is a three at us. apparently a three of us killed himself. This is confusing because you said it's one Spartan soldier, but you said it's a three of us. I know. Sorry.

I was trying to get that joke in, but I did already hear Alex say that he killed himself, and now that makes the joke land a little weird, so I apologize. I put you in the top spot. His name sounds like, I'm saying I'm on three of this, three of that. half a dozen of the other, yeah. But this story to me is stupider than the later 300 Spartans,

because not only was it for not very much land and an inter-Greek thing, but a three-at-us apparently killed himself after his victory was disputed because, you know, there are stories of Spartans surrendering, but there really was extreme public shame for a Spartan soldier who lived through a battle that they lost and came home. So a three-ed-us, just when there was the mere potential and debate, of whether he won the battle, he killed himself. Was that like an honor thing or? Mostly an honor thing. And then there were also Spartan laws about specific public shaming.

So he maybe didn't want to go through that either. Yeah, fair enough. But yeah. And so oddly, this dumb fight among Greeks, to me it actually is representative of the real kind of Spartan wars across their history. And to get into that, we have lots more takeaways. starting with takeaway number two. Sparta might be the most extreme example of social engineering and human history.

Ooh. The Spartans are famous for, oh, this is a society of warriors. And they achieved that, but also did a whole lot more completely bizarre and creepy stuff, controlling everything in people's lives in their city in order to achieve that. And speaking too generally about all of humanity, it's hard to do that at a bigger size than like a tiny tribe or cult or something. Sparta did it at a whole thousands and thousands of people level. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting.

So it's like they, were they fairly isolated? Yes. And they weren't really isolated geographically. Their city was between mountain ranges that cut it off somewhat geographically. But more importantly, they had strict laws and rules against especially men. leaving Sparta. They were only supposed to leave the area for wars or for athletic competitions. And they made it basically illegal to leave otherwise because they were concerned those guys might

start living any other way, which is nuts. Right. It's just hard to leave town in ancient times anyway. But they said, no, you can't leave. You have to do the regimented Spartan life all of the time. So it was just like a big prison. Yet it reminds me of the possibly true U.S. stereotypes of somewhere like North Korea, where you think everybody's only consuming state media and kind of brainwashed. Right, right. I mean, it's definitely, like, North Korea is definitely authoritarian. It's just hard to know how brainwashed people are versus, like, they kind of have to seem like they're brainwashed or they get punished.

Right, right. Like, I don't mean to pick out North Korea. It's just like very, very. very difficult to find a parallel. Right. Yeah. And yeah, we all just think, oh, they were these 300 soldiers, but they became that through extremely comprehensive social engineering. And key sources here will link both the key sources I mentioned before, Professor Andrew Bayliss of the University of Birmingham's book and Professor Paul Cartlidge of the University

of Cambridge interviewed by Popular Archaeology magazine. Originally, Sparta was just some farmlands. and it only became remarkable due to specific social engineering stuff. For many centuries, it was just some land between two mountain ranges, and then around 1,000 BC, four different villages gradually became a community. And it was such just a farming town. They named it after farming. Apparently, Sparta comes from an ancient Greek verb, which means ISO, Spiro,

which makes Sparta the sown land. It was just a farming community. That's it. Oh, so, I'm sorry. I was like trying to, I was thinking of sewing as in sewing with a needle. Oh, yeah. Not sewing as in that famous tweet where it's like, me while sowing. Ha ha, yes, this is awesome.

Me while reaping. What the hell this. Right. Which I think is biblical. But yeah, it's the old old sewing. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and also Sparta was great farmland just because of the mountains and also the warm weather.

Apparently they could do two harvests in a year because it was so wet and warm. Also, most other Greek cities built walls around themselves. Sparta did not. And later they claimed, oh, it's because we're such mighty warriors. We don't need to. But it's actually because most of it was surrounded by mountains in a way where walls kind of wouldn't add any more defensive help. It didn't really matter. It also sounds like people might not have wanted to go there because it sounds like it'd be a big downer to go try to visit and then not be allowed to leave.

