Let's be honest, most men drift. We wake up, we scroll, we work, and then we just rinse and repeat. And we know we're softer than we should be. That's why I built the 31-day resilience reset. This is not a devotional. It is a field manual for men ready to stop drifting and start fighting back. So, for 31 days, you'll train your spirit, mind, and body with scripture, prayer, and daily challenges that forge real resilience. Go to www.undaunted.life/31. life/31day to download this resource for free. That's undaunted.life/31day. Start your reset today. This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it. All right, guys. We got a special guest on the podcast today. His name is Edmund Richardson. He is a historian of ancient Greece. He's also a professor in the department of classics and ancient history at Durham University and the author of the new book Alexander God King Man. Now, I got to tell you, I was super excited for this one because when I was pitched this book by his publisher, I said yes almost immediately and I get a ton of pitches nowadays. But just the the gravitational pool of Alexander the Great as a historical figure is so substantial. But if you're trying to learn things about him, you can't go watch the terrible Colin Ferrell movie. You got to like try to dig into these different histories. But as we talk about in this interview, there are some some mistakes and some things that u the people that have written previous histories of Alexander didn't do quite well enough. There were certain sources that they wouldn't go to that are actually reliable sources. So, we do talk about that. And then we get into the person of of Alexander like what his relationship was like with his father Philip II. How Philip II obviously, as I you've heard me say before, thought he was the point, but apparently his son was the point. how Aristotle, the famous philosopher, the worldrenowned philosopher even to this day, how he was actually a mentor to Alexander, how that even came about. Then we get into uh him becoming king, some of his early conquest. We talk we talk at length about the failins, right? The Macedonian failins. And if you listen to my show for any length of time, you've heard me talk about the failins a lot. Edmund gives us a lot of really nice details about the failins and why it was so effective because that's basically the reason he was able to conquer from you know gosh ancient Greek all the way to India. Then we get into kind of his foil Alexander's foil which would have been Das the king of Persia. We get into Alexander eventually becoming Pharaoh of Egypt. We talk about the library of Alexandria. We talk about his battle strategies. Then we talk about this big shift in his life when he went from having these battleh hardened soldiers, these generals around him that were okay with interrupting him, that were okay with telling him, "Hey, this isn't a good idea, and then he eventually got to where it was just a bunch of yesmen around him." And how that really put him in a bad place. We talk about when Alexander finally was done conquering whenever he turned back and how it was a desert that consumed most of his men way more than he had ever lost in battle. We get into his overall legacy. I even asked Edmund towards the end about how he thinks about Jesus because Alexander the Great thought of himself as a god king. So did Xerxes and Art of Xerxes and you know King Tut and all these other people. They thought of themselves as god kings. But all those guys are dead, right? They're in tombs. Their bones are somewhere on this planet. They are not alive right now on this planet. But how Jesus of Nazareth is alive and what it could be as a reminder for us in terms of how we approach life. But really enjoyed my time with Edmund and I really really enjoyed the book. Guys, you have to check it out. It's in the show notes. But without further ado, let's get into it. Edmund Richardson, welcome to Undaunted Life of Man's podcast. >> Thank you so much. It's great to be on the podcast. >> Yeah. Hey, I will tell you, I've been very excited to talk to you because like I get a lot of pitches now. It's kind of ridiculous the number of pitches now that I get for authors or documentarians or whatever people that that need to come on the show. But I got a great relationship with Joe over at St. Martins's Press and he pitched this book and it was like just after reading the name of the book, I was like, "Yep, that's the easiest." Yes, I've ever heard in the history of the planet. And then they sent it to me and it was like a billion pages long. I was like, "Okay, well, buckle up, buttercup." And then uh we we got we got through it. But uh and we'll get to your writing style and all that here in a second and we're going to get into the book. But just out of curiosity to start here, Edmmond, you obviously you're an expert uh in ancient history and specifically ancient Greece. Where did that come from? Is there something like from your upbringing that kind of peeled you off towards that that made you very interested in it? I mean, it's it's a great question because it's it's on the face of it such a s such a such a weird obsession to have and like like like how how how do you how do you get from like the 21st century to ancient Greece? And and I think the most honest thing I can say is it's it's one of those those stories, one of those bits of life that just kind of stuck with me the the harder I tried to shake it off, the more I kept coming back to it. Um, the thing about history in ancient Greece especially is it's one of those things where the closer you look, the stranger it gets. And the closer you closer you look, the more more interesting it gets. And I'd heard these stories a little bit as a kid, like, you know, ancient world, Athens, democracy, the Greek myths, the the the kind of things that kind of float float by a lot of people. But when I started studying it, when I started like spending time with it, I I I I just I just found I found I I found I couldn't couldn't let go. And and yeah, that's that's how I ended up where I am. >> So, it's interesting you say studying it and spending time with it, right? And so, I told you off air the majority of our audiences are they're Christians. And so, they'll study the Bible. They they'll spend time with the Bible. They'll try to get into the mind of someone several thousand years ago, you know, a Hebrew person or someone writing this down in coin a Greek or something like that. They try to immerse themselves in it. But man, it can kind of be difficult depending upon what sources you're reading. Are you reading the actual firsthand accounts of something or are you reading something that was written down hundreds of years later? So for you as you go through and study Edmund, how do you kind of parse out like uh this seems kind of like a fable, this seems like a fairy tale, this seems like something that uh I think someone kind of made this up along the way because that will affect how you exist inside the story, you know. >> Yeah. And it's it's it's a great question. Um um particularly for for what I was writing about here, Alexander the Great. um the sources that we normally use are so many of them are so bad, right? They're they're just comically bad. Um and as you said, they're written down often hundreds of years after the event by people who've never been to almost any of the places that they're writing about and are writing for a completely different world. They're writing under the Roman Empire. They're writing for Roman readers. And so they're writing for people who see the world through completely different eyes and have completely different priorities. So that really affects you know what they choose to put in, what they choose to leave out. But one of the things that's kind of been so wonderful for me, and you know, as a historian, and and I'm sure you can empathize with that in your study of the Bible, the the thing that you you you you try to do is just to get a little bit closer than it's been possible to before to to to not necessarily to solve every puzzle, to to untangle every knot, but to get a little bit closer with with time and study and effort. And that's what one hopes to do as a historian. And the thing that's been so exciting with writing about Alexander the Great is that suddenly we're able to do that. Whether that's from sources which are actually written down around the same time he was alive, things that are contemporary with him that we're just discovering and just translating from the for the first time. Or whether that's from looking at a different kind of evidence, looking at archaeology, looking at the sites of his battles or the cities that he founded which are being identified and dug up for the first time or being able to use new technology to kind of examine data in different ways. I