Episode 380 - The Siege of Alesia

Hey, everybody, Joe here.

Good news, I suppose.

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Hello and welcome to the Lions That Buy Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe and with me is Tom and Nate.

We are the triumvirate CEOs of Flesh.

You may know us from the world's first skin gig gathering app, allowing you, our consumer, to sell bulk discarded skin to us at wholesale prices at any one of our four conveniently located drop spots in Cleveland, Akron, Cincinnati, and the scenic West Bank settlement of Kafar WhatsApp, which is populated solely by sex offenders from New York City.

Like many new and upcoming tech CEOs, we have been inspired by the leadership of Julius Caesar.

However, we believe that those other CEOs simply did not go far enough.

So we'd like to introduce our new employment concept.

Slavery.

Rather than going through the pain and logistical nightmare of onboarding new employees, we have partnered with Peter Thiel's new company, Brownshirt.

And for the small price of a cup of coffee, we can temporarily hire local cops to invade other smaller Silicon Valley businesses to kidnap their interns and steal their passports.

Thank you for attending our shareholder meeting.

We look forward to seeing you all at our next grand opening in Doha.

Put the fucking lotion in the basket.

Like, as someone who, like, I recently started playing Cyberpunk 2077, I was like, it's not that far off.

I didn't think a game released in 2019 would prefigure what we're living in in 2025.

But also as someone who got hassled by the police on Wednesday for wearing a kefia, yep, this is just the reality we're gonna live in.

Isn't the future fun?

Fun.

Fellas, I've gathered you here today to talk about that thing that all men our age eventually talk about, Julius Caesar.

Because Rome is to middle-aged white guys as dinosaurs are to a six-year-old.

Also, it's a a popular hair code for balding middle-aged men as well who want to hide their

receding hairlines.

I'll do you went better.

I was both into dinosaurs and then also into the Roman Empire and Julius Caesar when I was like seven.

So this is really ticking all the boxes for me.

So in your professional opinion, what kind of dinosaur would Julius Caesar be?

That's a tough one.

Award-winning history podcast, folks.

Yeah, award-winning history podcast.

I don't know.

I feel like a stegosaur could probably be stabbed to death by a lot of people.

So, you know, at the end of the day, day, that sort of fits.

All the other ones, I mean, stabbing might, I don't know, take too long.

Like, how do you stab a Diplodocus?

Like,

you stab it like you're killing the wise old turtle in Dark Souls.

It takes you two years of slashing over and over.

Somewhere in Ohio, there's a tweaker floating in a bath that's doing like Midwest precog to figure out if your child's going to be gay.

I was like, are they into Julius Caesar dinosaurs?

What's the third thing that's going to make your child gay?

Hey, come on.

That's a very mean summary of upstream color, Tom.

I thought for somebody as a film aficionado like you, you'd have a little more respect.

I mean, I guess the third thing for me would have been Pokemon a lot, but I was of the age, you know?

Yeah, but also there's the thing with Joe is that like everything that you have that's funny in that regard is like no one can point to it and be like, see, and that's what turned you into not heterosexual because like you were Joe is like the he's like the, what would they call it, the reference group for this podcast?

He's like,

he's the one who takes the placebo that doesn't make you gay.

Caesar inspired some of the worst fucking people we're somehow dealing with today, but also birthed the Roman Empire, dropped the sickest one upper light in human history while being stabbed to death, and of course, conquered Gaul for Rome.

Caesar was obviously born into a very, very important patrician family.

It was full of vast wealth, power, and influence, which he all used to, you know, get to why we know he exists.

So we're downplaying the achievements of Julius Caesar because he's a Nepo baby.

Julius Caesar's parents' names blue in the engraved form of Wikipedia.

Wikipedium.

But also,

that little fact of conquering Gaul really made everything he did possible.

I mean, it's the reason why the place I'm living is speaking French and not Welsh, Manx, Breton, some kind of Celtic language, some mishmash.

You know what I mean?

Weirdly, Switzerland does come up in this episode.

Oh, really?

All right, cool.

Strange.

Oh, yeah, because Switzerland was ruled.

Yeah, because Switzerland was all like

Gaulish and Celtic tribes at one point.

Um, that's why this is a side note, which is dumb interruption for me, but the Swiss French call the Swiss Germans Buchbin, which is like basically a Frenchification of Buchbinder or like bookbinders, because they're all just like nerds with their books and obsessed with little details.

