 And welcome everyone to another episode of We Are Being Transformed. Contrary to popular opinion, this is not a Transformers podcast, so I am sorry to inform here there will be no Rodimus Prime unboxings here, however we do talk here about the intersection and exchange of ideas of people with their culture, their myth, and their lore. And joining us today is a figure who needs no introduction, but in case you're not familiar, Garrett Ryan has a YouTube channel called told in stone. And this is one of the best examples of forward-facing scholarship I can think of. He releases weekly videos, discussing a myriad of topics from the daily life of Greeks and Romans and antiquity. So Garrett, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, it's a real pleasure. The honor is all mine. So Garrett, I thought I'd start with just a little bit of my own estimation of how sometimes we tend to, when we study history, we get preoccupied with the macro aspects, like Julius Caesar was assassinated on this day, the Roman Empire fell on this day in 476, etc. We get preoccupied with these things and sometimes neglect the everyday aspect of the people on the ground. What they're doing, you know, as they go through their daily lives, you know, and this is what I really love about your book, Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants. In it, you have tons of sketches and anecdotes about the day-to-day life of the people of antiquity. So I didn't know if you had any further thoughts on this and wanted to elaborate on why you approached the book this way. Oh, sure. I mean, as a scholar, so I was trained as a historian, an ancient historian, before I left and went off into the weird and wild world of YouTube. And we're going to do the same thing, you know, we always tend to focus on, you know, these famous events, famous people, you know, big history, which is a great thing in many ways. It answers questions we couldn't answer otherwise. And it gets students in the doors, frankly, for our survey classes. But, you know, all too often we leave aside in those grand narratives these granular details, which make it all come to life, you know, these are people ultimately, you know, Julius Caesar had a life too. It was in jest this, you know, marble monument of a figure, you know, who went off, conquered Gaul and got stabbed, you know, he also had, you know, he lived in Rome, you know, he slipped on those muddy streets, you know, he visited the baths, you know, he went to the spice markets. And so at Toldenstone, my goal was to try to capture some of that granularity, you know, these details that make antiquity more than just a register of great names and famous dates. And in my book, I try to do the same thing. It was just answers 36 questions I was asked by students mostly in my various courses about everything, you know, from, you know, did they wear underwear, you know, these kind of seemingly strange questions that get you at, you know, everything from, you know, what clothing did and what it was meant to present in antiquity to kind of these grander things like do they believe their myths, which again gets us into these, you know, very far-reaching questions about ancient religion and which is practice, but not really asked typically in, you know, survey courses. So that's my hope, both what I do on YouTube and what I do as an author is to try to make, you know, the, the vividness, the reality of antiquity a little more real. Well said. Thank you for that answer. So like I was saying in the in the book, you have these amazing, like sometimes very insane anecdotes in the footnotes. One of my favorites is about Alexander the Great's body. You talk about Augustus, he's going to pay reverence, right? And it's almost like a scene out of like a Judd Apatow movie. Like he's going in there and he's going to like plant this kiss and pay reverence and OBS sense to the body. And so he gives this kiss to Alexander on the cheek and the nose just breaks off. It's like that's one of my like favorites. It's very, a very surreal scene, like I'm on sketch. So I didn't know if you could talk about maybe one or two of your favorite anecdotes you have in the book. Sure. Yeah. I mean, Alexander's body is a great one. You wonder how you played it off. You try to like stick it back on, you know, to kind of just like dare anybody behind to say anything, you know, like a bit of glue. But right, you know, the body of Alexander is this wonderful example of a very famous artifact, essentially, you know, this mummified corpse of the great conqueror that is revered as by Augustus, you know, throughout the classic worlds, but experiences some thoroughly ridiculous side quests along its journey to oblivion at the hands of an earthquake or tsunami and late antiquity. You know, even before Augustus had his little, you know, incident with the nose, the body was hijacked at one point. It was not its way to Macedon when the Ptolemy shows up with a whole troop of horsemen says, no, you're going to Egypt now. So they turn the mules around and off it goes. It's put in storage for a while for like 15 years. But they're trying to build this giant tomb. Then, you know, the one of the later efforts to side of one of the later talamis decides that the coffin is worth so much, he just has to have it. So they pop the body out of the coffin, like, you know, pop it against a wall, I assume, melt the coffin down, but a new coffin in. So it really did a caracala, supposedly