think and the thing about that is a lot of a lot of sources the historians had kind of been inclined to dismiss to say ah no this is this is too farfetched this is just a fable we're starting to realize hold on a minute there's actually something there and a lot of things that were written very very sensibly very soberly just just seemed seemed absolutely unimpeachable it's like hold on no no no this is nonsense this abs this is absolute absolute nonsense. So I think so I think I think it's I think it's always it's always a process but I think one of the things we can try to do is go back to the time itself and see what evidence from that we have. >> I love that. Got to you know get a little bit closer. I wrote that down. I love that because that that's my encouragement to people that are looking at any type of history whether you're into World War II. I just watched a 20part documentary on World War II. It was absolutely fascinating. Tom Hanks and History Channel did it. It was great. Or maybe you're into the Civil War. Maybe you're into the French and Indian War. Maybe you're going all the way back to to the, you know, uh, Greek Wars or the Gaelic Wars or any of those types of things, getting a little bit closer to understanding. I remember reading through the book of Matthew. Just somebody mentioning, hey, he was writing to a mainly Jewish audience. Oh my gosh. Like, it just opened up what I was reading so much more because it wasn't just the words on the page. who it was who they were meant for primarily that helped me understand what was written down in the text. But I can't stand it any longer. We got to get to the book. So the book is called Alexander God King and Man or God King Man. Guys, you can check it out in the show notes. Uh it is available now if you're listening to this on time. I want to read this quote and then we'll get into it. He did not know it yet, but Alexander was about to become a legend. Within a few brief years, the young man from the hills of Macedon would rule the greatest empire in history stretching from Athens to the plains of India. His campaign would transform the world from the stars in the sky to the words on this page to the dreams in our heads. Alexander reshaped reality more profoundly than almost anyone else in history. So Edmund, why this book? Why now? Why you? >> It's several great questions, right? Um, so with this book with Alexander, um, it kind of comes back to what I was what what we are just talking about that there is suddenly a chance to tell a different story. And as a historian thinking about writing about Alexander, you're like, okay, what the heck heck am I thinking? This guy, this guy, this guy that's had like thousands of books written about him. Why? Why? Why on earth would you do that? But there's suddenly a chance to see him differently and not and to see him in his world. And I think one of the things you just said was was was really striking about figuring out who a text is written for, what kind of world it's it's it's occupying, where where it's coming from. And one of the things I try to do in this book is really to rebuild that world around Alexander. Not just, you know, not just one man in an army going going across the map, but this ridiculously complex and brilliant and beautiful set of cultures, these thousand-year-old cities, these ancient kingdoms, these stories from the edge of reality that we see growing up around him and we see him having to kind of come to terms with. So, I think for for me it was it was the ability to to to see Alexander a little bit more clearly and to bring readers closer to his world to to to make to make it so that you can see the same stars over ahead to to to feel the the full real horror of his battles and and the wonder of what he eventually accomplished. Well, and Edmund, for for you, obviously, in order to do the work that you did, you had to survey lots of histories that have already been written about Alexander the Great. Guys, they're out there. Just go to any bookstore, go to Amazon, and just type in Alexander the Great, and you will absolutely be flooded. But it it obviously felt like, well, I'm assuming this as I was reading it, it's like I think Edmund felt like something was missing. uh something was missing from some of the other biographies or historical recountings of Alexander the Great's life and reign. And so what do you feel like was missing from the previous histories? So this is the thing like if you've read a lot of history I I you know you you'll you'll come across this. There's a sense in so many histories of inevitability, right? This is this kit from a tiny little kingdom in Greece who ends up ruling by his mid20s the largest empire in human history. And it's hard not to tell that story backwards from the triumph. So that everything is inevitably building up to this. Everything is inevitably turning this kid into Alexander the Great. And with ancient biographies especially, you know, there's a there's a real tendency to write backwards from the adult life to the childhood. So if someone, you know, is is a is a famous kind of murderer later in life, then this kid is going to be creepy from from the cradle. If someone is a great philosopher, then they're going to be, you know, outsmarting their teachers and and and impressing everyone. It's it's it's just a thing that these guys do. But when I looked at the stories of Alexander, when I looked at the sources dating from his actual lifetime, more and more it was clear people didn't understand what was about to happen. People had no idea what was about to happen. And that was that included Alexander himself. No one thought that this kid was going to go and rule this vast empire. few people really took him seriously even when he when he when he when he took the throne of Macedon when he when he became king at the age of 20 he he was just his father's kind of slightly disappointing son so what I wanted to to sort of try to reintroduce was this sense of possibility this sense of uncertainty people not knowing how the story was going to end when they were in the middle of it people not understanding quite what was about to happen and the sheer wonder and the sheer awe of being swept up in one of the greatest stories in history. >> And I think one of the things as I was reading is it didn't feel robotic. Uh I I I know I keep going back to the Bible, but I remember being a kid, no one really taught me how to read history. No one really taught me how to read these these accounts. And you know, you read it like, "And then he went to this place and then he did this thing and then another thing happened and blah blah blah." And it just feels like it's like robots. And some some historical accounts, regardless of what they're covering, can feel that way where there's it's like there's no life to the person. It's like they're two-dimensional. But as you were writing or as I was reading through your writing, this was this felt more like a narrative arc. There was a lot of detail. There were a lot of sources, right? a lot of references, but it felt like there was a narrative arc which kind of got us more more so into the mindset of Alexander, the people around him, the settings that he was in because obviously it stretched for thousands of miles. Uh, and then obviously we'll get to the end of his life and kind of what some of the shifts were. But there's a great quote from early in the book and it's Philip gave him life. Alexander is said to have have remarked but Aristotle taught him how to live. So there almost everybody alive uh has heard of Aristotle and has heard as Alexander the Great, but not everyone knows that those two were very integrally connected. So talk to us a little bit about the relationship between Aristotle and Alexander. >> It's it's one of the great sort of collisions of history, right? Um, Aristotle arguably one of the first real real teachers of philosophy, one of the people who more than almost anyone else shaped the way we understand the world and understand knowledge. He was he was one of the first people not just to ask these questions about who we are and how we should live our lives but also to try to turn knowledge into a systematic thing to study to think about how we can study how we can unlock the universe around us and Aristotle comes to Macedon to become Alexander's tutor when Alexander is a teenager he's probably probably around 12 or 13 and he's brought in by Alexander's father, King Philip of Macedon. Now, Philillip does this in a little bit of an underhand way or a little bit of a kind of let's let's say direct way. He burns down Aristotle's city. He enslaves the inhabitants um including Aristotle's family and then he says to Aristotle, "Well, you know, I could rebuild your city. I could get your relatives um out of slavery, but why don't you come and tutor my