TRASHFUTURE - The Day The Bridge Died feat. Patrick Wyman

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Patrick Wyman, host of the new Past Lives podcast, joins us to talk about the one ancient civilisational collapse we haven’t talked about in depth: the western Roman Empire. What does it mean to live in collapse? How is it hidden by things like the price mechanism in ways it couldn’t hide in an agrarian empire? What would a potter have experienced in Britain in 350 AD? All this and more! Check out Past Lives here! Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! TF Merch is still available here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello everybody. Welcome to this free episode of TF. It is once again a pulling up to the lounge within the lounge. It is Patrick Wyman, host of Tides of History and past lives. Patrick, how you doing? I mean, you know when you're in a pool with a bunch of children and you're swimming and you're having a great time and you're playing with the kids and like you're throwing them around and everybody's splashing, but you're also drowning. like that's how I feel right now I try to avoid being in pools of children brother you're missing out like there is nothing more fun than like there's nothing more fun than being in a pool of children just don't ask any of you heard it after I said it

I'm trying I am cure of soul I'm a guy who like you're talking from dad perspective right this is very much dad yes this is dad I'm not saying go out and find random children and get in a pool with them for Christ's like that's I'm just saying you got to be careful because like I you know I I'm also speaking from the perspective of being a dad,

I'm also finding myself saying things like, I was in the playground the other day, and you'll have, like, buddies of yours who don't have kids, who are just like, why were you in the playground? Why were you hanging out of kids? And then it sort of clocks to them later. It's like, oh, no, you have a child now. You know what we're going to do?

We're going to maliciously quote you out of context, and we're going to cut off the part where you said, do not just go to pools with random children. We're going to cut out, do not. Patrick Wyman, Tides of History, past lives, official stance. Go to pools as random children. You just need a cover story, which is that you're a paedophile hunter.

It's the best cover story I can think of. I'm going undercover inside the Muslim grooming gangs. That's what I've been sent to do. Oh my God. That is what like some pedophil, like to go back to pedophile hunting groups has for because a lot of them do turn out to be like, a lot of them do turn out to be paedophiles themselves. And I do wonder sometimes whether it is a case of like they're doing it for like research

and they sort of like get a bit ahead of it. They sort of like go a bit too deep in the pool, so to speak. Chris Langham. It's what's been happening to FBI agents. infiltrating right-wing extremist groups for decades. Yeah, it's like, oh, you're here just like, suddenly you're getting paid a little bit more to be here. It's been the same the whole time. Yeah, I was just hanging out with the Nazis in the pool.

I didn't expect to be coming. It's funny how that works out. But we were also talking about, of course, before getting on, the new challenges that you have been facing as someone who's done a bulking cycle recently, as you can no longer fit through many of your doors. It's a real problem, man. Like, I like my house. I like it very much. I don't ever want to move again.

But I will say that it is a house from another era, and it was designed for people who were substantially smaller than I am. So, yeah, so the hallways are a little bit narrow. The ceilings are a little bit low. I'm kind of jimmying my way in. Like, if you were having to jimmy your way through your household, there is a problem. Like, that's not a verb you need to be using for, like, going around your house.

Hold on. I'll be ready to leave in a moment. I just need to cantilever myself into the bathroom quickly. Well, of course, every house in Arizona, was designed by the urbanist, Colonel Arthur von Twink, who had a vision of the modern American lifestyle. I mean,

like, now, if I were to buy a house that was built in the 2000s, it would be perfect. I mean, those are designed for men of girth. Yeah,

and size. Well, you're like the American pickup truck. Like, you get bigger every generation. That's, you, buddy, you know it.

That's the way we're, like, do you remember what a Ford Ranger used to look like? It's not what a Ford Ranger looks like now, baby. Yeah, you're like an FB thrifty with the double. double wheel base.

Oh, I do. Yeah, yeah. The power, got a power stroke diesel under the hood. Hell yeah. Whatever that mean. Well,

welcome historian Patrick Wyman. We're talking about how big you are. Why this historian on the planet. Yes. I will say this. It is an incredibly rewarding and fun ongoing bit. When that like there is

nothing that makes me laugh harder than if I post a picture and somebody who only knows me through my work sees it and they're like, what the fuck is going on here? That is, because that's the reaction. And it happens at least once a week. It gives me so much life. Like, I now have to keep doing this purely for the humor of it.

You've trapped yourself in a sort of personal reward cycle where you must always, in fact, you know what you've done. You have made your emotional well-being contingent on infinite growth at any cost. You will eventually become like fucking tattooo at the end of Akira, just getting larger and larger. Yeah, just call me late capitalism, baby. It's an unsustainable death spiral. That's right.

Those books are so large. You've got to be out of lift. So basically, basically, every time we talk to Patrick, I have this ongoing interest in thinking about the different dynamics of collapsing societies in late, middle, in early antiquity, excuse me, late antiquity, the medieval period throughout the world,

we've talked about Neolithic societies in the Indus Valley. We've talked about various empires in South America. We've talked a lot about the Bronze Age. We did a whole episode in the Eastern Roman Empire. But we were talking recently, and it occurred to me that the one imperial collapse that we have never discussed is the Western Roman Empire. Hello. And yet we think about it every day, as men.

Yes. We do. We do. It's right there next to the Y chromosome. So we've never talked about it because there's always a reason to talk about something else. Sometimes it's just Patrick recently has been thinking a lot about the bronze age. Or other times it's I've been listening to other things on tides of history. But now we are doing it because, well, for a lot of reasons, in fact, because as I sort of started thinking about wanting to do this episode, I'll get, I relate you a little story from my life, which is, I live near a tube station with multiple exits.

The exit that I take on my side of the street that I walk down to then get to my road to get to my house, it had water escape into it. And it was closed and they said, well, this will be fixed in one week. Three to four weeks later, it was eventually fixed, but it was unfixed for three to four weeks, lading me to ask, will this ever be fixed? Now, this is also something that has happened up and down the country where things break and just don't get fixed at places that transport authorities that aren't as well funded as TFL have stopped fixing things altogether. a while. Lots of different bits of the U.S., the less visible infrastructure in some places, like disaster prevention infrastructure, stops getting fixed. And you start thinking, what would a Roman citizen living in Rome, but not necessarily in Rome, or Southern Gaul or Britannia,

have noticed when a bridge is washed away in the flood of a river and then just doesn't get fixed? What does the collapse of a complex society that we're all familiar with look like? And also, why thinking about collapse, not as something that is a big final moment in time where one day Rome is and then one day Rome isn't, because that's also not what happened, just as it won't be one day Britain is and one day Britain isn't, or one day America is and one day America isn't, but rather, you keep on living as though it is until at some point with the benefit of hindsight, you realize that it actually hasn't been for a while. That's my basic understanding of how you talk and think about collapse and how we can profitably think.

think about it now. Yeah, I think that's exactly correct. So the, it is a sincere and well-meaning mistake to think about collapses being an event, but it's not an event. It is a process. And in fact, it's not one process. Any collapse of a complex system is going to be a series of overlapping, mutually reinforcing processes. And you can't always untangle like which one leads to which one. like you have fiscal problems going on simultaneously with military issues. Is it that the fiscal issues are making it so that the army doesn't have enough soldiers or not enough supplies? Or is it that the lack of success of the military means that people aren't paying taxes because they don't feel like they're getting their monies worth for them?