tried to pretty much caress the thing. You know, he took off all of his jewelry and threw it into the you know, the casket as another thing of reference. And it's a wonderful set of stories. But what my favorite part about writing naked statues. So each question, the answer rather is going to be pretty self-contained. It's usually two to three pages or rather two to five pages, you know, a couple of thousand words. And that's to be pretty coherent and pretty fast moving. But I would stumble upon all of these wonderful asides, things like Alexander's body and its, you know, misadventures. And to incorporate those into what I was saying. And I would put these footnotes on the page. And usually footnotes, you know, people are soured on footnotes by them usually being lists of authorities. I banished all that to the end notes, you know, to spare the reader, you know, my my list of, you know, primary sources and just try to populate the footnotes with these anecdotes, which, you know, make it all again, come to life. So just even in the first the first chapter of Naked Statues, which is about the recent Romans wear pants, trousers. And I talk about how that came about basically through soldiers who were on the station in the northern frontier, getting awfully frostbitten in their tunics and meaning to wear first kind of these knee britches and later on actual full blown pants. We have things from, oh, boy, like a few emperors, you know, shocked the world by wearing pants kind of prematurely. It was a fashion statement that no one was ready for. Nero, at one point, presided over a sting for purple dye in the form of the forms of Rome. So you want to see that Mr. Nome was wearing his shade of purple, the imperial purple. Another footnotes about how pants were outlawed in Rome twice, actually three times, they had to keep banning pants from Rome, because they were so unseemly, so barbaric. And then get another aside about how because there are no pockets in antiquity, at least, you know, you'd wear like a money purse or something. You'd hang it from your belt or from your neck, how often in Greece, especially people would carry coins in their mouth, which are called other mishaps, as you might imagine. So things like that, you know, these little nuggets of information that I would stumble upon when I was reading, I think makes the text, the experience of the text so much richer. I really hate the fact that in the audio book, people don't have access to that. So I was encouraged people to read the book, you know, in print, if they can, just to get the footnotes. Right, I have it on Kindle, I have it on my Kindle. And I just kind of, I always love to go through through those anecdotes. Oh, yeah. You can read about that. You're going to click on the note. Yeah, you just click on the note and hyper hyperlinks everything. Oh, but yeah, it's just yeah, they were really weird about that purple dye, weren't they? Yeah, they made laws later on about it. Nobody could manufacture it. It became almost like a cartel racket for the very much. So yeah, for the empire. And again, you were talking about the body of Alexander. That went through a lot of very interesting weekend at Bernie's situation. Very much so, yes. But the sunglasses pretty much. Yeah, exactly. It was almost like it was like a totem. It was like a like almost like you would think about like the body of a saint or a martyr before the concept. I mean, the concept existed in hero cults. But yeah, his body was very much like a totem for a lot of these emperors and groups. Well, just to break in there very quickly. So people would wear medallions with his face on them to ward off illnesses. They deal with this great conqueror, a kind of apotropaic function that he had been such a successful person that by extension, something of that would imbue an image of him, that wearing it gave you this this invulnerability. And one theory about what happened to his body, actually, is that it was literally pulled apart by relic seekers. That, you know, in antiquity, you know, when it was, you know, the tomb was being ruined by earthquake, student tsunamis, civil war. At some point, the casket was cracked open. And if it wasn't spirited away, which is, you know, the folks have very several madcap theories. It was quite likely pulled apart. People took little bits of Alexander as a talisman, very much like a saint's body would be, you know, a century later where it became so you have in the church. It's imbued some way. Some extension of that person's holiness for a saint or greatness for Alexander could become yours. If you had your possession, I don't know, a bit of his fingertip or something. Yeah, very, very Greek, magical papyri. Oh, yeah, the same era, of course, that those are being written as when this is happening. Absolutely. And just one more thing before I get on to my next question, but you mentioned it briefly, but pants, people, we don't think we don't think about this, but pants were considered a feminine and barbaric for a lot of the time. Back then, like, you know, we don't wear pants, like those those purgants wear the pants. Right. Look at things like the Sabbath, the Sabbath day on all these depictions of imperial victories and all the all the barbarians, quote, unquote, who are subjugated. All the mills are wearing the pants, like, quote, unquote, sissies. So yeah, it's a very, very strange kind of thought world. Yeah, for instance, so internalized that pants are, you