son first?" And so Aristotle not really having much choice in the matter which is how Philip liked things. He didn't really like giving anyone much choice in the matter. Um Aristotle comes along and teaches Alexander and we can see traces of that relationship across Alexander's life and indeed across Aristotle. Um, Alexander is said to have been kind of aed by his teacher and to have carried with him on campaign um, a volume of Homer um, Homer's Homer's Iliad um, which which was actually annotated by Aristotle. It was called the Iliad of the Casket and and Aristotle had said and made notes around the story for Alexander to read. And Alexander read Homer obsessively. um he he he'd do that like throughout his campaign. And Alexander meanwhile while he's, you know, going through all on his campaign is he's conquering much of what was for Greeks the known world is sending all of these remarkable and incredible things back to Aristotle and Macedon. So when he gets to Egypt, he sends all these records um of Egyptian um history and and learning. When he gets to Babylon, he sends Aristotle these vast cache of translated records of the Babylonian astronomers um who'd been, you know, looking up at the sky and recording the planets for hundreds upon hundreds of years. When he gets to India, he sends Aristotle a fullon elephant. So >> so much of so much of Aristotle's learning is built on being able to get access to all of these things which no one else in human history was able to get hold of all of them before. Egyptian records, Greek records, Babylonian records, and as you say, a whole elephant kind of trundling into this little town in the hills of Greece, probably without any warning. Um uh so both of them kind of grow from their relationship with the other and both of them are kind of Alexander especially is transformed by his relationship with Aristotle. Aristotle's teaching about courage about how to face impossible things about how to face down the world and and and the things that life might throw at you. Um seems to have been incredibly influential for Alexander. Yeah, that was very apparent throughout the book and also it was very apparent that you know Alexander did have this deep fascination with the writings of Homer which just I mean talks about the indelible impact of his writings throughout the throughout the millennia right and certainly throughout the centuries and specifically we see Alexander have a a focus on Achilles. >> So Achilles burned hot and then he burned out. He he died young. Obviously, one of the things about Achilles life is that he didn't want to have a long life. He wanted to have a glorious life. And in that day and age, that meant at some point you were going to die in battle, which was considered to be a glorious death. And I remember someone saying this. They said, "We can't just assume that Achilles wasn't a real person because we just we hear about it's like, okay, yeah, you know, he's in these these books by Homer. He's in these poems, these epic poems, but people just automatically assume he's a fictional character." And so I'm wondering what your opinion is because in my mind I'm still convinced he's a fictional character if not an amalgamation of several different, you know, champions, Greek champions that were kind of Homer took the stories of this person, that person, that person, and put them together in kind of this skin suit of a person named Achilles. But what's your read of of Achilles and whether or not he's a historical figure? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I I think for Alexander, Achilles was a real person, right? He's he's he's he's he he belongs to the world as much as Alexander thinks he does himself. and that sense of the age of heroes, right? That there's this moment that if you go back, if you enough enough generations, then you get to this world where everything is louder, everything is on a bigger scale, and humanity is somehow shining more brightly, right? that they're they're closer to the gods, they're closer to the the the the sort of immortal remarkable bit of themselves. So Achilles Achilles isn't just sort of for Alexander a real person. He's he's he's a he's a he's the idea of how he wants to live. He wants to live as brightly and impossibly and grandly as it's possible for a human being to live. But as to whether Achilles himself is a real person, yeah, I kind I kind of agree with you there, Kyle. I think I think he's essentially a fictional character, but that doesn't mean that there isn't some kind of historical rootedness there. That um we know that a lot of the we a lot of these these epic poems um come from something, right? Every story has to come from somewhere. Every every story of a war has to come from someone's experience. Every story of what of the choice that you have to make about whether to choose life or to choose as you said glory the immortal name. The word in Greek is cleos which is a beautiful one because it's this idea that the story about yourself is sometimes the most important thing. The story is that thing that will live forever, that will surpass you, that will that will shine brightly. And that that chaos, that story about yourself is also some part of who you are, right? It's not separate from who you are. It's it's you in the in in the most distilled form. But I think I think yeah, that that a lot of the stories of Homer definitely come from folktales, traveler's tales. memories of war, memories of of of battle and of of champions and of impossible things and whether we should think of Achilles as based on one particular warrior or as you said a few a few different people in a skin suit, which I think is a great way to talk about it actually. Um um that I I I think I think sometimes when when we look at tales of impossible things and we just dismiss them, we're missing what these stories do, right? And because for Alexander himself, there's a whole bunch of stories, right, that that that we're maybe historians maybe just dismissed as impossible things for generations, but then when you look closely at them, you realize, no, actually buried within them, buried within this impossible sounding story, there's something that's actually real and true. And I and so I so so I think I think looking closely at things and trying to see where they might have come from and why people why it was important to people to tell these stories in the way that they did um is is is a really valuable thing. Hey guys, real quick. So pretty much everywhere you look right now, all anyone in the fitness and wellness world wants to talk about is peptides. And in the last few years, the demand and the market for peptides has gone through the roof. And here's the thing, most people don't really know anything about peptides. They just know that a lot of people they know are on them and are having great results. And here are a few reality checks as it pertains to peptides. One, you need to know what they are and how they can help you. Two, not all peptides and peptide companies are reliable and safe. And third, you need a reputable company that will educate you and help you find the peptides that are right for you. 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And so uh that the Macedonian failins the importance of that and I've even talked about I was reading some obscure history of the failins because I was uh preparing a talk and I heard that they they found they found pretty early on that if you put if you always put people in the failins next to people that they didn't know well the the odds of them you know maybe cowardly kind of bowing out went up and yeah obviously if you lose a part of the failins the failing starts to shatter right the turtle shell can't have a hole in it. And >> so they would put these people with their brother on their left, maybe their father on their right, maybe their uncle on the other side. And so it would kind of steal their nerves a little bit so they can continue in this tight motion moving forward. And it's not hyperbolic to say that the cuz he didn't invent it, but the perfection of the failings that Alexander provided is the reason he was able to stretch his empire and to conquer from Athens all the way across. well into Asia. And so just talk to us a little bit about about the failings and give us some of the the finer details that people might miss if they're just watching something like 300. >> Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, and as I I think you you pinpointed it really brilliantly there actually. You in Greek warfare, you fight for the person beside you, right? You you fight for the people around you and you fight for their safety and they fight for your own. And that's how those armies work and that's why they were as successful as they were. They they are the fallances are really tightly packed blocks of