Like these are all mutually reinforcing processes. You can't tell what comes first. You can't tell what's the root cause of the other. But they are happening at the same time and what you can note. This goes for climate too, because a lot of the time, we see some sort of ongoing social collapse, there is a climatic aspect to it. There is something is happening. It's getting colder or wetter. There's a drought. And there is a strong tendency.

And this has been the case in studies of the Western Roman Empire over the past eight, 10 years with work that we've probably all heard about on some level, that there is climate stuff happening around this time. It's never as simple as saying the climate change caused the fall of the Roman Empire. It's that the ripple effects from a change in. climate created circumstances that led to state failure or contributed to state failure or in this one particular region made it more difficult. Like when we actually try to sit down and unpick why any of this stuff happens, it's infinitely more difficult than saying, well, it was this or it was this or

it was this. It's like, so for those of us who study the fall of the Roman Empire, the idea that you're ever going to get one cause and that everybody's going to agree on it is, it's laughable. Like, you're talking about like a quarter of the world's population living spread across a third of the planet. Like, whatever happened is not going to be the same in all of those different places. I think also, you know, we talk about like the collapse of something complex. It's these mutually reinforcing overlapping, uh, overlapping causes. You know, this is why we also talk about the omni crisis or now, right? These, these multiple interlocking overlapping crises, but also the creation of a complex political system is kind of the same thing, but in the opposite direction, right?

Like, for example, the creation of the American Empire. It isn't as simple as just like Britain was done being an empire so America was ready. It was this combination of quote unquote free real estate or, you know, sort of unlimited genocide committed against, you know, indigenous people who lived there. It was also a period of like relatively free of bad pandemics that hit the imperial core after the Spanish flu outbreak. It was all, there were all of these, all of these factors played into the sort of enormous growth story, like of this globe-besriding imperial colossus. And without those factors present, of course, it wouldn't sustain itself. So it's like, rise is as complex as collapse. Before we get into it, though, before we get into it, I was doing some reading around the subject,

as I often do. And I encountered a very fun crank theory of Roman collapse by a foundation for economic education crackpot named Lawrence Reed. In time, Lawrence wrote, because he's doing a very ancient Roman historian thing of reaching into history and telling a story to support his particular set of political bug bears on the present day. Let's see if we can spot it. The Roman state became the prime source of income for most people. High taxes needed to finance the state, drove business into bankruptcy, and then it was nationalized. Whole sectors of the economy came under government control in this manner. Priests and intellectuals extolled the virtues of the Almighty Empire, the provider of all things, the interests of the individual were considered a

distant second to the interest of the Emperor and his legions. The end came in 476 when Odo Walker and his primitive Germanic tribesmen, which is quite the aside, pushed aside the Roman Empire, made himself the new authority. Some say Rome fell because of the attack by these tribes, but such a claim overlooks what the Romans had done to themselves. When Vandals, Goths, Goss, Huns, and others reached Rome, citizens welcomed them in the belief that anything was better than their own tax collectors and regulators. Many people trace this collapse back to a Tribune of the plebs Yerminus Corbinius

who brought in his vigilance ideology Yeah And he said some very troubling things about Massada Yeah, that's right Christ, oh Jesus Yeah

Anyway, this is the This is of course the Chicago School of Economics view On the collapse of Rome, the Heritage Foundation view Yeah, like, that's such a wonderful example. I'm so glad you found that one because it really does tell you exactly how people use the fall of the Roman Empire as a rhetorical device. Which, to be clear, we also are just, we have a different set of political goals.

We're going to be cherry picking the opposite information. Yeah, we jot that down. We can all, look, we can all cherry pick. Some of us are just better at it than others. And what really pisses me off about that is the utter incompetence of the historical comparison. Like, first of all, most Romans were not receiving their. income from the government. The Roman state, even in its late antique manifestation, where, like, scholars of the middle of the 20th century often compared it to kind of a Soviet-style command

economy, it was not that, it was never that. Their attempts to do price controls failed miserably. Their attempts to do, like, real tight economic control all came to nothing because they don't have the tools. This is a pre-modern state, like how much state control can you actually exercise over the economy. Now, with that said, there is a really important state component to the late antique economy that when that falls apart, the whole economy falls apart. So it's actually making quite the opposite point that the survival of the Roman economy that made people rich all across the ancient Mediterranean world was, in fact, entirely dependent on the state providing protection, infrastructure, a baseline level of economic activity. The money supply, which

was largely filtered through the army, none of that could exist without the state. So not only is it just straight up wrong, it's also to the extent that we can evaluate the claim against the scholarship as it exists right now, it's actually completely bass acorns. But what you've not considered is, what if there was a Roman who was receiving, I guess the anonia, who was not incentivized to invent the abacus first abacus based iPhone, you know, thereby, failing to utterly transform the Roman economy. Yeah, think about all the innovation we missed out on because those guys were,

because those peasants were not starving to death. Like, that's really, I really, think about how much higher they would have felt compelled to take their lives had they not been getting a baseline level of caloric intake in a city that could not otherwise support their existence. All these kids on their abacuses these days, no one wants to play stick and ball.

You know, no one wants to have a go on their wax tablet anymore. It's all abacus this, Abacus that? Well, the thing is, if you actually look at what would we call it, Generation, I guess, XV-I-I-I, then you would, thank you very much, Patrick, that you actually see that, yeah, they're like, they're playing, like, they're watching a video on their Abacus, but then that video is just another person watching an abacus, and then half of it is them playing. Steppingstone surfers. Yeah, they're playing, what would it be? They're playing, they're playing Tiber surfers. soon you have to dodge the sort of filth

that draws down the river. Yeah, they're playing a sweet meat crush that's on their abacus these days. Yeah, just drawing out boobs and rustic capitals on their wax tablets. I saw a really funny post on abacus the other day, though, which was someone had actually like, I think they might have used generative AI,

which means actually an Ionian. Have you seen the new Mr. Wenartio post? He got a thousand Christians to fight a thousand lions to see who would win. No, but it's a toga and on the toga is actually written out in Latin and Gaulish the same phrase, which is, I am fleeing the Roman century of humiliation. Please direct me to where I can buy energy garum. King Gatorix, my people long for freedom. I mean, you know what the problem with ancient Ionians is, it's just the water usage.

