You're Dead to Me - Boudica (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: May 15, 2021

Greg Jenner and his guests discuss the important questions surrounding Queen Boudica including: Is she a feminist icon? How do you pronounce her name? And was she really ginger? Get ready to forget everything you thought you knew about Boudica and learn what it was really like when the Romans invaded. Featuring comedian, author and actress Sara Pascoe, known for QI, Have I Got News For You, and W1A among many other shows, and historian Dr Emma Southon, specialist in Roman history and co-host of the History is Sexy podcast.Script and Research: Greg Jenner Producer: Dan MorelleA Muddy Knees Media production for BBC Radio 4.

Hello, Greg here, just popping in to say that this is a radio edit of the episode, which means it's a bit shorter and some of the naughty stuff has been removed, so it's a bit more appropriate for family listening. If you want to hear the full length versions, scroll down to the original episode further back in our feed. Thanks very much. Enjoy the show. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the history podcast for everyone. Music, radio, podcasts. down with a top comedian and a top historian to have an informative and fun chat about a different bit of global history and we make sure to keep it light and amusing like a space hopper filled with facts and today we are winding back the clock nearly 2 000 years to get to grips with the angriest woman in ancient britain yes it's queen buddhica who went toe-to-toe with the might of rome and very nearly made them look stupid and joining me in the studio to chat about her life

and her massive rebellion are two extraordinary women in their own right, though hopefully they will refrain from burning down Colchester, at least for the duration of the episode. In History Corner, I'm joined by Dr Emma Southern, who's a classical historian and the author of fun, witty books about the Romans. Hi Emma, thank you for joining us. Hello.

And in Comedy Corner, you'll have seen her on stage and screen. She's one of the leading stand-ups in the country. She's an actor. She's a writer. She writes fantastic books. She's in all the good TV shows, panel shows and other. It's the wonderful Sarah Pascoe. Hi, Sarah.

Thanks for coming. Hi. Thanks for having me. Now, Sarah, are you looking forward to discussing Boudicca? Because I'm led to believe that you've dabbled in history in a former career of yours. This topic is particularly of interest to me. I used to be a London tour guide, and obviously we talked about Boudicca on the tour. I'm from Essex, and all of my family live in Colchester, so it's very close to my heart. For a couple of months, there was a tourist

attraction called the London Bridge Experience, and one of the characters I had to play every day was Boudicca. And how is your Boudicca impersonation? Did you go for an accent? Did you go... Yeah, well, they made us do it like Russell Brand. It's fun to hear that you've played a very brief Boudicca every day for 10 minutes. That's good to know. But actually, I think that gave me a lot of sympathy for her because obviously she's mythologised

and there's lots of figures throughout history who become the story of what they did or representative of a movement because she wasn't just one person. There were lots and lots of people. But've became more and more sympathetic with her position the more I found out about her. Well as ever we shall begin with the so what do you know this is where I hazard a guess and what you may already know about Boudicca. So what do you know? So in pop culture Boudicca is a feisty feminist icon. She's flame-haired.

She rides a pimped-out chariot with spikes sticking out the wheels. We know of her as a wronged woman out for vengeance who unites all the British tribes against the Romans, then goes on a sort of rampage, burning cities, slaughtering anyone with a Latin GCSE. She loses the Battle of Watling Street and she's buried under Platform 9 at King's Cross Station, just next to where Harry Potter commuted to school.

But then everyone's buried under there, aren't they? It's a busy place. Everyone that I call secretly buried at King's Cross Station. So many bodies under there. Archaeologist dream. Okay, so how much of this stuff is true? We're going to find out in the podcast. So time to crack on and find out who is Boudicca, or rather, Houdicca Boudicca, as I prefer to title it. Dr. Emma, can we start with the very basics? We're going back 2000 years roughly, but can we be more specific? How far back are we going in history? When is Boudicca born? Where is her tribe based? And what's her situation

growing up? The point at which she enters history is about 61,60 AD. So during the reign of Nero, absolutely no idea how old she was. No clue when she was born, no clue where she was born. She is from the tribe of the Iceni who are in East Anglia, so round about Norfolk. And she is the wife of the king of the tribe of the Iceni. So she lives as far as life in Iron Age Britain goes, early Roman britain she's living the best possible life that you can lead up until the romans come at which point it all goes very drastically downhill and her name buddhica is it her name maybe right i can tell

you her name is definitely not bodicea okay bodicea or voda were they roman ways of saying her name maybe well they would speak speak Celtic or a Celtic language which is very similar to Latin. So it might be a version of that. It also means victory in Celtic. So it might be her stage name. Yeah, so it might be a stage name or it might be one that they gave her.