know, if anything, a masculine article of clothing, or at least were until a generation ago. And right, yeah, for the Romans, that it was it was other, you know, was something that we don't do, but those people north or east to do it. And so that that, you know, made a whole thing taboo. Yeah, just hilarious stuff. It's like just as a history major, that was always one of the things that really grabbed me, like when I was studying this stuff. What I wanted to talk about briefly was something that you touch on your channel a lot, which is numismatics. So you talk a lot about coins and maybe people who are more focused, maybe like people like me nowadays who are interested, laypeople who focus more on the text, we don't understand the full importance of numismatic, numismatic evidence for the historian of antiquity. So I didn't know if you could briefly touch upon the importance of numismatics. Sure. You know, and that's true among historians, too. You know, all too often we are, you know, texts become almost a sort of cult because, of course, that they are the most important aspect of our evidence for antiquity. It's only through them we access the thought world of antiquity. But, you know, all too often our training as an historian is like when I was going through my doctoral program, everything I did was texts, even though, you know, my dissertation had been very heavily archaeological in various respects. You know, I received no training on how to deal with that evidence. And even people who do do archaeologists tend to leave numismatics aside in its own weird little sub-discipline, where, you know, these people, you know, study the coins as artifacts and as products of antiquity, but it's almost banished to the field of our history or something that's just not quite classical enough. And that's ridiculous because, you know, for many aspects of ancient history, coins are the most important category of evidence we have. So I can give you a few examples. So Bactria, the famous Greek kingdom in Central Asia and based on what's now Afghanistan and the other stans north of the Tejikistan, Uzbekistan. So that we have only a few texts that record what happened in Bactria because it was so far removed from the Mediterranean. We have, you know, these snippets of, you know, lists of king names, you know, X or Y, you know, defeated the Sarmatians in the battle. And that's it. But we have these glorious series of coins, silver coins, admitted by the Bactrian kings, which tell us both who those kings were. And a great deal about how they wanted to project themselves, you know, so they wanted to be warriors. We have them, you know, on horseback spearing, you know, these nomadic horsemen. We have them, you know, as as Hellenes, all the legends are, of course, in Greek, despite their subjects for mostly Persian speakers. And then later on, when they spend it into India, we have these fascinating examples of cultural fusion, where one side of the coin might be in Greek. The other side will be in Sanskrit, or in some language derived from Sanskrit, or it might have a Buddhist image on it. And so for Greeks in the East, coins are absolutely crucial for understanding how these kingdoms functioned, what their cultural policies were, who they wanted to be, essentially. In the Mediterranean worlds, where we know more from texts, we still know quite a bit from coins. Things like the Great Inflation Crisis of the third century in the Roman Empire, we can track the declining silver content of the Denarius and the Antoninianus, and that tells us exactly how bad the crisis was, how much silver is in the coins. Look at their legends, you know, what they're putting on the coins. And again, that's the most important propaganda the emperors had was their coinage, you know, nine-tenths of the population is illiterate. They're not reading Virgil, they're not reading Horus, but they're using coins. And the images on those coins tell you, again, what the emperor wants to project. The legends themselves are important too, but even as having the goddess or that abstraction or the emperor being crowned by victory is our most important window, in many ways, into imperial iconography. You know, there was that whole furor or, you know, internet tizzy around Sponsonian, you know, this new emperor discovered, you know, from a coin that had been known for a long time but had been judged fake before. And we know actually about a half dozen emperors only from coins, they're not recorded in any text. They were short-lived, you know, they were usurpers, they were, you know, a kind of has-beens, but only through coins do we know about their existence. So coins should be used alongside texts and alongside archaeology for a full picture of antiquity. And it's too bad that very often we neglect that. Well said. I was in a discussion with Dr. Edward Watts the other day and we were talking about not just the numismatic aspect, but inscriptions, things like monuments. These are, and yeah, like you were saying, in a population that's majority illiterate, these are functioning as divine text as well. These are projecting not just propaganda, but like the divine ordainment and provenance of Rome's rule, right? So they should be taken an equal measure. And this is something that's also being recognized increasingly in New Testament scholarship. There was a scholar named Davina Lopez who took Paul's letters and she intersected those with the iconography of things like the