infantry. often um in the traditional um traditional first century Greek model armed with relatively short spears and large shields in Alexander's model armed in a pretty unique way in a way which no army at the time had a counter for Alexander's palances are once again tightly packed blocks of infantry and these are men who have been fighting together for years. They fight as these impenetrable units, but they fight not just with light spears and shields, but Alexander's fal fight with these 18 ft long gigantic spears. And these are things that you have to maneuver two-handedly. So essentially, they're balanced. So, um, you're holding them about 5 foot foot along the shaft of the spear. There's a counterwe at one end. There's a there's a very light, very, very sharp blade at the other. And then before the fall goes into battle, the front five ranks of men, if you think of this as like a 16x6 block of infantry, the front five the front five ranks of men lower these spears and the phallanks charges at you at a full run. Now, if you've got something like this coming at you, before you can even get to the first line of soldiers, you've got to get through five layers of these n 18 foot long spears. So, generally speaking, before you even get to the first line of soldiers, it's over. >> Yeah. the fall just goes through literally anything in front of it. Um, we don't really have many coherent accounts of what it was like to face one of Alexander's fallances, mostly because very few people survive facing one of Alexander's fallances. The the best accounts we have are written centuries later by Romans who were facing way less impressive versions of the fall. And even then, they were like, "This is the most horrifying thing I've ever seen." Um, there's a Roman general, an incredibly impressive Roman general, won huge numbers of battles. He he watched a Macedonian fallank tearing through one of his legions. And he literally stood there just tearing his clothes to pieces, saying, "This is the most horrifying thing I've ever seen." Just waking up months later, screaming with nightmares, just remembering what what that fall had done to his men. And this is this is this is absolutely the tribute act compared to Alexander's own fall. We only have one surviving account of what it was like to face a Macedonian fall in battle and this was to face Alexander in battle and this was written by an Egyptian priest poor guy called some um he'd never been in a battle in his life. He never really fought anyone in his life. He was just kind of press ganged into the army of the great king of Persia. The first fight he had ever been in in his life was facing Alexander Fallank at the battle of Isus. And he was just like he was just completely confused. He was like just suddenly everyone around me was dying. Everyone around me was dead. And he took off. He ran for it. He just got as far away from Alexander as he possibly could because these balances are absolutely unstoppable. Every single attempt to face one head on to break this unbreakable formation fails. People try with every single kind of weapon that the ancient world has. They try with chariots. They try with sky chariots. They try with infantry. They try with cavalry. They try with archers. They try with elephants and absolutely nothing breaks these lines of soldiers. >> And so I'm wondering, I don't want to get too far into the failins, but I even look at modern warfare and you you see like echoes of the failins and obviously if you have, you know, if you have bombs you can drop from the sky, if you have improvised explosive devices you can put underground, like there's a lot of different ways to do warfare now. of sitting there in this even if you're sprinting a slowmoving formation. It's just it's really crazy to me that that just lasted for so long. But then and then again when you get into Roman warfare they they preferred the gladius which was more of a short sword. And then obviously when you go to the Hollywood movies fighting with a spear isn't that cool. And so even whenever you got to Achilles and Troy or Achilles in the movie Troy fighting against um oh gosh the the big epic battle with Hector and you know they have the spears at the beginning and then it's like Hollywood's like all right enough with the spears and so then they break the spears and pull out the swords and all of that. But do you know when there was kind of like a turn away from the failins? like when people kind of like okay warfare had gotten beyond it cuz they didn't find out a way to break the failins in just kind of like mono and mono or you know force on force battle it was only after the advent of you know vehicles and certain kinds of uh technology do you have a sense of when that kind of went out of style >> yeah so um it's it's it's complicated right um but and there's sort of there's sort of two two answers the first one is pred predictably a Roman answer because generally speaking when you when you when when you're trying to figure out ancient warfare there's always going to be a bit of a Roman answer. The Macedonian fells those infantry armed with the really really long spears go through everything in its path until a bit over a century after Alexander's death um they have to face start to face Roman armies. Now Roman legions by the time by this time by you know century and a half two centuries after Alexander's death they're fighting in a much more kind of complicated way and they're drilled in a much more complicated way than um most other Greek most Greek armies that they're facing and they know how to fight as small units. So essentially the Roman strategy is to lure them a phallank onto uneven ground or onto broken ground or onto ground where where because of natural features whether it's a stream or or a rocky hillside or whatever it's not possible to maintain that really really tight cohesion. And then once gaps start to open up in these solid blocks of infantry, the Romans send in the what they call their manipul. These like small units of men who basically go in and slice and dice behind the ranks of spears or of course attack fallances from the flanks where they're not so well protected because everyone is holding these spears which are pointing out front. So their flanks are quite vulnerable. So that's what they do. So that's how they beat the fallances by essentially luring them into battles which they're not designed to fight. But then if you think about where the idea of a solid block of infantry where you're essentially just fighting side by side and the and the victory depends on the formation being unbreakable. Where does that start to break down? It's probably all the way into, you know, the 20th century, the first world war, the advent of the machine gun. So, it's suddenly the case, the machine gun and barb wire. Suddenly, the strength of that formation is its vulnerability. Suddenly, if you have a solid block of men who can be very easily targeted by artillery, that's by machine guns, that's already problematic once you get to the Napoleonic War because wars because that kind of block of men is an easy target for long r longer range cannon, longer range artillery. But once you get to the First World War, once you can once you don't have to bring up a cannon or or a mortar or something like that, once you can have two guys with a machine gun facing a solid block of men charging towards you, then that block of men are suddenly disproportionately vulnerable. And they're disproportionately vulnerable because of the way that they were trained. you know, Brit British infantry when when they were when they were charging across no man's land in the First World War, when they were charging against German trenches with machine guns, they were told to do it at a walk. They were told to walk across because they were so so anxious about >> the formation being coherent for about the blocks, those blocks of infantry being unbroken that they were told they were trained to walk at a slow walk towards machine gun nests, right? Buried machine gun nest because their training just simply hadn't taken taken account of how the world had changed. So if you if you So yeah, that's that's I think that's I think at least a few points on the map of of of the failank. >> Well, that's helpful. So guys, keep in mind uh the failins as we're doing this because we're going to be getting into some different battles and some different things because if there wasn't the failins, there's no Alexander the Great in terms of how we've um remembered him throughout history. But as you see with many of these these great conquerors and you know I don't think you can say that Alexander was a great man morally because there's a lot of brutality in your book like these these men were horrifically brutal uh to the people that they went in and did and if they were doing it in