So we're calling her Boudica. Let's settle on that. Spelling-wise, are we doing 1C or 2Cs? Tacitus says 2Cs. Dio says one K. And in Celtic, it would probably be one C. And she probably wasn't literate, so she doesn't care how you spell it. Yeah, because otherwise she'd have written angry letters

rather than written down, wouldn't she? Dear sir, brother's degreed. It's in the Radio Times. My husband has recently died, and I had an agreement with the Romans. Annoyed of Norfolk. And her husband is called Prasitagus. A nice-sounding name, but again, we don't know if that means chief. Itoyed of Norfolk. And her husband is called Prasutagus. Yes.

Nice sounding name, but again, we don't know if that means chief. It might be his job title. It might just mean leader. Where do you stand on the scepticism then, Emma, of the idea of her being the queen? Are the Ysini like a sort of big, powerful tribe or are they basically seven people in a hut? They're somewhere in between.

They're not like one of the really big tribes of the south they are surrounded by two really big tribes they're a smaller one who were actively anti-roman the whole time they really did not get involved when you look at the archaeology are all around them or down into essex and down into suffolk even and getting quite close to them there's loads of roman stuff from really early on and like they've got garum down there which means they really like once you've got into eating fermented fish yeah then you've really got into adopted the new culture yeah you like that's the most Roman thing you can do the crucial invasion of course is in 43 is Claudius who sends somebody else to do it for him because he's not a military man.

He is an academic who fell into being emperor. And he sends someone to do it for him. They march in, surprise everybody by turning up with a massive army. And elephants. They do take elephants, which was probably very shocking. They were primarily like doing metalworking and subsistence agriculture. And then all of a sudden, bloody elephants turn up. So everybody immediately

rolled over obviously claudius turned up for 16 days marched around declared himself britannicus and then went home again this happened during buddhica's lifetime yeah so she would have seen a roman invasion but then she seems to settle into roman occupation a bit well the iceni are not too keen on it they enter a client kingship where they agree that the king will be a supplicant to rome but as a result they'll leave them alone and the iceni then go back to their ways of refusing to get involved with the romans they think they've made this agreement that their king will every so often nip off and go and say hello to the governor and give him some of their money and horses and then the romans in return will leave them alone which is

kind of all fine until the romans start not leaving them alone anymore do you think that buddhica's husband was a very respected forceful political figure and that's why they left well he's quite interesting because the king who entered the client kingship is not prasaturgus okay he prasaturgus is put there there by the Romans because there is a minor rebellion and the Roman response is to disarm every single tribe. So they go into all the tribes and take away all of their swords, which obviously upsets everybody

because now the Romans aren't leaving them alone anymore. So the Iceni king tries to rebel. The Romans then just take his throne away and put in Prasutagus instead. So he is their tame king. He's a puppet. Yeah, he's a puppet. And so technically he's supposed to be working more with them and isn't as rebellious.

Yeah, and that's her husband. So she presumably is on board with the whole puppet kingship situation. Can we hear the horrible story of what happens to Boudicca? kingship situation. Can we hear the horrible story of what happens to Boudicca? So this is a story told by Tacitus, who is a senator whose father-in-law was potentially there. So potentially first-hand source, but maybe not. So his version of events is that Prasatagus dies, probably of natural causes, and he leaves half of his throne to Nero, the Emperor Nero, and the other half to his daughters, with the hope that that means that Nero will leave.