Sabbath stand and these depictions of the barbarian other as subjugated females, you know, and the sexual violence inherent in the Roman founding myths. And she said the same kind of thing, you know, we need more art historians and more people who focus on archaeology to intersect with history and New Testament studies to give a fuller picture because these are functioning just as much these monuments and these coins are functioning just as much as texts as the written word itself. So yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, my own dissertation and my first book actually was just about that. You know, I talked about how Roman governors, you know, their chief duty was trying cases was being the most important judge in a given province. And so they would travel from city to city. It was called Conventus. It was their asizes pretty much. They were circuit judges and so they would ride their circuit over the course of a year going to city to city spend a couple of weeks in each city trying cases in the most important place in town, typically either in the forum, or in the Basilica or by a temple beside it. And my entire project, my dissertation was about how these spaces in which they tried cases were part of a dialogue between Roman imperial power and provincial elites and that they were in many ways talking through these landscapes surrounding them, the statues, the inscriptions, the great colonnaded facades. You know, you can't say, you know, it is an elite, you know, treat me fairly because that's implicit or it's pretty implicit in your dialogue. But the space can say that. And when it comes to religion, of course, right? The, you know, the medium is the message, right? In a lot of ways. And that's true of a temple as well. There's a reason that it's so conservative which is architecture. That they use the same kind of assads for millennium after, you know, there's all kinds of innovative ways to use concrete to do crazy interior spaces because, you know, that's kind of assad connotes a millennium of tradition. You know, that's how the gods have to be addressed architecturally. And that's also, of course, by rituals or so conservative because if it's worked once, well, why wouldn't it keep working? And yeah, it is fascinating. And I would love to see much more cross-palonization between archaeology and classical philology. But, you know, it's not, it's hard to do well. And I believe that I left academia speaks to how it's not terribly sellable either sometimes. But yeah, no, no. So in other words, full agreement with everything you just said. Absolutely. Thank you for that. So I think my next question is a little bit might be loaded, but let's go for it. This question sounds simple, but actually it's much more multifaceted than at first glance. So it's gonna touch upon the myth concepts and Greco-Roman society. So mythos and lore are an integral part, not just of the everyday life, but of Pidea. Intellectually leads like cornutus paving the way for allegorhesis. And in addition, the garbage etymology that they would do that persists to this day. But, you know, at the end of the day, did the Greeks and Romans believe these myths? Yeah, although that's, it's a chapter of naked statues. And as I'm sure you know from looking at that, there's obviously no single or simple answer to that. You're right to say that the myths were always important to how the Greeks and Romans saw themselves, that they could never jettison the myths until they became Christian. And even then they retained the myths as a sort of cultural knowledge. You know, the question of course is whether, for the elite especially, if they had always been a sort of cultural knowledge only, or if this is part of how they understood the gods. And of course, this changed over time. So the beginning for the era of Homer, which is our first real window into the classical world. So this is the eighth century BC. You know, Homer and Hesiod, we assume that the myths are being taken, if not necessarily literally seriously in this period, that this is part of how you know the gods. It's also very clear from the very beginning though, that there's no single set of myths. You know, Homer and Hesiod become the canon in a lot of ways. Their texts become part of Pidea, become part of education, and become for Greek children for the next 1,000 years and more, their first induction to the gods, or at least, you know, their first system egg introduction to the gods. But always there's this uncontrolled, incredibly diverse galaxy of local cults, each of which presents its own interpretation of the gods through practice, through cults, and through a dazzling array of local myths. And only those local myths that are taken up into the texts become iconic, become canonical. Whether those are taken more seriously than local cults by some of the lives in Thebes, or in Asparta, or in Athens, it's kind of hard for us to grasp, because what we have are these very intellectualized texts, often they're philosophical, when they discuss the gods, or they're historical. And so it's, religion becomes tangential to them, or at least becomes, it's talked about in a very stylized way that divorces it from lived experience. And so, you know, we have, in other words, what the elite is saying to other members of the elite about the gods in these very particular contexts, these certain generic contexts. So if you're Plato, for example, you're talking about how the myths are harmful