Empires, Conquerors, and Martin Luther

It's kind of stunningly spoken. When you see how little England is, you know, that makes sense what you're talking about with pirates. That like they had to be the most horrific monsters to try to control the empire. Well it's also insane. By the way, so I did this special in Spain. So I, and I love history. So do you know what year they finally unified Spain where they got rid of the Moors and they finally, the Castillians kind of pieced together what we consider modern day Spain. Do you know what year they did that? No. 1492. Oh. The year that Columbus. So they literally finally kicked the Moors out. By the way, were really, they were really not nice. Moors are evil people. Well, no, no, they were not nice to the Moors or the Jews. Like they got, that was. The Moors though, they were conquerors themselves too. They were conquerors. But like they. Everybody was back then, right? But like the, I mean, I performed in Morocco. It's like amazing to think that like, you know, we think of the colonizers as these Europeans, but the Arabs were colonizers too. They colonized Morocco. So like there's the Berbers in, I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong, that, so the Moroccans that were in Spain were part of, you know, when Muhammad and all these guys rose up, the great Arab power was they took over and they got all the way into Spain and stuff like that. It's insane to think that, I mean, this was a joke that I had when I went to Spain. Like Spain took all the gold, all the gold from Central and South America, all of it. So like there wasn't really that much gold in North America. There was gold in Central and South America and Spain took it all and they spent it. And so one of my jokes when I was in Spain, I'm like, where's the gold? Where is it? You guys, like they literally, like one of the things they did is they built a Navy and they got their ass kicked by the British. You know, so it's really fascinating to see what, how quick these empires come and how quick they disappear. Yeah. And that's the strange thing about where we are today is that we want to think that the United States is going to be around forever and that, you know, the power and influence we enjoy over the rest of the world will continue this way. And there's no way we'd ever live under the thumb of a ruthless dictator like they did, you know, back in the day and this part of the world or that part of the world. That's been the standard way that human beings have governed forever. Yeah. The Romans were like, we're good. No one's going to take over. Yeah. Come on. We got it. The Greeks the same way. I mean, they started with democracy, right? And it all fucking fell apart. And the Romans were like so confident. They're like, you know, Constantine's like, you know what? I don't even want to do Rome anymore. Let's go over to what's present day Istanbul. Like he switched the capital of Rome. That's insane. It's kind of like if a president was like, you know what? I think our capital should now be in, let's now put it in Vancouver. Phoenix. Yeah. Like in a different country, right? That's wild. It's an empire. It was named after a city, Rome, and he moved it to an, you know, essentially Asia. It's like insane. Why did he go there? I think that that was modern maybe. I don't know. Oh, interesting. I don't know. Dan Carlin wouldn't know. Yeah, he'd be the guy to ask. How does that guy know so much? He's just consuming books. Yeah, well he works so hard on his show. To call his show a podcast and to call this a podcast is really kind of hilarious because this is like we did zero preparation. I haven't seen you in two years. We talked like through text messages only and then also we're sitting there talking. We have no idea what we're going to talk about and we've been talking for hours. Dan Carlin, when he does a two hour podcast, he will research that for months, months and months. He's like, well he'll do a thing like The Wrath of the Khan, which is a spectacular five piece series on Genghis Khan. When he did that, it took like six months to prepare. Wow. Yeah, and then he puts them out and you can get them for a dollar. They cost a dollar each and it is like literally some of the most spectacular historical entertainment you'll ever get in your life. It's educational. There's an enthusiasm to how he does it too. He's amazing. He's so humble too. He always says he's not a historian. Like, picture a fucking historian. Yeah, he always says that. Stop saying that. Have you met him? I haven't met him. He's a great guy too. He's been on the podcast a couple of times. And so what is ... So the length of his podcasts are astronomical too. They're like four hours, part one of Caesar Conquers the World. And you're like, what? I know. Let me quote from this book that I read. I'm like, dude, I haven't ... How do you ... Like reading this dense information, he goes, Sophocles wrote this thing. And you're like, how do you know that? Yeah, and he covers so many different topics. He had a great piece on Martin Luther and the invention of Lutherism and the time in history where making a version of the Bible that was phonetically readable that people could understand, like a phonetic interpretation of the Bible where you could say the word. That didn't exist. They all read the Bible in Latin. And if you don't understand Latin, you were- Most people didn't read. Right. You were at the whim of the priests. And Martin Luther came along and said, actually, what God said, you should probably interpret it yourself and not leave it to these people. And they came real close to killing him a few times for that. It is amazing how consistently the messages and the teachings of Jesus are like ... Like humans can't grasp it. They're like way off. Like, oh, we're supposed to take care of the poor. We're supposed to help the needy. We're supposed to do all this. And people are like, does that mean I should get another car? We don't even come close. I'm going to get a Jesus tattoo. Do you know what I mean? We don't ... And I'm talking about people that embrace the Christian faith. Get it wrong. I'm not talking about people like, I don't believe in that stuff. Right. People who proclaim to be Christian. Again, humans are pretty dumb.