But the Romans in Britain have gone a bit power mad, started treating the Britons not like allies but like slaves. And so what the Romans do is enter the Iceni, they strip and thrash Boudicca herself. Yes, they humiliate her. Yeah, and the thrashings particularly is what you do to slaves. And especially being a public thing, it's about saying you have no power. Exactly. And so that's what they do. They take away her kingdom, they take away her daughter's chastity and their honour,

and they take away her standing as a human being and as a woman. And then they effectively cast her out of her tribe. It's that which then pushes her into saying the Romans have become so imperious and we need to fight back. But also there's a thing about having nothing else to lose. Yeah. All of the worst things that could happen have happened. Yeah. And now it's just going to be vengeance. Yeah, basically. So can we turn towards that element of her becoming a political figure? She's essentially queen of the Iceni,

although we're not really sure that she was queen per se. And the Iceni aren't particularly big players. So at the beginning of this rebellion, she's not really that much of a threat to Rome. But what happens in Colchester that changes things? She burns it to the ground. Right, that does change things. That'll do it. what happens in Colchester that changes things? She burns it to the ground. Right, that'll do it. How big was Colchester at that point? Colchester is the biggest Roman settlement in the area. It is the place where they are

focusing all of their attention. And it is the space where they have just built a brand new spanking temple to Claudius, the divine Claudius, who they've decided as a god. And they want all of the British people to come in and literally be priests and worship the man who has conquered them. Why did they like Colchester? It's difficult to imagine now. I mean, they've just got a wagamama. But also, presumably, it's the power base of the local tribe, isn't it?

It's the power, yeah. And the tribe is called the Trinovantes. Yeah, so she burns it the hell down, basically. She turns up. How many people have been living there? A few thousand. A few thousand. Okay.

And there's 200 troops at least hiding in the temple. Because when the people in Colchester hear that something is going on with the Iceni, they send to the local proconsul, who's like a mayor to get asked for help and he goes british and no trouble i'm gonna send you 200 men without swords yeah the romans took them as well so the community police officer to have a chat high-vis jacket so i can visualize it so at this point buddhica how big of a group are with her? Couldn't really tell you. Couldn't really tell you. No. But more than 200? Yes. So that's the point, is that they've not even sent enough of them.

No. And presumably Boudicca is armed. They're very armed. And he sends 200 men who then go and sit in the temple without any real arms, which is not a great defensible position. Everything else is made of wattle and daub, mostly poo. And so they come and they just set fire to it immediately it takes them a matter of hours to destroy it and then

there's a two-day siege where all of the men cower inside and eventually buddhica's men take it by storm and then they burn the temple down as well it makes everybody else see that they're a genuine threat it makes the romans see they're a genuine threat and makes everybody else very excited that maybe they could actually take on the romans yeah so the local tribe are on board the trinivantes and colchester's on fire yeah this is a this is a huge victory so the story of buddhica is essentially this point that is it's sort of vengeful tarantino sort of protagonist she's she's out for blood fired up but actually what's fascinating about the story is that she increasingly has to recruit more and more people to this rebellion.

And of course, the slightly odd thing about this time is we talk about Roman Britain or even just the Britons as being one people. But they're not one people, are they? They are lots of tribes who sort of hate each other. They hate each other quite a lot. They hate each other in the way that only people who have a lot in common can hate each other. Spurs fans and Arsenal fans. Exactly. So these tribes, are they very self-reliant?

Yes So actually they're kind of directly if they're not trading with each other then I guess you're always going to have a competition because generation to generation you're going to be infringing on each other's resources and land

They're competing for resources England is not very big No, it's rubbish It's absolutely rubbish These poor people live in the poor Tesco's But then Buddha comes along and it's very much like Game of Thrones,

whereby they all hate each other and are competing for the big, uncomfortable chair. But then there's a big existential threat that comes from beyond the wall. And they all have to get together briefly in order to try to fight off the big... And then they can go back to fighting for the chair. That's really interesting because the whole thing with tribal politics is it needs an other to exist. Yeah. And so of course you become one big tribe

when there's one big other. Yeah. And you say you've got family in Colchester. Yeah. So my mum and my sisters all live in Colchester. My niece is.

Does the name Boudica still resonate? Are there sort of chip shops named after her? Is there a nightclub called Iceni Inferno? There's definitely, there's a window company

called the Iceni. Okay. So there's lots of little nods and it's definitely something if I'm gigging in Colchester I'll usually try and say something they know it's local folklore and are they proud of that history or is it you know because she burned them down like it's it's a weird thing to have colchester and most of essex and essex like lots of places they can really laugh at themselves yeah and so the idea that she kind of came along saw the hippodrome and thought, no, let's start again. It's really funny.

She burns down Colchester. She's gathering an army. It's going quite well. Next stop on the tour is... Obviously London. She's on the way to London. At this point, we get a new character into the story. We do.