They're drinking a normal amount of water. Yeah, God knows. Look, we are importing at scale here. We can't afford to give them all water. Like, what kind of nonsense is this? Like, how did the, explain the unit economics of that to me? You heard about the problems of drinking ionized water? Of course.

The great Latifundia owner, Sam Altweiro has... Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that's my closest I can get with that. He's actually saying that he needs to produce a farm of 100,000 Dionians so all of us can generate the pictures that we want and then share them on Apicus. I think you've got to go back to the origins of the name. You've got to go like Samvelius Senex. That's got to be there.

Here we go. That's the one. The thing that I want everybody to bear in mind as we talk about the fall of the Roman Empire is that... Sorry, that was the jokes. We're going back to the Roman Empire. No, no, no, no, no. It ties back to the joke, God damn it. Give me a second.

The thing we have to remember about the fall of the Roman Empire is that it was filled with dipshits just like Sam Altman. The world was no different. Like, if you want to think about the closest parallels for the kinds of figures who were surrounding and advising emperors, especially in the middle of the fifth century. The kinds of guys who surrounded them, it was absolutely people who were fucking delusional, like Sam Altman, and who were just telling them things that weren't true.

And, like, really, like, one of the things that gets me about AI is the extent to which it's just, like, a filter over reality and that it is an attempt to make things more palatable for us, more palatable and easier. And I don't think that's a bad parallel for the kinds of advisors that were surrounding the, that were surrounding decision-making figures in the Roman Empire in the 5th century,

where like they were so insulated from the reality around them, the reality of the empires that they were ruling, that like, even if they had wanted to fix things, they weren't being given the kind of information that would have allowed them to make informed decisions. And I mean, maybe if they had known, they would have just done the ancient equivalent of swallowing a 45 anyway.

So I'm not sure it would have mattered that much. But like, there is a strong extent to which when you try and think about what is the core problem that's afflicting the decision-making political class of the of the Western Roman Empire. It's that they are not in touch with reality in any meaningful way. And like, when I see Sam Altman, that's what I think of. I'm like, oh, this guy is not living on planet Earth with the rest of us. And I think you could say the same thing for the Roman emperors in the West who were kind of ensconced in the palace and Ravenna through most of the fifth century.

Like, they weren't capable of making good decisions at all. And they certainly weren't being given the tools to do that anyway. And I think if you wanted to have, like there are lots of good materialist explanations of how states collapsed. I think we can simplify too. A state like ancient Rome was based on constant expansion. That was true of the Republican period. It was true of the imperial period. And it was why when the empire kind of stopped expanding that it turned inward. But because of entropy, you always have to invest little bits more in things that aren't working, which means there's always a little bit less. Now, you could also kind of the same thing for now. Now, the forms of expansion are not slaves and plunder taken from, you know,

harrying the Dacians or whatever, not anymore. Or maybe, you know, maybe the Dations have had it too good for too long. Yeah, I mean, I've had it with the Duchess Andero. Yeah. Look, like, if we wanted to invade Romania right now, I'm just saying, like, if Donald Trump wants to go get Andrew Tate, we can make that happen. Andrew Tate is going to be his, who was the Libyan king that, They were, it was Juba that they were always being like, oh, we got to go protect Juba, unfortunately.

Time to conquer more of North Africa. Yeah, like that's very much. He's their Juba. I mean, like, every era gets the Juba it deserves. And I think, this Juba guy can't look after his own kingdom, very bad king. Okay, we're going to have to go and bail out Juba again. It is fucking hilarious to me watching the kind of military buildup around Venezuela right now that they're just like casting around. for an exiled opposition figure

to put in power. I'm like, God, we are really just doing like Francis Foster from Trigonometry. I was going to say, I was going to say but there is one Venezuelan man who can take the job. I'm the president of Venezuela. I've been senane.

He sounds like melting James Acaster. Yeah. Constantine kissing as his like scheming vizier. We found a juba. He's a British man. He's named Francis Fust. We found a great juba for Venezuela.

He always looks confused. He's great, we love this guy. He can't be a communist, he can't read. He looks very sad. We're going to make him very happy. I think he's going to be very happy. Communists love reading. This guy's a perfect imbecile.

He's a perfect. Francis Fuster, a great juba for the time. He invented a beer. He's a great guy. Look, the point is, is that the American Empire, also needs constant expansion, but its expansion isn't the same as the kind of the Roman Empire needed.

It's in the width of trucks and historians. Yes. But also it's in things like, I've talked before about when there was no more manifest destiny of expanding via just moving settlers a little bit further west. You know, you begin,

but you find new ways to expand. You expand into the future through financialization. You know, you expand in new markets you can access via like, you know, free trade deals or like the accession of China. into the WTO, for example, and you just expand and expand and expand, and when there's no more

expansion, when things aren't growing. Like, the reason Tony Blair was able to do what he did in the 1990s, or Bill Clinton, much the same, wasn't that they were just somehow amazing at triangulation and what they did was right. It's that they lucked into a time of sort of the pinnacle of this form of government, sort of are whatever future historians will look back and call it. It will be, well, that was the pinnacle of that. That was the, that was the, that was the, that was the, top of that, and they were able to govern at a time of broad-based expansion for reasons beyond their control, and then they started closing all the libraries in Wolverhampton for reasons of broad-based contraction that were outside of their control. And so that goes back to expansion and

contraction being very, very complicated and more complicated also than the Edward Gibbon point of view in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, which is just everybody became too comfortable and therefore became A or immoral. Imagine a desperate fifth-century Roman emperor going, what about if we brought in some kind of card of identity that everyone had to carry? Yeah, Cartus personi, perhaps. Well, that would fix the anonia, because then, you know,

no one would claim more anonia than they had the rights to. Yeah, but you would... Some kind of testing of means, perhaps. Yes, you wouldn't have Egyptians coming in and claiming anonia, which apparently hundreds of thousands of them are. A huge problem. Sorry, M, M, M, M, M, M, M, M, M, M, M, M, M,

M. M. M. M. M. M. M. of them are. Thank you. Thank you. I always have so many things I mean to get to with Patrick. And then I just come up with, hey, wouldn't this modern thing be funny if we said it in an ancient Roman way? And then it's half an hour is gone. It is funny. That's the problem.