because they're part of the gods in negative light, which tells us two interesting things that Plato both believes in the gods very seriously, and that he thinks that's not crazy iconoclastic to say that you can disbelieve the myths. You know, and he's part of this, or coming at the end of this couple of generations of ferment in Athens, the Sophists, you know, who call the question traditional religion and seem to in some ways leave a lasting legacy in Greek intellectual tradition, mainly through Plato and his answers to the Sophists. But I guess all we can say is that from the time of Plato, from the 53 BC onward, for the Greek and Roman elite, it's okay and in some ways expected to disbelieve the myths, or at least to think that they are allegories, that they are not necessarily, for instance, the gods, you know, raping nymphs or doing other, you know, morally reprehensible things, that they are in some way, at best at least, a way of perceiving that God's fear of influence and influence on moral affairs. And at worst, they should be just entirely, they're just, you know, ancient superstition, the gods exist, but they're nothing like their myths and it's all there is to it. And so it seems that, again, for the elite, a lot dependent on which philosophical tradition you subscribed to. If you were a Stoic, you were much more likely to take the allegorical route, to do often write very slap-dash allegories, you know, where, you know, a famous one, the God Ares sounds kind of like the Greek word for harm, so therefore, you know, is the principle of harming, you know, philosophize for 10 pages thereafter. It very much seems that, you know, the Stoics want to have a cake and eat it too, keep the myths, but also say, no, they're just allegories. The Epicureans famously said that the gods, if they exist at all, are divorced from mankind and the myths, therefore, have no meaning for us, say best stories. Platonists, you know, again, later on the, we tend to think of them kind of through the Neo-Platonists, you know, the Imperial Platonists, who tended to keep the myths, but allegorize the absolute hell out of them. And so they're almost unrecognizable. The gods become these higher demons who stand between mankind and the one supreme God. And so in other words, for intellectuals, there's a dazzling array of approaches you can take to the bits, where you both know them, because you know them through the text, you have to know, as an educated Greek or Roman, you have to know Homer, you have to know Virgil, and to know them is to know the gods. But at the same time, they're not necessarily something you believe. For the vast majority of the population that's not writing philosophical texts, we really don't know. I mean, obviously people are going to the rituals, you know, they're going through the practices through which mankind has addressed the gods for millennium. Does that mean they believe the myths as well? You know, the elites tended to think so, we think, because like, oh, you know, the great unwashed, the multitude, of course they believe the myths, you know, they're slack jawed yokels, why wouldn't they? You know, we don't actually know in most cases, you know, the fact that we have things like votive offerings, where you dedicate, you know, a small statuette or some other, an altar base to a god. Yeah, they believe in the gods, it seems. Most people did or we assume they did, but you know, how much the myths were part of how they understood those gods. You know, again, we throw up our hands as historians because all we have, you know, are the texts which are opaque, the inscriptions, which tell us only this act was transacted between worshipper and god and archeology, which is susceptible to a huge range of interpretations. So, yeah, probably. Yeah, we'll probably never really know. No, that's the thing, you know, what we have to often say as historians of antiquity is, okay, thus far, no further. So we know individual answers to that question, but you know, right, you know, that there's, you know, a hundred million answers. Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing that I've kind of come out of these interviews so far, thinking as that, we really need to read texts like Plutarch hand-in-hand with the technological Greek magical papyri, because the Greek magical papyri really shows what people on the ground were doing when they're consulting these ritual specialists. And I mean, we can't always pause it like you were saying, whether they believe it or not, but obviously they're interacting in a transactional sense with these deities and daimons. So fascinating, thank you for that. This is a content creator on YouTube. Is it sometimes, you almost feel like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill, eternally to bring the academic content to the masses, and it's such an accessible, but also scholarly way that you do, especially what you do, which I find very admirable, that you do it in six to 10 minute video segments, which is, you know, like people don't realize how hard it is to succinctly digest the stuff into palatable kind of bits for people to understand and also do it in an entertaining way, which you do very well. So I wanna commend you for that. So I think as a content creator, you're dealing with, for lack of a better term, conspiracy theories, right? Especially on YouTube and TikTok, you have everything from the Roman Empire never existed to, you know, Jesus never existed. So