If you're a tourist you could leave, but yes, it was kind of, but it would be a weird place to visit if everyone's in kind of this extreme social engineering project. Yeah. It's not the best hang. It's like it's a very, it's like a very toxic commune. Basically, yeah, because what happens is these villages coalesce into a city. We also don't have great historical records until it had been around for a while, partly because guys like Thucydides and Herodotus who sort of invented Western style, fact-based history weren't working yet. So all we know is by around the 600s, there's a city called Sparta, and they've come up with a totally unique government, which will be. talk about, but they've also come up with one of the most brutal and slavery-based societies in human history. And the reason they did that is they made a different choice than the rest of

Greece. The rest of the Greek city-states said, our population keeps growing, we can't feed and house everybody. Our answer is colonies. We'll just make new cities all over the Mediterranean. Spartan's answer was, we will conquer and enslave everyone around us in Greece. And so in the 710 BC, they start with a city called Messenia. They accuse them of killing one of the two Spartan kings and then instead of merely seizing their land and stuff, they create a

three-tier society. The bottom tier is slaves called halets who were hopelessly oppressed. It was legal for any Spartan citizen to kill any Hallet at any time. It was an intentionally cruel system in order

to keep them in line. Then there's like a middle tier of people with no rights but not quite slaves called periacoi they tried to earn wages working for the spartan citizens and then like the very tippy top is basically a society of a bunch of rich plantation owner guys but if they get to be the only citizens in all of society like the government distributed a set of land and slaves to each and every one of them It makes all those like pro-Sparta, like, guys online with their weird fixation on Sparta. Kind of interesting.

Yes. Yeah, every right winger with like a Moldun Labbe hat or whatever, which means come and take it at the Thermopy reference. They, I guess, didn't check any of this stuff because it's pretty rough. Oh, I don't know if I'd say that, Alex. I don't know. Yeah, and this was so extremely socially engineered that their appearance and activities every day were curtailed by how a Spartan citizen was supposed to act. They on purpose grew long hair because apparently in ancient Greek culture, it was believed a long haired person could not do manual labor. And they were basically required to not do manual labor to prove that they were an elevated kind of.

of human and like spend their time on arch. The Spartans were more artistic than they have a reputation for, but also a ton of time on exercise and military training. Right. Which is interesting because I feel like the movie 300 really kind of made it seem like, all we do is fight and war, and that makes us cool and good. And we're not these Ponzi, like other people who like jewelry. Yes, and also their fixation on being a military was basically because you have estimates, say, about 9,000 Spartan citizens total, just 9,000.

And they were lording over up to 150,000 halets, let alone periacoit, too. So those few Spartan citizens needed to be extremely armed and trained and ready to oppress their own slaves who were funding their life. So it's almost more of a military to just oppress their own people and not to go out and defend freedom across Greece or something. Huh. I mean, I can't think of any modern parallels there. Moving on. Yeah, yeah. And these Spartan guys also on purpose with the long hair, they also wore what was supposed to be a ratty and rustic military robe.

but it was made with the same shellfish dye that made Tyrion purple for Roman emperors later. Like they all wore and affected like, oh, I'm just a rough and tumble regular guy cloak that matched each other and was extremely expensive. Like slaves funded and made it for them. Again, weird. I just, I can't think of any modern parallels.

It's so interesting. Yeah, yeah. Like how unique and like, like, nobody like pretends to be a downer. earth, folksy kind of salt of the earth guy while being wealthy and oppressing others. That just doesn't happen. J.D. Vance with a gun.J.F. Yeah. And then also those guys spent their entire childhood and adult lives living a specific way. Every male citizen had to serve in the army until age 60

in this era. And not a lot of people lived to 60. And from childhood as young, young boys, they were removed from their families to live and train together under state education and supervision. Males also had to eat all of their meals in a kind of barracks mess hall. And the food, there were plenty of calories for the adults, but the food was gross, kind of on purpose as a marker of this being a Spartan thing. The main menu item was something that roughly translates as black soup, because apparently it was made with so much animal blood you could see and taste the animal blood still. Right.

Which is very cling on to me. Like, it's not how people live. It also comes back to liver king. Exactly. That's why when you said liver king, I was like, maybe. Yeah, you know. They must have been so constipated. Right.