And the Swiss Germans call the Swiss French the Die Velchen, like the Welsh, the Celts, basically.

It's like, it's like, fuck you.

Like, oh, you're a bunch of nerds with little bookbinding printing small presses.

It's like, yeah, well, you're all Welsh.

Fuck you.

Go eat some leeks, bitch.

Those are some deep cuts.

Yeah, so, but that, I mean, bringing it back to the actual topic, yeah, at the time, even the name, like Helvetica or, you know, Helvetic Confederation comes from.

Bloody hell, it's Julius Caesar

comes from the Helvetii, who were a Celtic tribe that lived here.

Yeah.

But if there's one thing that Caesar did in Gaul that we still hear about today, it's, of course, horrific genocide.

But if there's two things we've heard about, it's the siege of Elesia, which was not just any normal siege that we've talked talked about on the show before, but rather, like a rainbow that was once weirdly popular on the internet, it was a double siege.

A double siege.

A military concept that really does not exist for a very good reason.

It's not something that happens very often.

Oh, when Julius Caesar does genocide, it's all good.

But when I, Benjamin WhatsApp, do it, it's wrong.

God cared.

Yeah.

Tel Aviv Mayor Benjamin Watson.

I reclaimed my ancestral family name when I emigrated to Israel.

I'm actually from Serbia.

That's what Zapovich.

Today's episode brings us to the era of the first triumvirate, where Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey formed an informal but formal alliance, controlling Rome through a network of influence peddling, outright voter fraud, and violence.

Thankfully, something that could certainly never happen again.

Caesar managed to leverage this deal, promising to further the other two men's interests if they backed him for the position of consul.

All three of them held their end of the deal, and at the end of that consulship, Caesar once again used the system to engineer himself the position of pro-consul, which is effectively a governor of three different Roman provinces, which is not something that normally happens.

He was made the pro-consul of Sisilfying Gaul, Illyricum, and Norbronesis.

All things that sound like serious medical conditions.

No, they're Sisifying Gaul.

No, they're doing Sisyhitno on Gaul.

But it's just funny because there's cisalpine gall and there's also trans-alpine gall.

And it's like if you're like a cis and trans or made-up internet words, it's like, tell Julius Caesar that.

Wow.

Yeah.

And he's got a really short sword.

He's jam it right into your xiphoid process and fucking be done with you.

One of the reasons that Caesar wanted these specific places was honestly quite simple.

It would benefit him wildly.

It didn't take a rocket scientist or, I don't know what a Romans would use in this saying.

They didn't have rockets.

Yeah, It didn't take the local horse cart engineer to understand

why this would benefit a...

A trebuchet scientist, maybe?

Well, I'll take that.

Yeah.

Trebuchet guy.

It doesn't take a viaduct architect.

It doesn't take a dick statue carver.

It doesn't take the guy who chisels the dicks at all the statues to understand.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It doesn't take a guy whose last moment on Earth when Mount Vesuvius was destroying Pompeii using that to jack off if he immortalizes jacking off.

It doesn't take that guy to know this.

He was wise, though.

Real dudes of history.

It didn't take the Pompeii jacking off guy to know that the triumvirate would not last forever.

And Caesar would need to score some serious political points over the other two.

Because Pompey,

the guy, not the city, had a long history of military victories.

And Crassus was the richest man in Rome at the time who also had a long list of military victories.

Both men had had multiple triumphs at this point.

So that put Caesar in the annals of Roman political power at the time solidly third.

I've always wondered how to say this stuff because I never had a classics education.

And it's like, is it Pompey?

Because Pompey to me sounds like

a minor character in Paw Patrol.

I don't want to say it.

So I said, Pompeii is fine.

But yeah, it's Pompey.

Pompey.

Yeah.

I have no idea.

I didn't go to British accent school where you learned nothing but this.

Pompey, the Paw Patrol guy who's stabbing the Gaulish Paw Patrol guys.

I mean, the Paw Patrol universe, weirdly popular outside of the United States amongst small kids, if they branched it off into Roman Empire shit, they would dominate that like six to eight-year-old market.

They have to have dinosaur paw patrol, dragon paw patrol, Roman Empire Paw Patrol, ancient Greek, or no, ancient Egypt paw patrol.

Can you imagine?

That's like, you've got the entirety.

It would also slap with the podcaster dads of these kids.