But if it wasn't funny, we wouldn't keep doing it. That's the fundamental problem here. It's like the issue is not your ambition. It's that we keep running into our own peccadillos here. That's what the Romans used to say about going to war in Bethanya. It wasn't funny, we wouldn't keep doing it. Yeah, I mean, we've got to sneak in a reference to Caesar bottoming for the king of Bethenia whenever we can.

Obviously, yeah. Obviously. Yeah, but like this is, I mean, what you touched on right there is one of the grand points of human history, which is that like structural factors are infinitely more important to understanding the rise and falls of states than anything, any individual ruler, general politician does. The Roman Republic was a collective creation. It was not the creation of any individual Roman aristocrat or any individual family. The kind of Mediterranean-spanning imperial republic that eventually becomes the Roman Empire is the product of a broad elite class and the

competition within them. And the expansion of the Roman Empire is the product of structural forces that had very little to do with the five good emperors. Like the Pox Romana and the Golden Age, like The temperatures were so good and the amounts of rainfall were so good in the Mediterranean that you could grow wheat at elevations in Greece that it hasn't been able to grow since. There are abandoned wine presses in mountainous regions of the Mediterranean world where wine grapes will not grow today. If that's the kind of basic underlying material reality on which you are building an imperial superstructure, like you're starting on fucking third base here.

Like you are not hitting a triple and getting there. You are starting in the absolute sweetest of sweet spots for building an agrarian state anywhere in the ancient world. Like, I'll credit to the Romans for institutional innovations, for building a political system that could function under those circumstances. But like, you have to acknowledge that they were starting from a pretty fucking good point. Consul, I bring great tidings. Our imperial project is starting from fingering or possibly blowjob. Well, we're not sure. But either way, that's pretty good.

not over the closed stuff. Yeah. We thought it would just be hand stuff, but I think we can do one better. It's great news. Basically, sort of the 200 BC to 200 AD Mediterranean world is kind of like starting on tutorial island. You're just sort of invincible. Yeah.

And to this point, like the, but what we think of as being the period of the expansion of the Roman Republic, right? Like when they're winning all these wars against Carthage and then the Hellenistic kingdoms of the East in the third century in the first half of the, second century BC. Like, you could make a really strong argument that all of that was a foregone conclusion by 264 BC. That if you look at the resources, the Roman state had at its disposal in 264 BC, the sheer number of military-aged men that the Roman state could call upon, like, there was no way any other state was ever going to beat them, barring some massive, an unforeseen

internal collapse. Rome was going to win. It was going to take them a while, was going to take them hundreds of thousands of bodies to get there, but they were going to do it. Like, you can see, the direct path. And if you're looking at the Roman world in 100 AD, like, you're worried about partians? Like, what are you worried about here? Like, there's nobody that can touch them. So, all credit to the Roman Empire for lasting as long as it's dead, for the systems that they built, for some truly extraordinary people that the Roman systems produce. But, like, it's like playing the game on the game of empire on the easiest possible setting. We couldn't defeat Hannibal now because awoke, everyone's gone soft.

Let's go back this way again. I'm setting mine back to 264 BC when this country had some fucking bollocks. So the other thing is also that what the reason I want to talk about expansion and contraction is that Roman elites competing over an expanding empire is

different from Roman elites competing over a stalled or contracting one which is one of the reasons that the empire and the court and the people who are empowered to run it becomes so insular and they do so much in fighting me. This is basically why Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire was, was it was when it collapsed to the Turks. Again, this is empires work when they expand, but the moment

they start contracting, self-reinforcing forces begin to pick up speed. And part of that is active elite disengagement, which is something I think that you can very easily see, okay, well, the elites of more or less the entire political spectrum of Britain and the U.S. So I'm talking like, your Labor Party, Tory party, Democrats, Republicans, et cetera, et cetera, are so detached from the actual severity of the, let's say, collapse indicators that they're facing that, you know, I think you wouldn't be sort of hard pressed to draw parallel. I mean, Patrick, we were talking about some of the ones in the States, which is just that, like, Dallas has just given up having, I mean, beyond just New Orleans, which was, which was largely left to rot because it was a piece of the periphery that was just

happened to be inside the United States because it was like racially disfavored, or Puerto Rico, which hasn't been rebuilt after. the hurricane destroyed it because again, it is sort of semi within the United States. But now cities like that are not sort of disfavored by the white supremacist leaders of the United States are just being abandoned. Yeah, you would think like, so like Houston is the is the perfect example of this in the United States. And you can see this where like it's because it is a largely minority city, especially after in large part due to Hurricane Katrina and mass migrations of people from Louisiana to East Texas after Hurricane Katrina. Houston is another place that is.

is racially disfavored. It is despised by the Texas Republican Party, which mostly controls state politics. We know the solution for hurricane flooding in Houston. It's not ours. You can build the Ike dike. Like, people have been talking about this for decades. It's why it's called the goddamn Ike dyke is like Eisenhower was a while ago, you know? That is the solution for flooding in Houston. And it hasn't been built. Why hasn't it been built? Well, the answer to that question tells you a lot about whether the structure of the overall state is viable. And, And so this is why, from my perspective, when I'm trying to explain the fall of the Roman Empire to someone, I always go to infrastructure. I talk about bridges.

I talk about roads. I talk about aqueducts. I talk about kind of the urban fabric. Because that's really where you can see this disengagement happening earliest and most profoundly in ways that would have affected actual people's lives. Like, most people living in the Roman Empire are never going to encounter a marauding goth or vandal or Hun or what have you. Like, could you never been to CEX. I mean, C-E-10. I mean, were there a lot of young Roman men who would have loved to meet a goth girl?

Yes, there were. Never got the opportunity to do it. They call them Vizigoths, but I don't see any anywhere. Like, they were never going to meet someone like that. They were never going to end up, you know, face down in a mass grave after a losing battle against the barbarians. what they were going to experience is that bridge washed away in a flood. Now it's not there. Now I can't get my crops to market.

Like, it's this city used to be able to support 10,000 people because we had a fantastic aqueduct. Well, when we were besieged in the course of this civil war, they broke the aqueduct to destroy the city's water supply and, you know, in the siege faster. And then nobody rebuilt the aqueduct. That's collapse. That's what collapse actually looks like from the, if you're looking at it from the ground up, as an ordinary person who's living through these things.