And then another part of educating the young boys is that they were simply not given enough food on purpose. And the goal of that was. to drive the boys to maybe hunt more food, but probably go and seize and steal food, especially from the slaves. And this was considered part of their training. It was a form of teaching them toughness and creative thinking.

And they were only punished if they got caught. And the reasoning was you're not stealing effectively enough. I caught you. Ah, I see. Huh. So they hope that would lead them to be soldiers who could improvise in a difficult situation. Kids have it so easy these days. We don't even make them steal food from slaves.

Right. We got to toughen up. We got to toughen our boys up by feeding them pigs' blood and starving them. Yes. And it's sort of like, I guess, the next parallel apologies to fraternity members, but it's sort of like fraternity hazing. Then once they aged into being considered adult men, they were treated better and did this horrible social engineering to the next generation of boys.

Because they survived it, so I can't. you know. Yeah, like you finally get to be the one wearing the oppression gloves that, I don't know if they had those, but oppression boot sandals, oppression sandals, there we go. There was a Spartan kind of government official whose job title translates to boy herder because it was like their job to punish and hayes and depress the young boys into being the kind of Spartan citizen they're supposed to be. Boy herter or boy herder like a.

herder like sheep, yeah. Oh, okay. I guess either one works. But that's fair. Yeah. Man, this makes me mad. As the mother of a fresh new boy, like, don't you, don't hurt boys? Yeah, yeah, same. And yeah, and the system, we already said guys were legally not allowed to leave Sparta unless they had a war or athletics. The Spartans love the ancient Olympics, partly because they were just free to train. because they weren't working for a living. And then Sparta, the slavery was not particularly racially or ethnically driven, but Sparta was extremely xenophobic, and apparently they would hold regular violent purges of anybody they considered foreign in Spartan territory.

Because the concern was foreign ideas would undermine the social engineering. But were these, so who were these people, though, because it sounds like these would still be slaves that, They brought there. Their slaves were basically neighboring communities of Greeks. I see. Andrew Bayliss talks about the Greeks having at least four different concepts of ethnicities within ancient Greece. But it was more about these are regions that we exploit rather than this person has the wrong skin color.

Right. So it's like they would like see neighboring regions get mad that they're not Spartans like them and then purge them? Yeah. And their whole region of Greece was called Laconia. And if you look at a map, it's basically the southernmost chunk of that peninsula. So they tried to exploit as much of that as they could. The main limit on it was just each place they took over meant more slaves, which meant more overseeing and oppression that this limited group of citizens needed to do.

So there's also like a kind of push and pull tug of war across Spartan. history of we can't get too big because then we can't oppress everybody so we shrink back down but then we want to get bigger. It's really weird. Yeah, there's a little bit of cognitive dissonance there. Yeah, and then the other cognitive dissonance is in their time Spartans were considered to have the most enlightened government in all of Greece and maybe the world, at least by other Greeks. Uh, what?

Oh, okay. It doesn't sound like it. I mean, they're feeding boys' blood and killing slaves. Yeah, and not everybody approved of it. One other piece of context is that most of the other Greek cities, including Athens, practice slavery one way or another. They just didn't do the enslave an entire region caste system kind of approach that Sparta did. So they didn't perceive it as totally unfree the way it was.

But because this limited group of a few thousand Spartan citizens was on the tippy top of society, they basically gave each other more say in government than any other Greek had, especially before Athens had its version of democracy. I see. So it's like, as long as you're in the good group, then it's great because you get a say and things. And then every, I mean, you know, that's pretty typical. of people throughout all of time? Sparta is not nearly exactly like the Confederacy, but it's another Confederacy kind of thing. Like all those guys in the stupid Confederate government

felt pretty free. Sure. Yeah. Right. And their government system dated so far back, it was attributed to a mythical figure coming up with it. A mythical guy named Lycurgus allegedly set up three branches of Spartan government. There was a pair of kings, partly because Sparta had kind of coalesced from different villages,