Oh, yeah, exactly.

You know, they'd be able to reify Paw Patrol.

We'd soften our ACAB stance.

doing a military triumph for a tiny blue dog but julius caesar was smart enough to know that gaul was ripe for the picking and would eventually give him the opportunity to put some of the win column for himself as this new pro-consul there was also the small problem that despite having served as consul which is technically the highest political position in rome at the time and being part of the triumvirate and now being pro-consul of three different provinces caesar was Fucking broke.

A lot of this had to do with the politics of the popularius movement and the optimist movement, movement, but he was spending a crazy amount of money winning people over to the point that he had nothing left.

So he hoped as pro-consul, he'd be able to leverage that into a way to make a fortune, mostly in the form of war booty, namely slaves.

Huge slave situation here.

And that's going to be how Caesar builds his vast amounts of wealth, but we'll get to that point.

And he knew that the three provinces that he was now pro-consul also happened to border a lot of parts of Gaul that were technically unconquered by Rome.

So it's all open and for the taking.

And pretty much as soon as he takes the position, shit starts popping off.

The Helvetii people who lived in what today would be the Swiss Alps decided that ye old Switzerland sucked shit since nobody had stolen a bunch of gold yet and decided to move west directly into the territory of Aduai people, which would be Savoy today.

The Aduai happen to be a tribe with a Roman alliance.

So they quickly turn to the Romans and call for help.

That's like literally where I live now.

Like saddleways that used to surround Geneva, like, yeah, when it was a city-state, like that's wild.

Internecine Swiss beefs.

Well, also, just, I think some of it, too, is just the fact that, like, the climate sucked.

It was awful.

It was incredible.

Like, for a long time during this period, like, you know, it was glaciers and whatnot were much further extent than they are now.

And, like, they were encroaching.

They were just like, oh, winter was kind of bad.

This week was kind of cold.

So a glacier crushed an entire village.

Yeah.

Almost like climate change has constantly caused the forced migration of people.

No need to look into that.

Let's not talk about that.

I don't want to get deported from Switzerland, so I can't, I can't have that opinion.

Sorry.

Caesar had four legions at his disposal, owing to the fact that the Roman government gave him a much larger army than was normal due to the fact that he was pro-consul three places rather than the normal one.

He also just began raising more legions on his own.

Something he was allowed to do, which most people would not have been allowed to do.

So he quickly moved in, and while the going was much harder than he thought it would be, Romans eventually win, and after negotiations, the Helvetii people fuck off back to the Alps.

Can you imagine facing off between the Helvetii and the Aduai, like head to head, but all of them like decked out in like, you know, Roman-era Celtic battle regalia with like so much weird butter hairstyles that it looks like Sunday morning and Harajuku.

Like just fully

like, it's just absolute, it's like motorcycle gang cosplay before these people had the concept of the wheel.

The Swiss Basuzoku coming at the Roman Legion, sacks through the fucking huge ass hair and shit.

Going to war with all my warcharm laboo boos hanging off my arm.

They're actually, they're actually severed heads of your enemies.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Soon after that, however, there was more unrest, this time with the Subiai people, who managed to mass an army of possibly up to 100,000, though Caesar, upon learning that the tribe was superstitious and they would not move during a full moon, I assume due to the very real threat of werewolves, he used this against them.

He simply attacked on the full moon.

And however, this is somewhat disputed.

A lot of this comes from Caesar's own written history, which of course always makes him seem like the smartest boy in any given room.

So in reality, you can probably assume this is like 50,000 give or take.

The superstition could have also been very, very real as well.

But you could always subtract about a quarter to a half of any number that Caesar gives in his notes.

That's probably closer to true.

But it's also interesting, too, because it's like, you know, there's things that were very much true at the time that aren't true anymore about like land masses, things that were later submerged, you know, climate things, places that are now deserts that used to not be.

Like this long enough ago that you had these huge changes.

So what if the superstition wasn't just superstition?

What if like the setting of altered beast was actually real?

And if the moon was full, that would actually happen.

Like you could just have that sort of shit pop off in a graveyard randomly.

I mean, we have our first possible case of the historical moon Turk.

Exactly.

Yeah, before Turkey was even a thing, before the Ottomans were a thing, before the Byzantines, any of that.

It was, I mean, yeah.

Yeah, but then that begs the question: if like werewolves are subservient to the immortal moon Turk, then what side does Van Helsing fall on?