the modern day we would look at them as war criminals as terrorists like those kinds of things. So yes, guys, we're keeping all that in mind when we say Alexander the Great. Okay, that's that's just the name that he's been given through history. But every great man, great warrior, great general has to have a foil of some kind. That other king, that other person in that other part of the world. And eventually you're going to have that gigantic showdown. And you know, arguably, or some people would say it's inarguable, but his great foil was Darius or Das. And so there was so much between those two. obviously spent a lot of time focusing on those two in the book. Uh and specifically when you get into the battle of Isus, which is one of the most important books in all of warfare and so that happened in 333 BC, but give us a little bit of an overview of the conflict between Alexander and Das. Uh because a lot of people don't really understand, you know, you we'll get to Egypt in a second. We'll get to all the other different places uh within his life, but if he didn't have that foil to try to break himself apart, he may have not had the breakthrough that he had and conquered for as long as he had. >> Yeah. So, the story of Greece, Greece and Persia, of the wars between Greece and Persia, like you, if you've seen 300, you'll you'll know you'll know the kind of the kind of overview, right? It's >> there were these two gigantic Persian invasions of Greece in the fifth century BC. So, you know, around 100 years or so before Alexander is um on the throne. And these two Persian invasions do a huge amount of damage. Like Xerxes, for instance, captures the city of Athens, burns the Acropolis to the ground. So this is this is this is real. And the idea of getting revenge, the idea of invading Persia and getting revenge for all of the things that were done, of all the atrocities, is an obsession for Greek politics. Ever after the Persian invasions, Alexander gathers his army and says, "Look, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to get revenge for all of the ways that we were hurt, all of the cities that they burned, all of the harm that they did. And Alexander invades the great Persian Empire. Now, I cannot stress enough just what a outrageously ambitious thing this is. Persia is the world's absolute superpower. It has a population in the tens of millions when most Greek city states had a population of you know a few tens of thousands possibly. So this is a state on a vaster vaster scale than anything Alexander knew any Greek knew. They don't even have a map for this place. They have no idea how far it goes. They have no idea what the cities of the great king might be like. They have no idea what kind of resources, what kind of weapons that they might be facing. They're literally marching into the unknown and they're marching against impossible odds. So, Persia is an empire. It's ruled by the so-called great king. And when Alexander invades, this is Das III. He's been on the throne for a few years. He's got quite a reputation as a warrior actually. He comes to the throne but in part because of this one moment earlier on in his life where he defeats an enemy champion in single combat. So he's he's someone who is to be reckoned with. He's some he's a sea a serious opponent and when he hears about Alexander's invasion, he gathers this absolutely vast army in Babylon and he marches out at the head of it to meet Alexander and they face as he said for the first time at the great battle of Isus. Now, this doesn't initially seem to be something that Alexander has got much of a chance in >> because Das doesn't just outnumber him. Outnumbers him probably 4 to one. He outmaneuvers him. Alexander, this is we're we're in the sort of coastal region of Asia Minor now. sort of um by the by the Mediterranean with the Mediterranean Sea on one side and a a range of mountains on the other and Alexander is sort of marching through this unknown landscape trying to find this vast Persian army but they keep slipping away from him. Duras however tracks Alexander, ambushes Alexander, cuts off Alexander from his sick and wounded soldiers, from his supplies, from his baggage train, from his food, captures all of that, and then sends a few wounded soldiers back to Alexander with their hands cut off with a message. This is what is awaiting all of you. So now D Alexander is cut off from his route back to Greece. He can't try to make a run for it even if he wanted to. He has got only the food that his soldiers can carry. So he's only got supplies for a couple of days. And bear in mind that this is an army of like 30 40,000 people. They need maybe a ton, two tons of supplies every day. So it's a really substantial amount of food. You can't just pick that up by the side of the road. Right? >> Soon as you don't have that, the arm is going to starve going to start starving. And he so he's got but instead of trying to make a run for it, Alexander halts his army. He turns them around and he marches them straight towards Das because he realizes that Das has made a mistake. He's cut Alexander off. He's captured his baggage, but he's got this vast Persian army encamped on this little narrow coastal plane, the plane of Isus. Is pretty pretty constrained. You can't go too far one way because you've got the sea. You can't go too far the other way because you've got mountains too way too steep to fight on. Which means this this vast army is bottlenecked. Duras can't just spread out and surround Alexander on all sides and attack him on all sides, which of course, as we were talking about, is the one way the fall is vulnerable, right? If you're not facing it head on, but if you're attacking it from the sides, from the rear, then these guys are vulnerable. But Duras can't do that. So Alexander marches straight at Das and he kind of traps his army on the plane of Isus. And that's how he engages them. >> And he ends up I remember hearing that cuz you see these the vast numbers of Persian soldiers cuz they were just basically throwing human suffering at Greek shields and spears cuz they're like eventually it's going to overcome where we're going. But he's able to to overtake uh the Persians in that battle. But Das escapes. Okay. Okay. And we we'll get back uh to Dice a little bit later because another thing that people kind of miss in kind of uh the totality of the history of Alexander is they kind of forget he became Pharaoh at one point. Here's a quote from the book. And so in November 332 B.CE in the ancient city of Memphis amid temples which had stood for thousands of years, Alexander was crowned Pharaoh. And so obviously we get Alexander as Pharaoh. We get Alexandria. We get the library at Alexandria which has now been uh essentially lost to history. But there's so much here when people try to talk about you talked about very early in this this podcast about uh people that look at history and they just go a no that couldn't be it. You see a lot of that when you study Egyptian history, right? Especially the people that are kind of the controllers the museums and the different things in Egypt. They just kind of dismiss some of these things. The timelines are all over the place. We can't science can't explain yawning, but you got some dork in Egypt that wants to tell me how they built the pyramids. It's like, buddy, you you you just can't, you know, move that many stones that far. It doesn't matter how many bodies you throw at it. But just talk to me a little bit about Alexander going into Egypt, becoming Pharaoh and what he established there with the library at Alexandria. >> Yeah, this is where it gets a bit wild like you said. Um because Egypt is just this impossible place for the Greeks. Like they they they look at it, it kind of breaks their minds. It breaks their ideas of like what the world is because this is this impossibly vast, impossibly rich, impossibly ancient civilization. um that like there's there's a there's a famous there's a famous story that Herodotus tells about an early Greek traveler to to Egypt and he gets talking to some priests and he says well you know if you if you trace my he's he's he's like boasting as as as as tourists like to do right but um he's he's saying well yeah if you trace my family back 10 generations you get to the gods we you get to the beginning of beginning of history the beginning of reality and the priests are like okay yeah come with us and they go into this temple and they show him the statues of the high priests of the temple. Just one random temple that they happen to be in, right? And they go back thousands of years, further than there was any conception that the world even existed in Greece. Further and further and further. So the thing about Egypt is that Egypt has a better story about everything the Greeks find. They have they have ancient stories. They