so rivalries among the villages led to two royal houses. The second branch was an oligarchy council, so like 30 elders, including the two kings. And then the third branch was a rotating series of five elected citizens who were so powerful they could depose the kings, and Sparta's kings could also be fined or punished, like they weren't absolute rulers at all. And apparently, because of such a tiny group of Spartan citizens,

almost all of them held one of the government offices sometime in their life. So despite having kings and oligarchs and stuff, they all felt pretty empowered. They felt like they were in a good situation. So it was just kind of like a, it was like a frat. Yeah, I apologize to fraternity members, but some elements of what you do, including the Greek letters, I guess, are relevant here. Look, some of you could be cool, but I definitely know there's still a lot of fraternities out. they're encouraging impressionable young guys to like chug bottles of soy sauce which can

kill you. The main thing I regret is comparing them to a slave society. But otherwise there's some stuff. Yeah. It's unfair. I'm sorry. Well, all I want to say is doesn't matter whether you're a Spartan or Delta Phi Beta. You can't drink soy sauce.

And that's my hot take. slavery's bad. Yeah. And so like ancient Greek philosophers still thought Sparta was good because they tended to live in slave societies too. Apparently the philosopher Plato claimed that a god must have come up with Sparta's constitution because it was so good. And even people who criticized it like the Athenian leader Pericles. Pericles' claim was that Sparta had free people because of brainwashing and Athens had free people because they chose it. But he was still, like, respecting Spartan life in his way.

So the much less defensible fans of Sparta are people in later eras, like the right-wing Roman leader, Cato, and the monstrous dictator Hitler. They knew better and still liked it. Yeah. But the final super weird thing about Spartan society, at least looking back at it from the modern day, is takeaway number three. Spartan citizen women were written. and powerful and allowed to have second husbands or boy toys. Okay. Now you've got,

now you're getting me, you're pulling me back in. I was out with all the killing and the feeding boys pig blood and yada, yada, yada, but now it turns out I could be the one doing the oppressing. Yes, this is exactly how Spartan society held itself together.

It's tippy top let, the citizen women be almost totally equal to the men. They lacked holding government office, but they also held more sexual freedom. And they were in a good situation if they were in the top cast. Yeah, this is great. This is truly what feminism means is equally oppressing others. That's interesting. So what was kind of the philosophy about kind of?

because I feel like that's sort of similar to say, like, Viking society where they were pretty awful to people who they were stealing from, but within their own society, there was a lot of, like, empowerment of women if you were the right kind of woman. Yeah, it's kind of like that. And it seems like the main, probably subconscious logic was women will help us citizen man oppress everybody. But the conscious logic was the better we treat these women, the better babies will have, the better soldiers will have. They are as important as us men in keeping going the ideal Spartan. Right.

Okay. Well, you know, hey, it sounds like these Spartans were really woke. This is another way that Muldun Labbe had guy would be so bad. Yeah. Because, yeah, the key sources here are again, Andrew Bayliss and Paul Cartlidge, also an amazing piece for J-Store Daily by writer Livia Gershon. At each tier of Spartan society, women were treated about the same as the men. So that's terrible at the bottom. Like at the Hellet level, it's ritual torment of the slaves, there's murder. And then those women were sexually exploited. Apparently,

there was an entire class called the Mothakes who were the children of Spartan citizen men preying on Hellet women, because that happened so often. They needed to name the resulting offspring. Okay, now I'm less enthused about this horrific society. Yeah, and then it like is so different at the top like it was for the men. Right. Because like short of holding government office, women had all of the privileges of citizenship, including owning property and inheriting property in their own names. Apparently there were many upper class Spartan marriages based on the woman will inherit the property and she's going to be rich.

like to marry her. Yeah. I mean, it is interesting because I feel like it's a common thing where you can see where you can have a society that has some idea of equality, but it is restricted to a certain subgroup of people. Totally. And then you can be quite, they can be quite, you know, like, hey, you know, like the women here should have an equal say and they're important members of society.

and then you just exclude the slave class from that narrow group of people who are the ones at the top who deserve rights. So that that hypocrisy has apparently always been around. Yeah, absolutely. And it led to other sort of benefits for Spartan women across all of Greek culture in terms of their reputation. Because apparently Sparta's women were pushed as hard to exercise. and be fit as the men were. And also without so much of the rounding up young boys and tormenting them at LeMet.