This doesn't require further study later.

Yes.

Subscribe to the Patreon.

You'll get more thoughts like these.

We'll trace back all of the ancestry to determine that Van Helsing is actually Greek.

Van Helsing also invented

Van Helsing.

He's Dutch.

Van Helsopoulos.

Now, this constant stream of inter-tribal beefs benefited Caesar greatly.

There was no unified force of different Gallic tribes.

So it allowed Rome to inch forward and pick them off one by one.

Or failing that, weaker tribes facing pressure from stronger ones would enter into an alliance with the Romans, which then would allow the Romans into their backyard so they would survive.

And also, once the Romans were allowed in, they would never leave.

In other cases, Caesar turned his army against those who had previously served with the Romans.

A different tribe called for help against the Ottawa and the Gallic warlord that answered was a guy named Ariovistus, who previously worked so closely with Rome and Caesar that Caesar once led the charge of the Roman Senate to award him the title of king and friend of the Roman people.

Ariovistus probably assumed that the title would help him with his new local pro-consul, but it didn't.

Caesar turned his army around and went to war against them too.

Though much to Caesar's frustration, Crassus also sent his legions to crush Ariovistus, and then his war bands were punched back over the Rhine River.

But still over time, More and more tribes reached out to Rome for help because it's also important to remember that Rome just being there makes all of their lives harder.

In turn, that makes it more likely that they're going to reach out to Rome for help against other encroaching tribes.

Caesar knows this.

Now, Caesar turns down virtually nobody that asks for help, slowly swallowing up more and more Gaul in the process, which in turn led to tribes revolting against Roman rule because Caesar would use this opportunity to crush them even further.

This eventually took Caesar as far north as the sea.

where they built boats, invaded Britain, and began crushing people there for tribute money.

A pro-consul's term usually only lasts one year, but Caesar had become so wildly successful, so wealthy from loot and slave trades, that not only did Rome all but control Gaul at this point, but he had been allowed to remain pro-consul for years longer than it was legally allowed.

The Roman army being propped up by Caesar's British pay pigs.

I mean, that's kind of how the Roman army worked.

Like,

the Roman legions, everybody pictures in their head, only existed thanks to constant expansion and warfare of the Roman Republic and then the Empire.

And then once that expansion stopped, nobody wanted to be a soldier in Rome anymore.

Like, we get paid shit.

The food sucks.

All of our benefits are gone.

Thankfully, no other military will go through this in the future.

Roman TikTok revealing to Roman Zoomers that there's black mold in the barracks.

Like, the Gauls who lived outside of the original Roman Gallic provinces probably assumed that he and his now massive army of 10 10 legions, which is about 60,000 men, were only there temporarily.

Rome would leave.

After all, this is hardly the first time that the Romans had come to town.

And depending on which tribe you were, the Romans being camped out nearby changed your life for the worse or the better.

However, over time, the number of tribes that saw the Romans as a good thing began to dwindle.

The reason for this is, to make a very long story short, is winter.

This is separate from any ideas of oppression or national liberation.

That kind of shit just didn't exist yet.

It was simply a pain in the ass having suddenly tens of thousands of extra dudes outside living on your land.

They were like a cloud of locusts stripping the land bare of food, water, and wood for their camps.

And it's not like they shared.

Not to mention, Caesar demanded tribute and gold, goods, and conscripts.

for his army to serve as auxiliaries.

So like, not only are they literally taking food out of your mouth, they're also stealing your son.

Yeah, I think, I think that makes people pretty mad.

Yeah.

All my son's gone.

Yeah.

They come and they take the pie out the window.

They take the soup pot off the stove.

They take your kid.

So like, yeah, I dislike this.

I'm not a fan.

Oh, no, my large son, he was destined to drive the plow.

He drove the plow so good.

Eventually, this came to a head in 53 BC with a trebe called the Ebrones, who lived between the Rhine and the Meuse.

Wait, between the Rhine and the Meuse means where you are now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So basically, Dutch, the Dutch Celts are like, okay, the Swiss Celts, whatever, they're dealing with it.

They're getting their chickens and soups and pies and suns stolen.

But the Dutch Celts are like, you didn't pay me 15 Euro cents for that Nespresso pod.

They keep sending Caesar tikkis and he's simply never paying them.

It's like, this is too much for me.

I can't.