I just thought, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your experiences as a content creator, and if you have some crazy encounters that you've experienced in your journey so far. Oh yes. Well, let's lead off with the first question. Yes, Sisyphean is an apt adjective sometimes, because it's not so much that the writing is quick enough. You know, that's something you kind of get into the habit of is writing these kind of succinct scripts. And the visuals, I work with a video editor now, who takes a lot of that part off my back, which is great. The hard part is the research, you know, doing, you know, good academic research every week, you know, quickly. And it can be exhausting when, especially I'm doing something else, which I almost always am. You know, I'm writing a book. I'm, you know, I'm in Europe doing, you know, some kind of travel thing for YouTube. And when you're not treating it like a full-time job that it is, it can quickly pile up and just bury you. And so yeah, like anybody, I think like most content creators, you kind of live in this love-hate relationship with your medium, where, you know, YouTube makes so many things possible for me. It allows me to do what I love outside of academia, which I would not be able to otherwise, because you know, people don't buy enough books, frankly. But at the same time, the nature of the medium, right, exposes, makes you present that material and what feels like, you know, kind of a slap-dash way. It feels minimalist. It feels irresponsible sometimes. You know, dealing with, right, these absurd conspiracy theories sometimes. But my favorite one is the mud-flood. I don't know if you've encountered this before. It's the idea that somehow, for reasons completely unknown to the people who subscribe to this too, about a century ago, the world was submerged by a biblical-style flood that covered everything in, you know, like 30 feet of well mud. And that is the greatest continuity in history. And so everything you think is into history is actually a lie. It's much more recent. I don't know where this comes from, but I did a video once about how why Rome was buried, you know, how it was buried by its own debris, essentially. And a lot of mud-flooders came up in the comments. I also got an email from somebody who was absolutely convinced that Jesus was crucified in the Coliseum. Don't know how they came to that particular conclusion, but it wasn't built yet for one thing when that happened. But yeah, they sent some very long emails to me on that subject to which, you know, I pointedly did not reply, but well. Someone helped me find a lost mind at one point. That was fun. So you end up with, yeah, being a public-facing historian can be a wonderful thing, but sometimes, right, you know, that the public you're facing is a public you're not expecting. It's sort of that way. Right. Unfortunately, it seems like it's easier to be Graham Hancock these days than to be Karen Ryan. Yeah, that's right. Both in terms of views and in terms of, I guess, monetary rewards. But that's another subject. Let's move on. So as you mentioned before, you are working on a new book. Is it a sequel to Naked Statues? Or is it something different? I didn't know if you could tell us anything about it at this stage. Sure. Yeah, no, I'm doing the grand announcement in probably about a month and a half when the page proofs are done. I can, you know, send to you a more full picture of the book. But yeah, I'm done with it now. I finished writing about a month ago. I finished proofing everything about two weeks ago. It is a sequel to Naked Statues, called the same vein as Naked Statues, insane emperors, sunken cities, and earthquake machines. And before you ask, the earthquake machine was an early steam engine that I'm talking about. And so, yeah, it's the same deal. And it answers 40 questions about the recent developments in that short kind of pithy style that I tried to use Naked Statues. Many of the answers this time began actually from something I was doing for YouTube and they're kind of extended versions of a video script where it's like the real answer, you know, in depth with the footnotes and everything. And it almost killed me, frankly, to finish the book while I was doing all my YouTube stuff because I had essentially conjured up from nothing in the course of about two months, which was a lot. But it's done now. We'll be out in the world October 1st and I'm thrilled to see it, you know, finally approaching the light. You know, it really is, yeah, if you enjoyed Naked Statues, you'll enjoy this book too, I sure hope so. And it's been, it's always a pleasure, you know, for me writing scripts for YouTube, you know, I really see myself as an author, first and foremost. And, you know, when you're writing a script for YouTube, you know that what your script takes the backseat to the visuals. It's a visual medium, it's the nature of the beast, so be it. So it's nice writing a book because you know that the prose, you know, it takes the front seat and then whatever, you know, little small merits I might have as an author, will be appreciated for what they are. And so, yeah, I enjoyed the process despite the exhaustion of writing the book and looking forward very much to announcing its launch on Toad and Stone in about a month and a half. Yeah, so very much looking forward to that Love Naked Statues. And I definitely wanna hear about this earthquake machine. Sounds fantastic. So Garrett, I