The governor. What's his proper name, Emma? Suetonius. Okay, but his full name? Gaius Suetonius Paulinus, isn't it? He's the governor. The governor. And he's where?

He is hanging out in Anglesey. Hanging out slash murdering druids. Having a lovely holiday murdering druids. So Suetonius, the governor, hears about Boudicca burning down Colchester and thinks, oh, that's probably my job. So he's got two Roman legions, but he's a long way away.

He's in Wales and people don't march for, you know, what, 30 miles in a day, if you're lucky. So she now burns down London, which is also very badly defended. For her to get to London 30 miles a day probably takes her three days to get there. She can probably get to London in three, four days. And all the while she's gathering reinforcements and troops. And also if they're ferocious, it's probably safer to join them than to try and get in their way. Exactly that.

they're ferocious, it's probably safer to join them than to try and get in their way. Exactly that. The governor is on the way, but he rides ahead, finds London on fire and goes, oh, he can't do much about it. He sort of evacuates a few people. So more women and children are killed. You know, this is the... This is the thing with Boudicca as well.

She just kills everybody. Yeah, she loved to kill, right? She loved killing. And also, that's how angry she was. It wasn't like a, we're going to prove this point or we're going to reinstate organised and fairer system. It was, I'm going to make the Thames run full of blood. Yeah.

Is she a problematic feminist icon, do you think? Why is it essentially you keep saying feminist? Well, she keeps turning up in these history books. She does turn up in like that What Would Boudicca Do? What Would Boudicca Do? It's a sort of news. But sometimes I feel like that just happens because people are women. Yeah.

And it happened with Theresa May and they go, oh, it's feminist. You go, no, it's a woman. Yeah. That's different. Feminism is a movement about equality. Nothing you said about Boudicca so far has creamed to me. No. She wants the world to be fairer.

Yeah. I wouldn't necessarily want to be her friend. And I wouldn't necessarily want her to leave my feminist movement. But it wasn't just her. This is a movement. Yeah. And that's the other thing about not being a thing, is that it wasn't a female army. Well, actually, is it?

I mean, what do you think? Well, no. Tacitus says that she's the only girl there, and he has her bringing all of the women to watch the battles, which causes a problem for them later when they get to Walling Street. So the cavalry's on the way to a certain extent, but we should also add there's a second cavalry on the way, which is the 9th Legion. And the 9th Legion are the crack elite squad of Roman troops in Britain.

They're up in Lincolnshire. They have marched south, but Boudicca has intercepted them and annihilated them. Absolutely destroyed them. She did. So that's really fascinating to me because what I would love to know, and again, it's something that you learn at school when you go on a school trip. We learned a lot about how Romans fought. We learned about shields and like this hedgehog yeah was the way they were fighting so ferocious that romans couldn't with their battle i suspect that the legion just really underestimated what was happening in the same way that when they sent 200 men without swords they just think that the Britons are unbelievably rubbish.

But also, by this point, she may have gathered a really large army. And this is one legion, which is only 4,000 men, infantry, 1,000 cavalry. But she wipes them out. So the Celt army must have ambushed or just massively overwhelmed. Like a tsunami, just of people, that thing. Okay, wow. More than anything, that that means it gets in the history books because wiping out a town is as a medium deal but wiping out a legion never happens

yeah the romans never lose and they never forget when they do lose this is a blow to the roman ego in a way that they've never really had to deal with before it does make you feel a bit even though it's so awful it's making them a bit a bit proud. Just going, do you know what though? When we put our minds to it, we can get things done. Some of the cavalry ran away, but they're not there to fight. London on fire.

They now march to St Albans. In Latin, it's called Verilanium. Does that sound right? Yeah. At this point, the governor, Paulinus Suetonius, has now got his army together. He's managed to cobble together

about 10,000 people. Which is not a huge amount for the Romans, especially if they've just beaten four. That's not like 40,000 all of a sudden. That's it. So he's managed to take his troops out of Anglesey. He's cobbled together a few survivors from the 9th Legion. The Legion in Exeter refused to join.

They're terrified. So he's got 10,000 men. St Albans is on fire. But at this point, St Albans is on what's known as Watling Street, which is a diagonal road that runs all the way from Dover, I suppose, up through the Midlands, up to Wales, isn't it, really? He decides he's going to pick his battlefield. Sarah, you've got 10,000 men.