I was going to say, because between the Meuse is like the more or less border, northern France border with Belgium.

And then the Rhine obviously runs into the netherlands so yeah so it's you it's your home territory or it's luxembourg one of those areas who knows

well

there is a a really bad harvest and that left them with virtually nothing and

generally speaking this would have been survivable in normal times but now caesar was in town demanding that these people give them a massive portion of their crops because he had seven legions camped out in the area in three different camps spaced apart so they could support one another, but also close to population centers so they could steal their food.

And when I say, like, the because it's obviously like Roman soldiers lived off the land and situations like this, that was sometimes true.

They would send out foraging parties and whatever.

But in situations like this, off the land literally just meant stealing food from the locals.

They would go to a town like, you owe us this many pounds of fucking wheat or whatever.

or we'll start burning shit shoot sons it's whatever it is yeah put it on the wagon julius she just camped outside our town and he stolen all my blackberries

putting a short sword to you and saying run me your progeny

so once this um famine hit or this bad harvest hit Caesar didn't lower his required amount of shit that he was running on them.

And one of the reasons why Caesar had a comparatively easy time conquering Gaul thus far was because he was able to do it piecemeal, one tribe at a time most of the time.

There's no real unification to speak of.

They didn't have a universal fuck that guy moment, as we say on the show.

However, this time around, this tribe and neighboring tribes were already talking, planning, and plotting against the Romans.

Everyone in the neighborhood Not Gaul at large, but this specific neighborhood, was sick of their shit.

That is when Ambrax, the king of the Ambrones, marched north to a Roman camp where today would be liege and warned the commanders, hey, there's a revolt out there.

I don't think you guys have heard about it yet, but I heard that these fucking Germans are coming over to help.

So you should come out and crush it.

The two Roman commanders in the camp, Cada and Sabinus, immediately began arguing with one another.

Sabinus argued that the rebellion was coming and they needed to withdraw from the fortified camp, moved south towards the rest rest of the legions, reinforced their position.

While Cata argued, we can't do that.

Caesar didn't give us orders to withdraw and we're supposed to stay here.

Also, this is a fortified camp.

Like a fortified Roman camp has walls, has ditches, has watchtowers.

It's a decent position to fight from.

Why withdraw from that and march across open terrain in the middle of fucking winter?

However, Sabinus had more political and military pull in Cata due to who his family was.

So this meant Cata lost.

So Sabinus and most of the force packed up their shit and began marching south directly into an ambush led by Ambrox, who was lying in wait, and they slaughtered the Romans almost to a man.

Is she bouncing on my Sabinas until I eyebrox?

Just got to get it out there.

I mean, I feel like the tribe almost sounds like the Gibronis, a guy named Sabinus.

Like, Ibrox kind of sounds, yeah, it sounds like a weird alpine, you know, foraging animal or like a shitty hair metal band from Finland.

Like, it could be just so much.

This is a target-rich environment.

The Gauls are keeping Keife with these names.

That is when the Nervii hit the Romans with the Eternal Uno.

Shut the fuck up.

This is when the tribe from Evangelion shows up.

They hit the Romans with the eternal Uno reverse card.

These tribes have been fighting the Romans for years before Caesar really put the boot down on their collective necks.

They had learned a lot from that process.

Namely, whenever the Romans caught them in camp or in a village, the Romans would assault that position.

They would build a ring of fortifications around them, trenches, walls, palisades, watchtowers, stuff like that.

Turn a position of strength into a position of weakness.

You'd be trapped inside.

The walls you're hiding behind in a siege become less important.

If you also have walls trapping you in.

And now the people on the outside simply have to wait for you to starve.

So that is what the Nervii did, digging in around a man named Quintus Tullius Cicero and his men.

Trenches, walls, watchtowers, everything.

Just rapidly fortnight hopping around the Romans in a massive ring that measured three miles in circumference.

And these walls were built strong.

They were 10 feet high and soared by 15 foot wide trenches.

Watching these get popped up in front of them probably made Cicero realize I might be fucked.

He kept sending runners out at night trying desperately to get word to Caesar about what was going on, but they just kept getting captured and being murdered in just about the most horrible ways you could imagine.

More than one guy was set on fire, for example.

You could really see the Nervii and the other tribes really taking their frustrations out whenever they caught one of these runners.

They did a pressing upon, which I'm not sure if you're aware what that means.