Yeah, and if you want to talk about, by the way, aqueducts, just look at Britain's water infrastructure. You know, there's infinite poo in all the rivers and on the beaches. Number one, baby. And there is just kind of no one is interested in, or more or less, everyone knows it should be fixed, but by what means is it to be fixed? Yeah, this is, we were talking about this before the show,

but I mean, to the extent that I can think of a handy way of summing up collapse. It is that everybody knows there's a problem and you can't fix it. We can say pretty conclusively, I mean, this show believes that the global North's economic paradigm is largely at an end, that the way it gets discussed

in the the public conversation, you can hear the leading capitals on all those words, is, oh, there's a crisis. They're muddling through as this, well, this is just, this is now the new normal and where someone's going to at some point do something. We don't know who they are or what it's going to be, but this is stably bad until it's going to be somehow different.

But there's very little, I think, in that public conversation that things could change drastically in forever. For example, if the Atlantic Maradonal overturning current collapses, then what happens to Northern European agriculture? Nothing good. Just to let you know, nothing good. Much like everything else that seems to happen to Britain at the moment, nothing good.

It's a good rule of thumb. It's a heuristic. It's not always true, but generally speaking, it's words to live by. But also, some of that stuff isn't happening soon. some of it's happening now. What I always go back to is the reason olive oil costs a million pounds right now is that crops keep failing in Spain and Greece because of climate change. So like something like inflation, right, is not just a temporary political problem. It's actually a problem that is that nobody knows the solution to that is obscured by the price mechanism. Oh, I mean, insurance markets are another great example of that, right? That like when they have tried to do actual insurance pricing based on some reasonable assessment. of climate change risk, like this, the underlying system can't support those estimates of insurance payments that they just ended up having, like when they tried to do that in Florida,

they had to stop doing it because it turned out that those homes were uninsurable. And like, you think about how much of our financial system is based on those kinds of unspoken assumptions about the solidity of a system, about the solidity of an investment. And all of a sudden, you can see how you end up in real trouble when one thing that doesn't seem all that important changes. Like the great financial crisis is another one that comes to mind. Like nobody knew about, you know, swaps, derivatives, trances. Nobody knew that stuff. And like all it took was one little thing in one particular segment of the economy to trigger chain reactions. And that is by and large how scholars now think about collapse, as they think about these as

complex interwoven systems where, you know, the butterfly wings flapping in one part of the system can have really profound and unforeseen effects elsewhere. And we have built this extraordinarily globalized interconnected system in which shocks in one place can very easily have unforeseen ramifications elsewhere. And the late Roman state is not a bad parallel for that. The late Roman state did so many things that were really, really important to keeping the Roman Empire running, that when little disruptions started to occur in kind of the normal flow, of that state's operation, that's when you start to see things falling apart. That's when you start to see, you know, armies not getting paid, soldiers deserting their posts, bridge is not getting

rebuilt. Like, that's when that kind of stuff starts to happen is it's not a direct A leads to B. It's 17,000 things are happening. And because these two things interacted in this particular way, it had this really profound impact. And I think when we go back to something like the price mechanism, then a lot of those things that aren't happening because the world is so big and interconnected, because, for example, you can be like, okay, well, now we can, we can buy olive some North Africa and supplement the crops. So there's not as much olive oil to go around, but there's kind of enough olive oil that, you know, most of the people who are used to buying olive oil will buy a little more for,

pay a little more for it. And maybe some of the people who are already thinking of olive oil as a bit of a luxury are going to just switch to like a sunflower oil or something. And these changes are happening at the margins, but they're actually quite dramatic. But the thing is, they are disguised by the price mechanism. They're disguised by insurance markets. They're disguised or they're disguised by the way that sort of things are talked about that are so far outside your experience of your direct life that you can't necessarily see that a bunch of that were happening at once. Like, for example, the slow abandonment of

minoritized cities in the South of the United States, largely to repeating natural disasters that the elites know kind of what they need to do to fix, but just don't really have any interest in fixing. But it's easy to not see any of these things just because the field in which they're happening is very big. And the way that most of them are transmitted to you is through prices, which are slope changes. They're very difficult to perceive all at once. You know, it's very difficult to look at it all at once, but you can, these things aren't supposed to be happening. The tunnel in the tube station is supposed to be fixed kind of quickly, right? It's not, and they're supposed to be able to meet those deadlines. But then you expect, well, no one meets any deadlines anymore.

And it's not because, oh, people don't want to work. It's because the institutions are failing. I mean, look, we talked about the great financial crisis in its aftermath, right? The so many things that were considered to be necessary enough for the state to do, such as have public libraries in Wolverhampton, for example, were then considered to be luxuries. I mean, it's just everything outside of London in the Southeast is considered to be largely disposable by the political elite class here, much in the same way that sort of minorized cities in the American South are. You're on your way to Tesco, you trip over a pothole.

You discover a Fredo is now 40p. You go home and turn on the television. Kirstama has been replaced by local warlord Tom Skinner. Yeah, he's Britain's Otter Walker. He's Geyser Otelwaker. I mean, I feel like Oda Walker probably was a geyser, if we're being honest about it. Like, if we're trying to project back in time, like, I think Odo Walker easily meets geyser requirements. Odo Wanker.

Thank you very much. That's a strong contender for episode title. But you also wanted to look at, for example, like, well, how to have you. Hang on a second. The state used to provide public libraries in places other than London, right? And like maybe Edinburgh. The state did use to do that. And now it just doesn't. And now the public library is either nothing or like a betting shop. Right. That's not just like, oh, it's a shame no one wants to read anymore because public libraries provide huge amounts of services other than just, other than just reading. Public libraries teach people to read and bedding shops teach people to count. So in a way. Right? That's one example.

Or even just like train timetables in Southern Rail getting cut and cut and cut and cut until like it's impossible kind of to get a train anywhere or sit down. It's slow, slow salami slicing until you realize you're cutting your finger. And it's always obvious when you start cutting your finger. But then you look, you realize you've been slicing a salami for quite a while. And these to me are all examples of the institutions that are supposed to make life work for people in some way. And again, because we're not talking about the state. In totality, right?

We're talking about the state as experienced by people, but it does things that makes life work for them, like run sort of train services or run libraries or operate public goods or provide, you know, like benefits for the unemployed or whatever, right? All of these things or health services, right, the queuing of ambulances outside of hospitals because the health service is no longer able to accept because we have a one in one out at the overburdened hospitals, is again, it's the same thing to me as a bridge not being repaired.