So they didn't have like a Girl Scout version of the barracks? Yeah, apparently the main parallel was that both groups of children, and I know there's more than two genders, but the Spartans probably thought of it as two genders. Both groups of children could be stripped nude by state officials to check if they were healthy enough, just from like a visual inspection. Well, that's not cool.

Yeah. I feel like I'm sorry, so much of my, like you keep revealing one horror after another. I'm like, man, that's not cool. It's a deranged place. Yeah. Yeah, it's, I don't know what else to say. They, like, treated children like livestock, it sounded like. They did.

And then also because Spartan citizen women were free to not labor in fields. and were free to eat well and exercise as much as possible, this created a reputation across Greece that Sparta had the most beautiful women for like the logical reason that they're just treated better than other women and could be healthier. Yeah, like if you're not out in the sun all day and malnourished, yeah, you're going to look better. Yeah, and that also influenced one of the most famous works in all of written culture,

the Iliad and the Odyssey, the works by Homer, apparently he made the fictional character of Helen a queen of Sparta specifically, because the entire audience basically would have expected that. Like they would have expected the most beautiful woman in the world to be Spartan. It's interesting. I mean, it's funny because there's the new, there's the new Odyssey movie coming out and people are really mad about historical and accuracy and like, oh, like all these celebrities with like plastic surgery or work done. And it's like actually kind of accurate in a way, right? Because, I mean, first of all, it's a myth. It's not a historical.

I don't know if people know this, but the Odyssey did not happen. It was, yeah, not real. Yeah, and this will come out a couple days after the movie. Our 300th episode just timed out that way. Oh, whoa, cool. At least the U.S. release. But, yeah, so like the characters of Manilaeus and Halen are fictional. and would be living at a time before solid Spartan written history anyway.

But yeah, Homer was like, if I'm writing the most beautiful woman in the world, okay, obviously Spartan, what do I name her? You know, like, that would have been this process. And then speaking of hot people, Sparta's citizen women were encouraged to take multiple husbands in their lives if they wanted to. Well. And this was relatively specific to the women.

Apparently there's a few stories of Spartan kings taking multiple. multiple wives, but they needed permission from the rest of the branches of the government. And it was usually done with kind of a public statement of, I have to have an error. And when they did that, they didn't execute or punish the first wife. They weren't as mean as Henry VIII that way. Yeah, like Henry the 8th could have, like, why not? He was already tinkering with the rules of the church. Just say that you can have more wives.

Yeah, that's what the Spartan Kings did. Yeah. And it seems to have been influenced by what they let women. do, which was again mainly driven by we need citizens to be born and soldiers to be born. So the idea was let's have women, have more babies. In some cases, a Spartan woman married an older man and then was allowed to marry a second younger man at the same time as a way for kind of planning ahead and continuing to have kids. There were other times when a Spartan woman married a pair of brothers because that would smooth out land inheritance issues. And then apparently also

So Spartan men, there were strict further social engineering laws about having to be required to have kids. Like you had to have kids by around your mid-30s, otherwise you were publicly punished. And so a lot of married women were allowed to sleep with and have children with a single man to allow that man to remain a bachelor, but also fulfill the Spartan law. And apparently in all these cases, the women were just allowed to do it. It's not like the husband was expected to resent it or be angry. So it was just basically make children and we're not going to judge you how you do it as long as you make the right children. Yeah, it's a lot of children's stuff and then also allowing women to own lands and then needing to sort that out. And also across histories and accounts aspire to their stories of women being outspoken and forthright.

And this top tier of citizen women had possibly nicer lives than most women in like the 1800s A.D. Even the 1900s A.D. Like a Jane Austen marriage plot doesn't work in Sparta. She just gets the land and the money. Right. I mean, that is interesting because there's a lot of kind of, I don't know, just the idea of what the traditional roles are, right? traditional gender roles. No doubt Spartan society was messed up and it shouldn't be held up as an example of what we should aspire to. But it is also pretty funny that it's like, ah, like traditional, we should go back to tradition. And it's like when and where?