Boudicca has, let's say, 100,000 warriors. How are you going to win this battle what are you doing to maximize your advantage or minimize your disadvantage what i know of military battles especially if you're that outnumbered as you need to get them in a valley don't you oh great yes essentially what you want is them to lead into about a valley and you come over the hills you look bigger you come from above to lead into a valley and you can come over the hills. You look bigger. You come from above. They're trapped down in between you and you can obviously

at all sides. Basically, yeah, that's what he does. He gets them into a narrow valley. So there's a really narrow entrance into the battlefield. And then behind them, he picks a space which has forests. So there is no way they can get behind them at any point. And then he lines them up. This is one of the very few times that Tacitus decides to get detailed

about military things because he finds it very boring. It's more interesting than a woman talking. Basically. Basically, he has his infantry, his heavily armed infantry in the middle. So as you come down, that's what you're going to see. Then light armed infantry on either side. And then on the far side is the cavalry. So they're forced to come down basically in a column.

And then they can be swamped on all sides. And then I guess the people behind don't know what's happening. They just have to keep coming in. There's people behind them. And you get a trample. You get a kind of bottleneck effect. And if you try to move back, there's even more chaos. And then to make the situation worse,

the British had brought a long load of women and children on carts to watch, which they then had all behind them. So when they were trying to get back, they were squished up against their own people tacitus says that they killed 80 000 british people yeah and only lost 400 men which is a lie but um shows how much they thought it was a victory some of tacitus does sound like someone recounting their favorite football match yeah where he's gonna go he suddenly gets really detailed about his team's goal. And then we scored five more goals.

Actually, he's really on the side of the British because he really hates violent Roman imperialism. And he really, really, really hates Nero. And so he likes Boudicca and he likes the British because he sees them as like noble savages, basically, who are being run over by the terrible Romans. But they were not as good as the Romans are now in his period. Okay.

I think that kind of brings us up to something that we like to do on this show called The Nuance Window. The Nuance Window! It's where we allow our history nerd to just go to town on whatever they want to talk about for three minutes. Emma, you are a specialist on Roman women. You've written a book about Agrippina, the mother of Nero. What are you going to talk to us about for three minutes?

For three minutes, I'm going to undermine everything we've said. Great. Cool. Here we go. Three, two, one, the nuance window. So the thing with Tacitus is that he's not telling a story that is historical, as we would understand it. He is telling a story that is literary. History is an art form and a literature form. It is not

the telling of an objective truth of any kind. And his version of Boudicca is him retelling the classic story in Roman history, where Nero is the evil king who's gone too far, who is monarchical and tyrannical. And Boudicca manages to be simultaneously Lucretia and Brutus, the great tyrant killer. She is undermined by the fact that she's a woman and therefore is unable to successfully kill the tyrant. But her body is the space on which the tyrant plays out his evil ways in the same way that Lucretia's body was the space where the tyrant played out his evil freedom-taking ways. She then does the Great Speech where she talks about how she needs freedom from the tyrant. She needs, the Rome has become so imperious that even our children's bodies are not safe, which is pretty much a straight-up quote from the story

that Brutus tells when he takes Lucretia's body. Lucretia kills herself in order to take away the shame and Brutus then takes her body and shows it to the Roman people so that they can rise up against it in the exact same way that Boudicca takes her children and shows them so that the Iceni and the British people can rise up against it. At which point she is unfortunately undermined by being both a woman and a barbarian. She is unable to contain her evil barbarian ways and her unfortunate female ways because all women in Tacitus are power mad, are cruel when they get power, and are driven by a desire to hurt people around them. Basically, when you look at all other women except Boudicca,

so Livia, Messalina, Agrippina, even Cartamandua, another British woman who's even better than Boudicca, as soon as they get power, they become insanely cruel and they just start doing cruel things, exactly what Boudicca does. So she is less a real woman in Tacitus and less a real person telling a real story and more a very symbolic story about how Rome has become so degraded that it is as bad as when they had to kick out the kings. That's two and a half minutes. Bang on. Thank you so much. That's all right. Sarah, what are your thoughts on that nuance window i think it's such an important thing to remember about history is that it's such a subjective as you say art form and it's a form of literature

and that's the thing and actually the same thing happens everywhere the stickiest things are often not the truest things the statistics are the easiest to remember like 30 years later going that study was never replicated and history the same. There's certain things we remember it a certain way because it's better. And to the Romans as well, the other thing is that this is a great loss

for them to lose a legion. And they have to tell a story about this terrifying person who was so terrifying and scary in every way in order to kind of make themselves feel better about the fact that they lost.