have ancient gods. They have things that should be impossible like the pyramids. The the the Greeks have just no idea what these things are, how they came to be, how they could possibly exist. So how steps into this world and he realizes he realizes pretty quickly that if he's going to try to build this vast empire, if he's going to try to rule all these places that Greeks have barely any idea about, then he's going to have to step towards this world. He's going to have to take on some of the characteristics of these worlds. He's going to have to figure out how to rule like rule Egypt like an Egyptian. So when he gets to Egypt, he doesn't just he doesn't loot. As far as we can tell, there's no looting. There's no, you know, killing. There's no emptying out of temple treasures. He just he just basically lets everyone get on with it. But he goes to Memphis um and the ancient capital of Pharaohs and he's crowned in the temple. He puts on the double crown. He's given the title Lord of the two lands. And what's really remarkable and and one of the things I you know even I I didn't realize until until like I I'd studied this for a while is that we get Alexander on the walls of Egyptian temples on Egyptian artifacts dressed as a pharaoh looking fully like a pharaoh in Egyptian art and hieroglyphs of his name on the temple walls on on on inscriptions on papyri on artifacts. So he really does step towards this country and and that's sort of quite telling, right? That he's not just wanting to conquer, he's wanting to build something. He's not just wanting to take the money and go back to Greece. He's wanting to reshape the world. He's wanting to reshape reality in some kind of very profound sense. And that kind of really brings us to the city of Alexandria. Alexander founds lots of cities, lots of there are Alexandrias across what his his empire stretching from Egypt all the way to Afghanistan all the way to India. But the most famous one is this one in Egypt. And the most famous part of Alexandria is this great library. Now people have been building libraries. People have been collecting books before Alexandria. But this is the first universal library. So in other words, this is the first library which isn't just trying to collect Greek books or Egyptian books or Mesopotamian books or Babylonian books. It's trying to collect everything. every kind of knowledge that exists, everything that can be got hold of all the way from Italy and Spain and the Western Mediterranean and Carthage and North Africa all the way through Greece through the works of Plato of Aristotle, the great plays of the the dramatists of of of Athens um the the and then all the way through Mesopotamia through the the astronomers of Babylon, Babylonian and science and and star maps to India to the the the early writings of um the Buddhists of of of Hindu gods and all of this in one building. All of this gathered together. And one of the one of the one of the the most remarkable things that happens in the Library of Alexandria is so many of these things get translated into Greek and people start to be able to to write about the world in a way that brings in all these different kinds of science, kinds of philosophy. For instance, there's a famous story about the library of Alexandria about um one of the kings who ruled after Alexander's death, the the the Tomies where they send to messengers to Jerusalem to the high priests of Jerusalem and say, "We want to translate your scriptures into Greek." And it said that this whole giant team of Jewish scholars work on this translation on this translation of the Hebrew books of the Old Testament as we know them today into Greek. And that's how we get the first Greek versions of the Old Testament. those those those those those those versions of the Hebrew Hebrew scriptures which were used for centuries and centuries and centuries until people until people would actually went went back to the Hebrew Bible. So this this version this building this place the library of Alexandria is probably it's just so remarkably responsible for how we understand the world, how we we we understand science, art, philosophy, literature and it's responsible for preserving so much of ancient knowledge doing systematic editions of of texts like Homer and and like before before the Library of Alexandria, there were as many Homers as there were manuscripts of Homer, right? Alexandria turns it into a systematic text for the first time. So I always say when you're looking at a figure like Alexander, you don't just have to look at the battles and the victories and the things that he does. You have to look at the ripple effects. You have to look at what happens, what the consequences of his his reign are. And they are in Alexander's case truly remarkable. >> I think so as well. Uh and I mean just imagine I hope one day it's revealed to us. God will just be like, "Hey, here's what was in the, you know, the library at Alexandria." Like this is kind of everything that that had happened. because you know even just the the tales that could be told about what happened in Egypt that were lost that were still here thousands of years later trying to contemplate and think about now we do have to speed up just a hair you go into great detail about him meeting Das again there's kind of this final showdown and he gets to Das and Das is dead but after defeating Das you make an observation that's incredibly poignant in terms of the life of Alexander so excuse me I actually want to read this quote here the army was changing The men Alexander promoted to lead it were smoother and more compliant than Parmmenio and his sons had been. The old general had not hesitated to be candid with the king, especially when he thought that he was making a mistake. Paresia, the Greeks called it, the ability to speak one's mind without fear or hesitation, whether to a friend or to a servant or to a king. But the new commanders knew when to obey, when not to ask questions, and when to denounce their friends. After supervising supervising the torture of Photus, Hefin was appointed one of the commanders of the companions. After the arrest of one of Alexander's bodyguards, Tommy, always sensitive to changes in the wind, assumed the man's place next to the king. Loyalty now meant obedience. You want to talk about a tale as old as time, Edmund, we have this thing where you you have these guys. They know you're the king, but they're willing to interrupt you. They're willing to tell you to your face, "This is wrong. You can't do this. You are our leader. We will obey. We will go with your command, but you just flat out can't do this." As he kept going, as he kept conquering, as he kept having to leave people behind to try to govern the places that he had conquered, he was surrounded by syncopants and yesmen and people that just worshiped the ground that he that he, you know, walked on. and they wouldn't be like, "Ah, king. I I yeah, you're the king, but hey, this is not going to work out well for us." And man, that really does dovetail nicely with his eventual downfall, which we'll get to in just a second, but I would love to hear you comment on that some more. >> Yeah, it's so fundamental in ancient Greece, the right to argue with anyone about anything, right? And that is so fundamental to how Greeks saw the world. If you think someone's wrong, you got to be able to tell them. You got to be able to tell them, you know, whenever you want, in whatever circumstances, at whatever volume you think is appropriate for that thing, for for that for that moment. And the Macedonian court when Alexander becomes king is like that. It's it's it's arguments. It's people figuring it out. It's disagreeing. It's absolute loyalty and following the king to the death while also feeling perfectly entitled to tell him he's wrong um at whatever circumstance you want. But it does change. And many of the people who were boldest in disagreeing with Alexander, who were least afraid of saying, "My king, you're absolutely wrong. either die or are murdered, assassinated, put to death, tortured on Alexander's orders. And that spreads, right? It spreads through the army. One after another, the old guard either fall silent or fall away or fall dead. And the people who start to take power quite literally worship the ground Alexander walks on. Um some of them try to say we should worship this king as a god and they say so in all seriousness. In other words that Alexander shouldn't be treated as a man like any other a king to be obeyed and honored but also to be spoken to candidly. This is someone who is above the rest of us by his very nature. Now, not all of Alexander's army ever go along with this. Um, not all of Alexander's army ever take this seriously and and the men who who try to say, "Look, we should worship Alexander as a god," are argued with and mocked and