Because there's a lot of weird ones, folks. And you could kind of pick and choose to either get a very like idealized society or complete Boschian horrors. Yes, exactly. That's the fundamental question of all that stuff. And Andrew Bayliss points out that in some ways we got to Spartan tradition eventually in like the late 1900s UK and US and elsewhere, where we started to allow women to have like bank accounts and credit cards in their own names, you know? And in Sparta for the top tier women, that was fundamental from jump. They just had as much of their money and land as they wanted to. Well, you know, you win some, you lose some.

Were there basically no risk, like on that upper class of people, were there any restrictions on women that did not exist for men? They basically couldn't hold government offices. That was it. I mean, I guess that's pretty significant. But, you know. Yeah, yeah. And it seems like it was driven by sort of the idea that the woman will influence government through her husband, which is not. good and also something.

Right. Okay. So she just thought she's going to Macbeth it is the idea. Yeah, yeah. Weirdly a realistic-ish element of the movie 300 is that Lena Heddy's character, the Queen Gorghaw, was famous and outspoken. And apparently in the real Persian wars, she was the only person in the room who could figure out a coded message that they received from what's now Turkey telling them the Persians were going to invade. because she was so involved in the government and also very smart. Like the top tier women really had a lot of living and doing things going on. So it seems like they were just willing to not hold government offices,

even though I'm sure many of them wanted to and said so. I forgot Lena Heady was in that movie. She's played a lot of like villains that I always like them, despite the movie or TV show telling me how terrible they are, because she's so great and so charming. That it's like, you know, I don't know, I get that Circe and is bad from Game of Thrones and that mama is bad from Judd's Dread, but it's Lena Hetty. So I like them because I like Lena Hetty.

They even kind of brought her back a little for the 300 sequel. Yeah, she's just really cool. Yeah. Everybody's a fan. Yeah. Yeah. No, she's great. And that vibe is how ancient Greeks felt about the women at the top of Sparta.

Yeah. They were like, these are cool, beautiful, strong ladies. Yeah. But yeah, we are, we're many takeaways deep. There's not much main show to go. We're going to take a quick break and do a last takeaway about maybe the weirdest legacy of Sparta. What? Like, I thought we did all the weird stuff.

I know. It's such a weird place. Oh, God. Okay. Well, I'm going to say 100 more SIFs. So by the time we get back, I'll be approaching 100 SIFs. Perfect. SIF, SIF, SIF, SIF, SIF, SIF, SIF, SIF.

And we're back. Wow, Katie, great job. I did, Sif, Sif, Sif. I did 300 during the break. Yeah, and during the break, I regretted calling it weirdest. It's probably more of an ironic legacy of Sparta. That's a better term for it. It's our last takeaway of the main show. Elena's Moreset-style irony, like rain on your 300 day.

Sort of. So here's our last takeaway number four. A Spartan king overreached, got greedy, and accidentally founded Athenian democracy. Oopsies. Yeah, which is like broadly good for society, but ended up being the sort of permanent rival and problem for the rest of Spartan history. That Athens developed a system that was even freer than the Spartan one. And of course, less of a horrible slaver social engineering thing. Right.

So, yeah, there's the story of a king named Cleomones. Cleomones the first. Cleomadies? Don't make me say it. Yeah, and in a realistic 300 movie, he might be an old man in it. He was one of the two kings who killed the Persian ambassador, and then he was the half-brother of Leonidas and the father of Gorgho. Oh, right, because of the...

I forgot the incest thing, right? Yeah. Okay. They're related. And so Cleomeny's, toward the very end of his reign, rejects peace with Persia. But before that, he says, hey, we are one of the most powerful city states in Greece. What if we fully take control of this other city state, Athens? Hmm. Okay. So he's getting greedy. Yeah. And at the time of this story, Athens is not the reputation that you might have heard if you know a little bit of Greek history. where Athens is this like shining hill of democracy. It has the big hill Acropolis, but it also has a tyrant. Tyrant was the standard Greek name for a dictator. So it didn't have like a negative connotation back then.

It was just descriptive. Yeah, apparently it was descriptive and then people would go on to say, and I don't like this tyrant for a hundred reasons. But yeah, it was more descriptive, yeah. It's like prime minister or something. Like, yeah, sure, great. Right, okay. Got it.