It means putting a big piece of wood on you and then piling rocks on top of it till you're crushed to death.

Do you know what?

I bet it feels real fucking good about a millisecond before it kills you.

Yeah, I've often said that about the rack when you're like getting pulled apart.

Like for there's like a split second there, you feel the most relief any human being has ever had before you're like ripped in twain.

Though eventually, a messenger did get through, got to Caesar's camp and told him what was going on.

They're about to be wiped out.

Motherfuckers are getting crushed with rocks and set on fire.

Please send help.

He quickly slapped together two legions worth of men and some auxiliary horsemen and marched out to break the Nervii siege.

The Nervii left their position to go confront Caesar, but decided this is a bad idea.

They got the fuck out of there.

Once Caesar got his shit together, virtually every other tribe dropped their shit and went home, giving the Romans effectively an apology for the whole revolt thing.

Only one tribe, the Iberones, refused to kneel to Caesar.

So Caesar came up with a novel solution to this problem.

Divide and conquer, effectively.

Rather than marching in and putting more men at risk, he told every other tribe in the area, hey, if you kill those guys, you could steal all their stuff.

The plan worked, and the tribe was wiped out.

Ebaroni's last words, like, I thought we were friends.

So, by the end of 53 BC, Gaul seemed handled.

So much so that as winter rolled in, Caesar arranged his legions and camps once more, this time making sure they were closer closer together so that shit didn't happen again, and then went back to Rome.

Because he was still a political mover and shaker in Rome, he couldn't just be gone for years at a time.

He frequently went back to keep a prize of the ongoing political bullshit there.

However, the Gauls were not, in fact, handled.

In fact, Caesar, comfortable that he had taught everyone their lesson, that even when they work together, Romans will still kill them, was not worried about someone else trying to rise to the surface to unite the Gaulic people.

Caesar's often portrayed as being so smart, so intelligent that he fundamentally understood the people of Gaul that he was conquering.

I suppose for a Roman, that might be true.

But in general, he absolutely did not.

He thought the fallen king Ambriox had unified the Gauls.

He thought this is as good as they could get.

When in reality, Ambriox had only really unified a couple tribes within one specific region.

But soon someone would come around to largely unite the Gauls as a whole.

Enter Vercingetorix, king of the Avernii tribe.

Though at our introduction here, he's not a king, not yet.

He's a noble who, after Caesar's invasion of Gaul, constantly stood against him.

Where other tribal leaders said working with the Romans was okay to further their own lot, Vercingetorix refused.

It seemed he understood that once people let the Romans in, they would never leave.

Regardless of the benefits they temporarily brought you, it was always a bad idea.

As people began to understand this, they rallied around Vercingetorix.

He and his anti-Roman group were exiled from the city of Gergovia by his own uncle who was king at the time.

So Vercingetorix rallied his followers, who are mostly poor, common people that were impacted largely by the Roman incursions, and invaded his own hometown, ousted his uncle, and then was proclaimed king by his his own people.

Immediately afterwards, Vercingetorix sent riders out in every direction, making contact with his fellow tribes.

Selling them on this idea of a greater alliance was the only possible way to peel themselves away from the Romans.

Many tribes, still suffering from the same thing that they were before, a lack of food made worse by Roman demands, signed up, and Vercingetorix quickly became the leader of the largest Gallic military alliance in history up until this point.

A few tribes were worried that standing against Rome was asking for a swift death, and they told Vercingetorix this.

Vercingetorix's counterpoint to this is, well, I'm standing right in front of you, and if you don't ally with me, I'll kill you first.

So they joined.

Amazing.

Amazing.

It was a very persuasive argument, sir.

Yeah.

How to win friends and influence people, Celtic version.

How to win friends and cleft

skulls in twain.

Verse and Getorix also knew Caesar was in Rome, which was a handy bit of knowledge to have because they knew that he was the one they had to worry about.

Without their leader, the Romans were just...

they didn't seem as intimidating and they needed to strike while he was away.

The signal for a general uprising was an attack on the Roman town of Cenobum, home to the largest Roman grain store in the entire province, which also happened to be home to mostly civilians, who were all butchered.

The Gauls then loaded the grain up and put everything else to the torch.

Now, word of this gets back to Caesar, who drops everything and rushes back to Gaul, only to run into a serious problem.

The Gauls had struck to the south, leaving his legions in their winter quarters far to the north.