Sticking with the mythology element to it, she's gone down in history as a redhead. Dio Cassius. Does not use the word redhead. No no he does not what he uses the word xanthotartos yeah which means really yellow really blonde sarah pascoe if it was summertime yeah there may be i mean she was outdoors on a horse so you might have been a strawberry blonde also women can change their hair color maybe she was was from Auburn shall I have a rinse I'm actually interested in that

so cosmetics for British women in those times especially they would have had natural dyes it's very easy to put a rinse on light hair that makes it orange interestingly the word that is used by Dio who's writing a solid 150 years afterwards in Greek

he is the same word that they use to describe lions yeah and gold it is a strawberry blondie yeah so it is a specific the way he describes her is like the most barbarous thing and it's from him that the description comes as her standing she's wearing a multi-colored robe she's got a big talk which is those like huge thick neck yeah not even necklaces you can't sort of gold um like a neck bangle almost like a huge chunky neck but it's both it's a symbol it's a symbol of power so it's what leaders wore and so she's wearing one of those she's got her hair down which is a big deal for the romans and then he also says she's massive terrifying and her voice is ugly.

Just in case you thought she was sexy. But that's obviously the point of the description. That's what's interesting, actually, about the sexualisation of that. Yes. Because the reason they're saying her hair is down and straggly, they're saying she's animal-like and she's bestial. Yeah. And then that's been interpreted as flowing locks.

Probably a bit of cleavage just around the top. What are they? Yes. And I guess a couple more myths to bust. The chariot with the spikes? No. No. War chariots were a really big thing for the Celts. The war chariot is a big Celtic piece of weaponry that they used

and it did scare the hell out of everyone that they ever found, but they didn't have spikes on them. No, and it's more sort of a mobile platform for chucking spears or delivering troops. It's like a kind of scary skateboard, but they were very nippy. Two-wheeled? Yeah. Yeah, okay, so it's not four-wheeled.

It's not a sort of wagony type. No, they're nippy. They had two people giving you spears on either side. Terrifying. And is she buried underneath King's Cross Station? No. Ah. That's made up by somebody, I'm afraid,

who got very confused about where things happened. Well, we don't know where Watling Street is, do we? We do not know where Watling Street is. I could spend an hour and a half here listing places that people think Watling Street, where they think the battle happened. And the word street is interesting because everyone thinks of Roman roads.

Yeah. And that wasn't the word. Well, street is an Anglo-Saxon word. Yeah. So it is. And Watling, also an Anglo-Saxon word. Again, so much of what we know about buddhica we do not know about buddhica we don't know her name we don't her age we don't know her tribe she's born into we don't know if she's a queen we don't know where she died or how she died because she's apparently she poisons herself but

this isn't there's another really nice thing that tacitus does is that he gives her she poisons herself which is a weak girly way to, it's a coward's way to die. It's also how Cleopatra dies as well. There's a sort of romantic myth, isn't there? But it's weak and girly. But wouldn't she, I guess it is, rather than just dying in battle, fighting for what you believe in. The correct way to die is to fall on your sword. And the sentence in Tacitus is he juxtaposes it by she poisons herself. And then the guy who refused to join in

falls on his sword like a good Roman should. But I'm afraid we can't be certain of how she perished. And I'm afraid that's also all we have time for today. A huge thank you to my guests. In History Corner, we've had the wonderful Dr Emma Southern. And in Comedy Corner, the magnificent Sarah Pascoe. And to you, dear listener, join us again next time for another chat about something completely different with two more excellent guests. But for now, I'm off

to go and pimp my chariot. Maybe Buddha could input spikes on hers, but I'm definitely having spikes. Bye! Sneakers? Trainers. Whatever you want to call them, they are amongst the most iconic cultural objects of our time. But their evolution is a story rarely told until now. From BBC Radio 4, this is Sneakernomics. Across this podcast, we're going to be telling the crazy origin stories of the most well-known sports companies and their relentless quest to be the world's number one brand.

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