And so Cleomenes is king of Sparta, Athens' tyrant is named Hippius, and initially Cleomones says, let's do the main kind of Spartan foreign policy. Because Sparta didn't have enough citizens to really conquer places very far away in the long term. They were too busy oppressing their own slaves. And so the foreign policy was you send the army and do regime change. And then a new group of oligarchs seems to be more representative than the tyrant. but you pick oligarchs friendly to Sparta and then you kind of run them. Okay. And so it's a sort of, it's not quite colonialist, but it's sort of how imperialism has often worked across history.

Right. Where it's like there's a guise of independence, but it's not only so much. There's definitely a leash going on. Yes. And Sparta did this so much in their region. They formed a group called the Peloponnesian League. Their region is called Peloponnesia. or the Peloponnese, and they had what they called, oh, it's a league of cities who are friends,

but it's cities where they had done regime change and made them Spartan subjects. I see. And so he says, let's do that with Athens. I'll do the standard thing. Army marches in, overthrows hippies. And so far it's going the usual Spartan way. But Cleomenes doesn't just leave it there. And Andrew Bayliss writes that Cleomenes would probably even be like a hero in Athenian history if he overthrew the tyrant hippies.

but Cleomenes doesn't just exile Hippius and Hippius's family. He exiles about 700 other Athenian families. Any family that seemed to have even a little interest in Spartans not running Athens, he kicked out and forced to live somewhere else. It was a lot of the city's population. And then instead of installing what seemed like a more democratic oligarchy, he installs a new tyrant named Isagoras, who was widely known to be Cleomones' puppet.

So he's trying to, for kind of the first time in that era of Spartan history, totally control another city. Right. And so Cleomenes just way overreaches to the point that, you know, most of his troops have to go back and oppress the slaves again. Athens' people form their own uprising. They overthrow Cleomenes and Isagoras. They murder most of Isagoras' supporters. And then in the aftermath, these exiled families come back and they say, we're not just going to do an oligarchy. We're going to do what becomes Athenian democracy, which is still controlled by rich people.

And Athens still has some slavery. But it's a beginning of what, you know, the Mullen Labé and Rit Tavern guys see as Western democracy, you know? Rit Tavern. I forgot about those guys. And with some justification, like, it had a lot of positive things going for it. But that only happened because the Spartans overdid trying to control and subjugate Athens. Right, right. So as a response to that, not because cool naked guys were like, hey, democracy.

Right. And it's the total opposite of the 300 movies. They spend two entire movies claiming that Sparta inspired Athens to create freedom, which is really, really the opposite. Like, they weren't friends. I mean, technically they did. did just, you know. Yeah, the whoopsies way. Yeah, yeah.

And yet, basically the rest of Spartan history, if I'm reductive about it, is they grow, they're powerful and they're always fighting Athens and can never become a massive power because of their slave system and because of Athens. And then later on, the Macedonians and more importantly, the Romans conquer all of Greece. And then when they incorporate Sparta into their empires, they end the social engineering, right? Sparta is just a city and a huge empire. It doesn't have any reason to manipulate guys from childhood. Right.

Once that happens, there's basically not a lot more reason for Sparta to be a city. It gets sacked by Goths in the 300s. It reverts into mostly being farmlands. I know that you mean like the goths as in the group, but it's never not going to be funny because I'm always going to think of people just head to toe in a hot topic. like conquering a city. Right, right, yeah. Yeah, the end of Sparta as a city is really the same as the end of a lot of the Western Roman Empire

where Goths and other Germanic people run in and break everything. And then apparently from there it's just been rural. And I'll link a New York Times travelogue where someone describes having a bad time trying to go there. Like there's not really airports, it's inland, there's not a lot to see. And apparently a new town. in the 1800s AD was kind of built over a lot of the history. So it really once Sparta stopped being able to do their horrible social experiment, partly because they made Athens a different experiment,

they kind of went away, and that was it. Huh. So they got a little too greedy, tried to make everyone weird and sort of culty like them. Yeah. And yeah, it didn't work. And now they're a big farm. Yeah, their society was just so fundamentally exclusionary and regressive.