think this is gonna be a super complicated question. So feel free to skip it if you need, but I think it's the most important. Why didn't Romans use their aqueducts as water slides? You know, I feel like the Empire would never have fallen if they had discovered that last key component, you know, to classical civilization. One of my favorite videos ever, of course, was on this very topic. And it was asked on Reddit actually initially. I used to be very active on Ask Historians on Reddit and someone asked this question and I loved they asked this question and so I just went full bore on it. The short answer is that there was usually no gradient in aqueducts, you know, a very slight gradient. You know, so if you're building an aqueduct, you know, your goal is to economize on material. And so you wanna keep your source as low as possible. So you have only have to go, you're not building a giant, you know, sprawling arcades, you know, across your whole length. Or if you do have a lot of gradient, you wanna bring it down right away and then have a decline very, go very slowly going towards the city. Also, there's too much gradient. It'll, the water will road the channel on the inside, the mortar in the inside, so you have, you know, water coming out, you know, from the side of the aqueduct. So most Roman aqueducts only go down a foot or two every mile. So you really can't slide very well. You get in maybe like a slip and slide deal, but you know, it wouldn't be very satisfying. There were, however, I discovered things called aqueduct cascades. So when there was a spring located, say high up on a slope, and they wanted to bring it down to the level of the plane and have that channel going out towards the city, they would bring it down very rapidly through a series of often open slide-like channels with water coming down. So there you could have slid, but if you had slid, you would have gone into this dark channel that was never accessed and probably would have died down there. Often they weren't very deep. Typically you're talking about a foot at most of water with kind of a slow flow. You know, they were cleaned out pretty routinely, so they weren't too slippery either. And of course, they're dark. You know, the channel is normally about wide and tall enough for a man to walk down for the maintenance people to scrape out, you know, in crustaceans and stuff. So you could do it theoretically, but it wouldn't be very comfortable you're scraping the walls on both sides. And of course, ultimately they didn't do it because it's their water supply. They didn't want people playing around in their drinking water. Nero famously took a bath in one of Rome's main springs and there was an outbreak of disease right afterward. People blended on Nero, taking a bath in the springs, you know, where they had the aqueducts coming down from. So long and short of it is they could have done it in the Cascades at least, but alas, we have no record of it being done. Yeah, it seems like a missed opportunity. I can really see like, Commodus or Julian really putting on their floaties and stuff. Right, right. And down those. Perhaps we should learn from their mistakes and invest in that. And actually that there is, I discovered in Florida a resort that tried to recreate parts of Pompeii and then have a water slide go down through it. And I tried hard to get them to sponsor my aqueduct water slide video. I thought it'd be a great, you know, little thing. But a really experience of water slide. Alas, they weren't cool. That would have been the most epic thing ever. And yeah, that's one of my favorite videos of yours too. There are so many great videos. And I just wanna thank you again for all your hard work in bringing these stories and, you know, the people who live them to life. It really is a service to, you know, interested laypeople like myself to otherwise, even when I was in college, I didn't hear about a lot of these things unless I did independent study. So yeah, I just wanna thank you again for that. So Garrett, you have obviously told in stone, you have told in stone foot notes, your podcast. Just feel free to take this time to plug whatever work and people find you, you know, the floor is yours. Well, thank you. And let me say it has been a pleasure to talk to you as well, you know, because the really, the best thing about being a kind of creator on the internet is that you get to meet, you know, virtually at least thousands of people who love the same things you do. And that's the most rewarding part of what I do on told in stone. So yeah, so I have my YouTube channel told in stone. I have actually two other YouTube channels as well. One told in stone foot notes for the podcast and other live stuff. One called Sneakroots to the Past, which is for my travel content. But of course, my baby, the thing that I'm most keen to publicize is the upcoming book, which is titled in Stain Emperors, Sunken Cities, and Earthquake Machines, published in October 1st, available for pre-order now. And if you go to my website, toldinstone.com, you'll see a link to buy it there, or some Amazon as well. But that's the thing, of course, that as an author, I love that people read that books. I think if you love antiquity, there's a lot of stuff that you'll find fascinating there. I sure hope so. Gareth, this has been an absolute pleasure and honor. Thank you very much. We hope to speak to you again soon, and best of luck. I appreciate you, Jason. Have a great time.