disagreed with all the way through. But Alexander starts to believe them. He starts to take this stuff seriously and he starts to allow himself to listen to these men who say, "You are a king. You have won greater victories than the heroes of old. You've gone further than the gods themselves have ever gone. So of course, we should treat you as someone set apart." No, Edmond, I think I was going to ask you about that next because you could see there's this consternation with Alexander where what was it at the the temple of a moon or something like that where he didn't exactly say he was the son of a moon but he didn't exactly not say he wasn't the son and he was uncomfortable with the god worship but at the same time he didn't think of himself as a man. It was almost like he was in between like he he thought of himself as a god kind of but then he struggled with his own humanity and his place in the world because you know part of the reason why he was so obsessed with Achilles and went to the tomb of Achilles as opposed to of tomb of Achilles and all that is because Achilles was a man that died that that went into a tomb like only only a god man can get back up and survive. But I mean that that really takes us all the way to him finally getting to a place Edmund where he had felt like he had conquered enough. Whereas if you're if you're a god, if you're a god king, which we know art Xerxes and Xerxes, all of them thought of themselves as god kings. He finally got to a place where he's like, "That's enough. Let's turn back now. Let's try to rule this kingdom that I've created." And I would love to hear you talk a little bit about the process of them making their way back, going through the desert. because I mean they couldn't be defeated on the fields of battle for the most part, but they almost got taken out basically by, you know, the desert and topography, you know what I mean? So, I'd love to hear you talk some more about that. >> Yeah. So, in the end, after more than 10 years on campaign, Alexander and the Zami turned back for home. They head west from the plains of India. Um, and part of the army goes by ship. That part arrives. Okay. Part of the army retraces its route. That part arrives. Okay. But Alexander leads about 20,000 people through the Gdrosian desert, which if you head essentially north from modernday Pakistan along the coast towards modernday Iran, then that's the route you're taking. It's a bleak and awful place. Once again, they're marching into a place that they have no map for. They have no idea what's ahead of them. They have no idea whether or not they're going to find food, whether they're not they're going to find water. And Alexander has been lucky up until now. He's been able to keep his army alive on campaign for 10 years, which is a remarkable achievement. It really, really is. But the desert starts to win. They lose contact with their fleet where they which they've been hoping would help them resupply. Then they start to get lost. They start to lose track of where they are. They have to follow the stars at night. They have to do night marches just just to be able to keep keep on track to keep going the right way. They don't realize just what the heat is doing to their baggage animals. Which means the mules, the donkeys, the oxen, the camels that are meant to be dragging along their supplies of of food and water, they start to die. Then thousands of them start to die. Then suddenly they find the army finds themselves basically with no baggage train and just only able to carry what they can. They have they they're able to hold themselves. So they have to abandon their treasures, their riches, their loot, the gold from cities and cities and cities that they've been carrying with them for for almost 10 years. Leave it in the sands and press on. Hundreds of men start to die every day, then thousands. And Alexander basically desperately turns towards the coast, hoping that they'll he'll find some water. And by the time he gets to the beach, there's only half a dozen men around him. The rest of the army is straggling along behind him. This column spread out for dozens of miles. And he gets off his horse and he digs around in the pebbles. And he finally finds some fresh water. And the Greeks stagger onto the beach behind him. of 20,000 men, fewer than 10,000 are left alive. The desert takes more than all of the battles put together. And it changes them. It breaks them in ways that these battles have not broken them before. It makes them feel vulnerable in ways that nothing else has. When they come out of the desert, they really, really are staggering. and they're really shaken by what's what they've had to go through. >> And I think that we we see that have a tremendous impact on them cuz obviously even if you survived, your will was broken throughout this entire process. It's a brutality that none of us can even fully comprehend or imagine. Now, if we go towards the end, again, you go into great detail in the book, guys. You got to go pick up the book. You can check it out in the show notes. But uh Alexander uh is engaged in this drinking contest uh and then he falls ill. People think it's because of the amount of wine that he consumed. But as we probably know now today, he very likely uh contracted typhoid. He had typhoid fever and you know after some struggling and different things. And this was a man I mean gosh he how long did he operate with a collapsed lung cuz he took an arrow right to the abdomen. He basically still led his army with a collapsed lung and he could barely breathe. But he does finally succumb. He does finally die. Uh he dies with no clear successor. Uh, so I do want to hear you talk about that as well because there's a lot of uh a lot of people that have, you know, thrown out some different theories about what he actually said versus what he what ended up saying, like what did he say, but I actually want to read a quote from the epilogue because I think it'll help us understand not only the amazing things that he did, and again, I say them amazing in terms of what he was able to accomplish, not necessarily that they were morally good, obviously, but there's a great quote from the epilogue here. Almost no one emerged from Alexander Alexander's world unscathed. Ruined cities dotted his empire from Greece to India. Thieves, Ty, Gaza, Procepilus and others which were destroyed so completely that even their names have been lost. The graves of his murdered friends were scattered across the known world. Pminio, Photus, Cleletus, Kalistanes. Most of Alexander's most of Alexandria's that he founded were places where citizens longed to escape from. Even the Tower of Babel, the great ziggurat of Babylon, had been left a heap of rubble after he failed to restore it. Alexander had hoped to remake the world. Instead, he left it in ruins. And so, we see the glory early in his 20s. We see the battles. We we see these tremendous things that he does. Overcoming Das, you know, becoming Pharaoh, pushing farther than anyone had pushed. He was also a philosopher king because of what he did at the library of Alexandria. All these great things, all these great things. They turn around, start heading for home. He eventually dies and then it's like, oh, the world is in shambles, right? And obviously, there's the issues with logistics of making sure you can govern these places that you've just conquered as you continue conquering. There's a lot to discuss here about his end. And you actually there's a great poem. It's a little bit too long to to read here, but there's a great poem from a Rowan uh poet uh Lucen or Lucan uh that you include in the epilogue that's right after the quote that I just read. Again, guys, get the book and read it. It's wonderful. Gives a very good summary of his life. But I mean, Edmund, you you spend all this time, I mean, I don't know, gosh, hundreds, if not thousands of hours on Alexander the Great. If you had to sum up the legacy of Alexander from front to back, from soup to nuts, how would you do it? >> Oh my god, that is that is such a difficult question and such a good one. Um I he changes the way we see the world. Um he he does yes he does leave it in leave so much in ruins behind him but he in the aftermath of his conquest and the the decades after his death the world changes around him around his legacy the world becomes more connected than ever before and I think if you look at the library of Alexandria if you look at that place where the knowledge of three continents is gathered together and where discoveries and possibilities are taking shape then it's changing what we can do do as human beings it's changing what it means to be human and I think that kind of space would not have been possible without Alexander that kind of transformative shift in understanding in being able to take our place in the world