I don't know how it ever would have been large, you know. It was just always going to be that small. And then once the Romans didn't let them do that to themselves, that was kind of it. The Romans were like, look, guys, we're weird freaks too, but you're a little bit, this is a little much, actually. The whole like starving your boys, a little weird. Yes. Right. Yeah.

When the Romans are telling you, you got to get it together and stop being so naked and strange. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe just chill out a little bit. Yeah. Folks, that is the main episode for this week and it's the 300th episode. What a thing. Thank you so much for being here.

Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, there is a different, previous, maybe more important story of specifically 300 Spartans fighting to the death for their values.

The Battle of the Champions against the Argyves. Takeaway number two, ancient Sparta might be the most extreme example of social engineering in human history. Takeaway number three, Sparta's citizen women were rich, and powerful and allowed to have second husbands or boy toys. Takeway number four, the Spartan King Cleomenes overreached, got greedy, and accidentally

founded Athenian democracy. And then tons of numbers before that, especially about the Battle of Thermopylae and the 300 Spartans, but really about 7,000 Greeks there. Also, many numbers throughout the show, maybe the most fundamental is up to 9,000 Spartan citizens lording over up to 150,000 halets. It really was a strange way to run a country. Also, there's two other numbers I want to throw in since you listen this far. The year 1974, apparently various U.S. states had allowed women to have independent bank accounts before that,

especially California in the 1860s, but it took until 1974 for a federal law requiring banks to allow a woman to have a bank account in her own name. Other U.S. number is 1925. That is when Michigan State University changed their mascot to the Spartans and the Spartan guy. Before that, they were seen as just an agricultural school and the mascot was the Aggies. But then they became one of the first Spartan mascots. Those are the takeaways. And hey, more information, fun. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. if you support this show at maximum fun.org.

Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the two most revolutionary thinkers in Spartan history. Visit sifpod.fod.fund for that bonus show for a library of just about 25 dozen other

secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFund bonus shows, It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. And you're backing in the most recent Maximum Fun Drive, funded digital art to celebrate this 300th episode. If you haven't received it yet, I will say something on the Discord today about when it's coming or where you can get it. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week really include two scholars. I think I didn't name check. many of the sources in the flow of the episode today. But the two biggest sources by far are a book

and then a deep interview with another expert. The book is called Sparta, the rise and fall of an ancient superpower. That's a new history by Andrew Bayliss, Associate Professor in Greek History and Head of the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology at the University of Birmingham. Other key sources, an amazing interview for the digital magazine, Popular Archaeology. That's an interview by writer Richard Maranka, interviewing Professor Paul Cartlidge, the chaired professor of Greek culture at the University of Cambridge. But beyond that, lots more sources about recent digs, modern Sparta, and more linking to the Guardian, Atlas Obscira, the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine. Also, J-Store Daily, there's a feature by writer Livia Gershon that dives

deep on Spartan citizen women enjoying two husbands or even just two dudes. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lanape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoke people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life, there is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey,

would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 34. That's about the topic of goats. What a wonderful thing, Goats. And fun fact, there, a quack doctor from the United States, circumvented U.S. broadcasting law to pedal quack treatments involving goats from a gigantic radio tower across the Mexican border, which also kind of helped invent country music, at least as a national genre with the whole industry behind it. Anyway, I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's podcast, Creature Feature about Animal Science and More. Our theme music

is unbroken, unshavened by the Budoz band. Our show logo is by artists Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for editing this episode. special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And truly to you, you are why we get to make a 300th episode. Your why we'll have a 300 first episode next week. I think I've said at the top of other round number kind of episodes and didn't say this time, we do our usual kind of episode on a round number on like a landmark because we do the

very best episode we can do every week. Like if there was a secret better version of SIF, we could be doing. we would just do that every week. So I love the 300 number theming with Sparta. And also, I hope you just love this episode in every show we do because we try to make it the very best we can for you. And so that's what we're trying to put out. And I hope you appreciate it and enjoy. And I always love hearing from you about it. So thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with episode 301 of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.

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