It's just because there is so much. more complexity. It's taking longer to unravel. And it's unraveling in sort of stranger ways. But you have to see them as the same thing. So I wanted to ask as well, if you're a Roman, so we can maybe do as a couple examples, like a sort of maybe a crofter, you know, or maybe a free crofter, a slave crofter, or even like a major Latifundi at different times. What is your experience of daily life? Like the crisis of the third century is where I want to start because I really want to focus on late antiquity. Okay. So I want you to imagine, let's say a potter. A potter...

Oh, so fuck my crofter idea. Yeah, no, we're not... I'm not doing a crofter. I'm doing a potter. Fuck crofters. It's only because I'm more familiar with pottery distribution patterns and I can more easily work that

into a macroeconomic analysis, you ass. That's what. If anyone knows where to get pot, it's dog to patchy one. Yeah, potts all of them. Yeah. So, okay, I'm going to use a potter as an example because pottery is really easy

to track through the material record. We have a good understanding of how pottery types change over time. And you can track distribution networks really easily. So they're a good proxy for kind of overall economic complexity. If you are moving pottery long distances, that speaks to a really sophisticated transport network, system of trade, price information being transmitted. All of this stuff is, it's a good proxy for the sophistication of the economy and the kind of the underlying society. So if you are a

potter living in Britain during the crisis of the third century, you probably have not noticed that many changes. You've noticed some real price inflation over the past few decades, like that as all of this stuff is happening, you're not entirely sure who the emperor is. There's a lot of different faces on the coins that are coming through. But in Britain during the crisis of the third century, it is still fundamentally part of the Roman Empire, right? Like you are almost certainly speaking a variety of Latin. You are using Roman coinage in your daily life for transactions, right? Like you're not bartering. You are thinking of things in monetary terms. You are using Roman coins to pay for things. The mechanism through which money is getting to you in Britain is the

payment system that pays the soldiers. So soldiers get paid. They spend money in the local economy. That is the economic driver of like of monetary flows in the Roman Empire. It's basically army pay. And so you're noticing some problems with that. If you're living in Britain in the third century AD and you're a potter, your money doesn't go as far as it used to. You, a, place that you used to make pots and send them to no longer is buying pots from you. But mostly things are pretty much the same. If you fast forward a few decades, we're in the middle, let's say we're in the middle of the fourth century AD. Same person, same job. You probably live in a market town. That's one of the characteristic settlement types that we see in late Roman

Britain is these concentrated market towns where people are doing craft work. They're making things that are then being sold across the countryside. Usually your local aristocrats, they'll live in villas out in the countryside. They're spectacular late Roman villas from all over Britain. But they also have like a city house in one of these market towns and they go in and they do their shopping and maybe they're also like a town councilor there. Now, if you're this potter, life is just normal. Like the, you are, money is coming through. They're functioning markets. Uh, the, you are not that worried about military protection. Again, you speak Latin. You are, you are as Roman as anyone in the Roman empire in 350 AD. 70 years later, your children are living in an entire.

entirely different world. So again, we think that's pretty fast, but it still takes 70 years for Britain to become unrecognizable to the eyes of that woman who's living in the middle of the 4th century AD. By that point, you're not making pottery anymore. You're not using money. The market towns that you lived in have in large part been abandoned. If there are still aristocrats living in your area, maybe they're hold up in their villas, but they're probably more like warlords than civic aristocracy of the kind that you were used to. There are people, there are new people coming in who speak a different language. They're speaking Germanic languages. The structure of the world that you grew up with is effectively gone. And I like to use Britain as an example here because it is the most

extreme case that we see in the Roman world of collapse, where nowhere else basically, maybe Northern Gaul, are you going to see that stark a difference over that short a period of time? Britain at the cutting edge once again, 2,000 years later. Well, I was going to say that's true. Yes, It's reassuring because clearly that can't happen again. Surely we've learned our last in many times. No, no bad thing could ever happen again. No, my follow-up question was like, well, okay, during this time, like what were the Romans' favour of vape flavors?

Like, you know, what were they puffing? Garum. The problem is there is garum vapes are just marketed to kids. What is the equivalent to like the vape phone, pet grooming kind of hybrid store on the high street during this time? I would say they are selling patched pottery, pottery that has broken and been repaired because they can't make it anymore. Like the range. Yeah, great.

They're not using coins for money anymore. They're turning them into jewelry. Like, that's a huge thing that you see in like kind of all over Northern Europe in the fourth, fifth, sixth centuries AD is people take Roman coins and they turn them into like the centerpiece of a of a necklace. They're called bracteates. It's quite nice. Yeah, that sounds quite nice. Yeah. Yeah.

It's quite like Flavre-Flave coded. Yes. Yes. If I see someone like wearing like a used vape as a chain, that's when I'll drop your line to sort of say. It's an expired credit card. Like it's in a plastic lanyard. If you're wearing that, they're like, ah, this is a throwback to a bygone era in which we can exchange money. I'm Flavian's favorite rapper.

And I've got all these coins around my neck and a big sundaeunt. dial. But let's also, let's move geographically, right, to Britain was at sort of some of the furthest periphery of the Roman Empire. And so it was far out from a lot of its trade networks. It would feel the collapse of that pan-Mediterranean system most keenly, partly because like the amount of social complexity that is required to sustain the life of the potter you were talking about requires a gigantic trade network. Yes. And then that goes away. But then let's look at someone closer to the center. What about the potter who lives in Rome? Almost no difference over that entire period of time. Like, there are fewer people. You notice more abandoned buildings, especially as we get

into the fifth century in Rome. It's really not even until the second sack of Rome, though, by the Vandals, that the city really goes into a steep decline. Even after the Visigoths roll through in 410, like, the city of Rome is not really that much different between 410 and 455 when the Vandals sack it again, as it had been before. It's only really after. that that you get this extreme population drop. But so like you really would not have noticed much of anything. You're you could still, you're still getting most of the same products. You're still living in the same kind of built environment. You still have you're still using money for everything. There's not major changes in kind of the ethnic makeup of the region that you live in. There's no mass wave of new migration. You're like you you call the officials who oversee your lives. You calling them by the same title. they're chosen or elected in pretty much the same ways. Like, those aspects of your life do not really change very much. Like, maybe there's more insecurity and fear.

Maybe there are more abandoned buildings and fewer people. But by and large, you are living almost exactly the same life. Hello, yeah, this is packs of remandar insurance, yeah. Well, the city's been sacked again. Well, that's not going to be good. Wait, hang on, so you let a group of people, and they were called the Vandals. Well, I mean, that's your first mistake. What do you think they're going to do?