would not have been possible without the chaos and the ruin of his empire that came before it. >> I I was even trying as you were saying to how I would put a bow on his life as well. Um because it's someone that's obviously every one of us is complicated, right? We have the the if someone were writing a history of our lives like we would come across complicated. We would have moments where we seem like the hero, moments where we see seem like the zero. But even if uh you know as I was thinking through this interview today, going back to the quote that I quoted from very early in the book, Alexander reshaped reality profoundly, more profoundly than almost anyone else in history. And so as I was reading through this book, as we got through the end, obviously I put that emphasis on almost because I talked about earlier where, you know, he was seen as a god. He may be seen him saw himself as a god. The Egyptians, the pharaoh saw themselves as gods. You know, the Persian kings saw themselves as god, but they're all dead. They're all dead. Their bones are somewhere on this planet. But obviously for me as a Christian, I believe that a real man named Jesus walked around ancient Galilee, did ministry publicly for three years in his early 30s, that he was betrayed, crucified on a Roman cross, put into the tomb of Joseph of Arythea, and three days later he walked out, and that God sent him here to do that. And so I do think about how great Alexander was in terms of what he was able to accomplish. But Jesus is alive and he's not. And so I'm I'm even curious for you. You're so steeped in a world that most of us can't even fully comprehend. When you look at the person and work of Jesus, when you look at the the Hebrew Bible and what it points to, which is the coming Messiah, the coming savior, Jews think it wasn't Jesus. Obviously, Christians think it was, what is your read of Jesus and how that even applies to you and your personal faith? >> Gosh, that's that's a really a really profound question. Um, and I think I think what's what's really interesting about finding myself doing studying the ancient world for a living is is is how is how it sort of makes me see in different ways or understand sometimes more profoundly the the faith I was I was brought up And um and just to sort of see the world of, you know, hope and despair and loss and empires and how people the the profound longing that so many people in this world had for a sense of hope and a sense of a a a sense of purpose to their lives, a sense of possibility. And the ways that even when Alexander is thinking of himself as a god king, you can see the doubt there. You can see the uncertainty. You can see you can see the sort of uncertain young man behind the mask, behind the performance he feels he has to put on. Even the pharaohs, you know, um even the pharaohs Thousands of years before Alexander lived, as distant from Alexander's time as Alexander is from our own, even the pharaohs decorated their tombs with with songs about the transients of their power and of all things. Um, there's this this I I I put it in the book, but there's this beautiful harpest song from deep deep ancient Egypt from from far far long before Alexander lived where on a on an Egyptian tomb where where where the the singer says, "I've I've heard the words of Imoteep. I've I've heard the the wisdoms of the wisdom of the greatest of men, but but where are their tombs? Where are their halls? they've disappeared. They've they've vanished from the world as if they had never been. Um and and and and so the thing you have to remember about ancient god kings and ancient monarchs is however great the claim, there's always that humanity there. There's always that knowledge of one's own fallibility, one's own fragility, one's own mortality. which which is really important to remember, really important to look for in the story of someone like Alexander, in the story of a pharaoh or someone who might have had stories of told about them that they were close to the gods, but also had to reckon with their humanity every day. Whether that's Alexander with the arrow through his lung or the pharaohs like realizing that their stories will soon will one day be be forgotten. And I think one shouldn't let the empire and the power blind us to the humanity of these people. >> I think that's a great lesson and reminder for all of us because we all get into this rat race. Maybe you're trying to get a advanced degree. Maybe you're trying to get that promotion. Maybe you're trying to get there. Wherever there is, there's the myth of there. Once I get there, I'll be complete. I will have conquered enough. I will have done enough. Well, speaking in terms of what they were able to accomplish in their era, the the renown they were able to amass, the wealth they were able to amass. Pretty much none of us, no one listening to this is going to have the influence that Alexander the Great had, then King Tuten Common had, than any of these people that we're still talking about thousands of years later. I'm under no illusions about myself personally that my great grandchildren may not know my name. And it's because I was here to serve a purpose while I was on this planet. I'm here to love my wife as Christ loved the church and to raise up James and Elijah and the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Those are the arrows that I'm shooting into the next generation. So, while some of you are focused on grandeur, on followers, on your name, on you know, people giving you whatever plottits that you're seeking, just remember you're going to be boned someday. And the only hope that you can have is if you put it in somebody who's not dead but is alive. And so I guess as we wrap up here, Edmund, you don't strike me as a guy that's just sitting around doing nothing. Like, look, I wrote a book. Great. I guess I'll just sit on that for a couple of years. We already know you got an idea kicking around in there. So, let's let's give uh some benefit and let's give uh some advantage to the people that stayed to the end of the interview. Give us something that you're that you're thinking about. What's coming next? What what's kind of that next project? So I am fascinated with you know one of the things we we talked about at this the start of this conversation about how we get to know what we do about the past about how we can look closely at the ancient world and and and and see it clearly and maybe see more clearly than ever before. And I'm I'm interested in like there's this story about um Egypt um and the discovery of ancient Egypt in the 19th century which god it's it's a it's it's a it's it's a weird one. It's it's got um ghost hunters. It's got mummies curses. It's got um lutters. It's got lovers. It's got um but but I'm I'm I'm I'm trying to I'm trying to figure out more how do we get from from that to here? How do we how do we know what we know about history when so much is lost? And how do we read these languages of the pharaohs when everyone had forgotten how to do that for almost 2,000 years? Like um how do you how do you untangle our lost language? How do you how do you start to listen to someone's voice for the first time in over two millennia? Um so I'm it's all very early stage, but but that's the kind of world I'm I'm I'm looking at. Well, as we get it more formalized and maybe once we get it to the presses, we'll make sure that we get you back on here to talk about. I'm sure it'll be amazing. But Edmond, that's all for me. Is there anything else you want to get off your chest? Oh, >> thank you so much. It's been been such a pleasure to talk. Thank you. >> Thanks again. There you go, guys. I hope you enjoyed my time with Edmond, but before we let you go, we are going to do a quick resilience boost at Undaunted Life. Our mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that forges spiritual, mental, and physical resilience. So, I've got a link to where you can go and buy your copy of Alexander God King Man. It's one of the best books I've read this year. Highly recommend it. Thank you everyone for listening to this episode. Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe, rate, and leave us a positive fivestar review. If you want me to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, just shoot me an email to info@undaunted.life. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook. And check out our website for everything else, including how to donate to keep more content like this coming. www.undaunted.life. The music on this podcast is the song Conqueror by the Christian metal band Void Awaken. Be sure to stream their music on Spotify, Apple Music, and wherever else you get your music. I'm your host, Kyle Thompson. Remember, keep pushing back darkness. Keep forging spiritual, mental, and physical resilience. Keep seeking the Lion of Judah. Now heat.