I mean, come on. I mean, that's going to avoid your whole. policy. So in that same period, sort of in the crisis of the third century, the dominoes, let's say, start getting tipped over and those conditions that allowed the Roman Empire to grow and keep growing, or at least the Western Roman Empire to grow and keep growing, are no longer really the case. It enters a period of retrenchment. And in its period of retrenchment, it largely, we talked also about extreme elite insularity because the growth that is happening is no long, it's not about splitting growth out. It's about defending a shrinking, let's say, pile.

That could never happen in this country. No, it would be crazy. Our elites are very in touch. I'm so glad you brought that up because that was exactly the contrast I wanted to draw. When elites start seeing competition as a zero-sum game between them, nothing good happens for a large, complex state. And I think that's what you see happening in the United States right now. I think you can see it happening in the UK. I think you can see it happening in a lot of sophisticated economies where suddenly these growth projections have started to run out. And like, to the extent that there is a single thing that sums up Trump and his appeal,

I think a lot of people do see the world as a zero-sum equation. And Donald Trump just says very directly that if I get it, you don't. If you get it, I don't. And on some level that appealed to people, I noticed this all the way back in 2015 when I was like when Trump was first coming onto the scene and people were talking about what appealed to them about him. That was the thing that they kept saying. It was like, well, he tells it like it is. And what they meant when they said that was that the world is a harsh place. And if you're going to, if you're going to win, somebody else has to lose. That was by and large what they meant by that when you really drilled down into it. And I think that dynamic played out over and over again among elite groups

is what leads directly to the kind of dynamics that we see in the late Roman Empire. And when we talk about, let's say, periods of growth that are no longer being able to, to be sustained. I mean, again, with Rome, it was often territorial expansion. In our situation, it's more complex because you're not necessarily expanding into new territories in the same direct way that they were, right? You could say, for example, that the infinite growth in terms of returns to capital was based on things like cheap energy, right? And one of the things I always go back to was like, the birth moment of neoliberalism was the six-day war, the oil price shock, and the the sudden retrenchment of public services in the face of,

um, of spiking prices. Uh, they, you deal with stagflation by, you know, basically basing the entire, entire global economy and IOUs. I mean,

it's more or less what Reagan and Thatcher were. And then the things that they found were just sort of continued to be chopped up and fed into the infinite growth machine, but you were powering the ship's engine by feeding parts of the ship into it. And you didn't notice it for a little while, right? And it made some people, I mean,

it makes the metaphors a bit here. It's made some people, ordinarily wealthy, some of the wealthy as people in history, in fact. But, but that just created the next crisis. And the next crisis destroyed that. The financial crisis obviously destroyed that system, then followed by COVID, destroyed the disinflationary effects of a global just in time supply chains. The inflation never really recovered after. Inflation was high for longer. And again, inflation is not just a thing that happens. It's the result of we can't get enough oil. We can't get enough olive oil. We can't get enough building materials to do all the things.

that all of the people who are buying them competing over them want to do. So when you look at it that way, you just see, oh, what happened is, starting in the 1970s, there was a slow-rolled period of constant crisis that was able to be managed, although the tools for managing it became shorter and shorter term each time. And after each cycle of crisis, the elites who were in control of managing the crises that happened, we talk about the modern state as a thing that you expect to largely protect you from the sort of vagaries of the global economy. Like, for example, whether or not you can go to school, you think shouldn't really depend on, I don't know, how the peso is doing against the pound, right? You, and this is what we expect from the state. This is what gives the

state legitimacy and the eyes of the people who live in it, or is most of the people. And so, you know, when you look at it in those terms, it's very easy to start thinking to yourself, well, am I that potter? Am I starting to see the patchwork pots? What are the versions of the password pots that I'm starting to see. 4,000 AD Patrick Wyman being like, let's look at the life of a podcaster in London in the 2020s. Or alternatively, 300 AD Patrick Wyman being like, yeah, so the ancient Babylonians, you know, being like, hey, are we living through collapse? Because I'm noticing a lot more patch pots recently for our show that's on Abacus.

I've noticed the Smithian growth has come to an end. And that's a concerning thing for me. Hanging gardens, not getting watered as frequently. Yeah, a lot of dry plants in the hanging gardens. Yeah. Well, like, Riley, something you just mentioned there, I want to come back to. Because something you noted was that these systems have made people extraordinarily wealthy. Since the oil price shock, that like inequality has risen. And it's not a coincidence that this is also one of the defining features of the late Roman Empire,

is how much more unequal it is than the earlier Roman Empire, where there's, I don't want to go all like economy-brained here. but like there really is broad-based growth and prosperity in the at the height of the Roman Empire. Also, I want to add this is, by the way, for obviously free citizens. Yeah, well, yeah, but even then the defining line between slave and free status was not, I mean, like, if you were enslaved in Rome, you had a decent shot of becoming a free person being manumitted and your children being Roman citizens no different than anyone else. It was kind of like a really horrible internship. Yeah. Yes. God, my boss is a real slave driver.

Just hope you don't end up in the podcast, minds. There's like, I don't want to overstate this. But there really is something happening in the late Republic and early empire that's like, people really can kind of hope for a better life in material terms. They really can hope that like if I work hard and I invest my money well, maybe I too can buy a slave. And obviously that's pretty bleak in some ways. But to a person living in the Roman Empire, that was progress.

That was moving up the social ladder. That was making a better life. And if you were a person in that world, you living in 100 AD in Rome, you had a pretty good shot at it. You really could, if things went well for you, live a materially better life than you would started than your parents had had. You could hope to pass that on to your children. Yeah, which is just like the 50s in the major Western democracy.

or like the 60s, 70s. Yeah, and it's not a coincidence. There's a baby boom happening while this is going on. You can track like periods of extreme fertility that go along with growing economies in the ancient world. The two things go hand in hand perfectly.

Like when people are doing well, they want to fuck. Roman boomer going on about like Sulla's purges and it's like, you weren't fucking alive, man. Sulla wouldn't have suffered this. I mean, that's just like the statue guy,

on Twitter now is talking about Sola. Marius went woke. Marius went and he went broke. That's, uh, that's, yeah. Yeah, Julia Caesar speaking before, uh, speaking before the Senate promising to save the Republic, uh, soundtrack to S. Omniums, things can only get better. That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't, you can't have a woman in a triumvir. It's fucking ridiculous. It's, it's bloke. But like, this is, this is really one of the things that you can, see happen as we get into the later Roman Empire is the rich get much, much, much richer. And like, the Roman elite were always wealthy, but these late Roman senatorial families were the equivalent of major multinational corporations. And there weren't that many of them. Like, in the earlier,

in the earlier empire, into the late Republic, fortunes are being made and lost. In the late empire, fortunes are being clung on to with two hands. And if anything, they're getting bigger. Well, you know, common folk are quite often living worse. They have a lot. lower status than they would have had, even if they were free, they were now on the wrong side of a really strict wealth hierarchy that hadn't existed earlier in the Roman period. Things have changed here, and they've changed in ways that favor the elite and favor the wealthy at the expense of other people. And again, I think that's pretty straightforwardly.

If you view this as a zero-sum game, you're going to do everything you can to hang on to what you view as your rightful piece of the pie. So it's almost as though the only way, if you are. living in a sort of global, let's say, imperial metropole, and you're living through a period of retrenchment, then the only thing that can reverse the collapse doom loop is a non-zero-sum form of elite organization, to replace zero-sum thinking elites with non-zero-sum thinking elites. Correct. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's, I think that is straightforwardly true. And that, and because those are the two options that you're being presented with, you're either, we have to reimagine this,

we can stick with the same kind of mental structures and just admit that there's going to be winners and losers. And like, I don't think it's a coincidence that all around the world, we are seeing like a rise of ethno-nationalism and explicit kind of gutter racism and blaming immigrants and ethnic minorities and the poor for their problems. It's like, well, yeah, because it's easier to do that than it is to admit that the system is fucked, like structurally fucked. Those are different propositions. And so when you, let's say, when you, when you do feel. like the area around you is in ruins in ways that it wasn't before, that life is harder, that somehow things just don't seem to be like as optimistic as maybe they were when your parents were around. If things aren't getting fixed, if things aren't getting built, if no, if nothing,

if all of the problems seem to be intractable, and if let's say there are more zero-sum things around you in, let's say, the puddles of elite discourse or whatever thing that passed a a public conversation in whatever country you're in, you might be living through the collapse of something. Cheery. Yeah. I would drink from the puddle of a late discourse. Thank you, Sir Kear.

Thank you for that one. Yeah, like, I can't stress this enough. In collapses, there are a lot of people are going to lose. And a lot of people die when collapses happen. Like, this is like straightforwardly the case that there were fewer people living in Britain in 500 AD than there were in 300. Just to interrupt you from one as well, that fact is also obscured by very smooth statistics, which is life expectancy is lowering.

That's not just a number that's changing. That's lots of people dying. That's what that is. Yeah. It's very easy to put these things in kind of dry terms. But like the reality is a lot of people end up in graves who don't need to be in graves. And like to the extent that I have politics or political philosophy, it's that I don't want children in mass graves. And that's where collapse ends. it's with preventable diseases, it's with military engagements that don't need to happen, it's with slaughterers of civilian populations that don't have to happen, in large part because people cannot imagine alternatives. And like, that to me is one of the great tragedies of any collapses that you have people who are mentally trying to stick their like,

their round pegs into increasingly square holes. And they're just jamming them in there, like a toddler with these wooden blocks, as the fit gets worse and worse and worse. they do more and more and more damage trying to slam these blocks into the thing. Like, and to me, that's what the Trumpist America First types are doing is like their conception of how the world is supposed to work no longer exists. And they're going to keep.

There's a massive measles outbreak right now in the US. In South Carolina, yeah. I mean, like, there's a prevent, an eminently preventable disease that doesn't, oh,

there's also a whooping cough outbreak in my home state right now. Like, this doesn't have to happen. But when you keep jamming the, wrong shaped peg into the wrong shaped hole, you end up with a lot of collateral damage. And I think that's one of the major trends that I see happening around the world right now. Well, I guess keep an eye out for it. And if you see something, say something. If you see collapse happening, don't go silently into that good night. Patrick, I think we've come to the end of the time. Patrick, always a delight

to talk to you. Where can people find you? Because there are some new places people can find you now. There are some new places. I have a brand new history show. It's called Past Lives. It is the show I have always, always, always wanted to make. It's all about ordinary people in the past and their experiences. Crofters? We might get a crofter in there.

So far, so far I have covered an enslaved woman who is a victim of imperial violence, the most expensive slaves sold in classical Athens. This week's episode is about a sex worker in classical Athens and her life experiences. We're covering the common clave. humanity here. Because I really think that like if you want to understand what history was and what it was like to live through these times, that is the frame of reference you need. It is ordinary people. It's not elites. It's not top down views of these things. That if you want to create a better story of the past that is more representative and frankly more accurate, that's the raw material you need to use.

Those are the perspectives you need to center. And I kind of felt like I've been talking shit about this for a decade. Like I should probably put my money where my mouth is and see if it works as a concept for a show. That's what past lives is. You can find us on Patreon. All the mainline episodes are freely available and will forever be freely available on the podcast platform of your choice. I'm still making tides of history for another few months. I don't know where that will be available. I can't speak to that. But there will be episodes coming out. And you can catch me on Masters of Our Domain every week with Milo and Phoebe talking about fun stuff. Fun stuff. Antiquity. If you want history that's slightly more been hit over the head with a hammer, that's the,

If you were listening to this episode being like, this is a bit smart for me. There's a version of this where me and Phoebe constantly drag Patrick into our pit. You say drag me. No, buddy, I'm throwing myself head first. I'm throwing myself head first into it and enjoying every second of it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So you can get all of the genders of different types of history there. I'm on tour in the New Year.

I'm in Europe. I'm doing a bunch of cities in the low countries Luxembourg, Paris, Brussels, Rotterdam, Amsterdam I'm also going to be an island, Belfast, Dublin, Cork and Galway that's like early February and then Australia's now on sale as well I'm doing Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, maybe New Zealand, maybe Newcastle, New South Wales, we simply don't know yet I'm relying on emails from people in the Southern Hemisphere

and they don't like responding to your emails but those it's a definite, they're on sale, the ones that I said. Wake up, sweetie, new racial stereotype about Antipodeans just dropped. Oh, man, Australians are like, oh, yeah, she'll be right. And New Zealanders are just like, it's just tumbleweeds. There's just no, like, you email an Australian, you get an email back a week later. You email the New Zealander, I don't know if they have email. I don't know what's going on over that.

Well, no, there's no Wi-Fi in the Shire, man. Anyway, anyway, do all that stuff, and we'll see you on the bonus episode in a few days. Bye, Road. Bye, bye, bye. Thank you.