Obviously, sending a messenger north to tell them that they needed to meet was a bad idea, and he could hardly run over there on his own.

But Vercengetorix was not looking to march out and fight the Romans head to head.

For starters, It was winter, and he knew how Romans worked.

They stayed in their camps and they lived off of the locals.

This happened in small fortified towns called Apita.

These could act as Ford operating bases, but were mostly supply dumps that were close to Roman fortifications.

So you had effectively a grain silo with people living around it whose whole job was to constantly ferry you food, which grain you stole from those people, right?

If the Gauls were going to fight the Romans, the best thing they could do was dodge the Romans entirely and burn these small towns.

Fight Caesar with a literal scorched earth tactic.

I just got to say, I think bands like, you know, Sabaton and Amonomarth have had a monopoly for too long on writing songs about historical battles.

I want someone who sounds like Tommy Wright III to write a song about Vercingetorix and the Gauls stealing all the grain.

Like, I want a Memphis soul tape.

Oh, no, I got Gauls in my grain.

I want a soul tape with Verse and Getterix's soul trapped in it.

The problem is that it's going to probably be a French guy trying to do a soul song.

Yeah.

Versus Getterix is definitely a good one.

That sounds cursed.

Something that French people all learn about.

Another thing that he made sure to target was where the Romans were the weakest, their tribal allies.

This would force Caesar to make one of two choices, both of which were really, really bad.

Leave their tribal allies to face the Gaul alliance alone and make Rome look weak, which in turn would probably end with most of their Gaulic alliance switching sides or leave their fortified camps and march in winter away from the secure food supply.

This was a choice that Verse and Geterix was trying to force Caesar to make because both sides of it are bad for the Romans.

Caesar managed to get around the Gauls and get back to his men and he decided the only possible way to solve this issue was to go on the march.

He knew he couldn't leave his Gallic allies to fight the Gauls because they would almost certainly just switch sides.

Like, there was no way they would actually continue to fight for Rome if Rome did not help them.

Vercingetorix was a talented leader, organizationally and logistically.

I mean, look what he pulled off so far.

But he had never commanded in the field against the Romans, certainly not against Caesar.

So he was quickly taught a lesson in underestimating his opponent.

Rather than marching right at the Gauls, Caesar split his army into threes and advanced on three of the Apida, including one Vercingetorix already had under siege, forcing him to break off the attack and regroup.

After this, Caesar made for Avaricum, one of the largest cities in Gaul, thinking that if he took it, it would force the Gauls to back down, put their swords up, and go home.

The tribe that controlled the city quickly sent word to Vercingetorix that the Romans were coming, explaining that Avaricum was easily defensible,

had strong walls, had a large grain supply, and begged them to come to the city and defend it.

Now, Vercingetorix absolutely refused because he knew what a siege entailed.

Getting pinned in in a siege against the Romans was a surefire way to die.

This is called foreshadowing.

Getting a letter saying, send help.

Romans about to hit the back walls of a viracome.

God damn it.

I knew it.

I knew it was coming because when I said the name, you giggled a little bit.

I saw the look on your face.

I saw the little giggle.

I was like, I know where this is going.

Yes, yes.

Caesar's about to hit my back walls.

Remember when I said Verson Gederix ordered a scorched earth policy?

Well, he fucking meant it.

Every tribe in his alliance was forced to burn down dozens of their own villages to include him.

He burned down a lot of his own shit too, but the goal was is like, look, we all burn our shit down.

We're all in this together.

The idea, of course, maybe for people who have never heard this tactic before, is deny the Romans everything.

The Romans did not bring their own food supply.

They're not not a modern military.

They live off of taking your food supply.

You're living off the land.

Torch it all.

And they have to leave.

They have no choice, especially in the winter.

And Vercingetorix's scorch earth policy was incredibly thorough.

But when it came to Avaricum, that particular city, that tribe begged Vercingetorix to allow them to not burn it, calling it the gem of Gaul.

And should they win, they need a royal city, effective, like they need a city to birth their new country around their new state, as much as one existed back then.

So Verst and Geterix agreed to spare the city, but warned them, if the Romans show up, you're on your fucking own.

So I don't know what they expected, but that exact thing happened.

Caesar marched on towards the town and began building fortifications around it like he always did.

This is really hard going because Avaricum was actually very easily defendable, owing to the fact it was built against rivers.

It was constructed almost entirely on a swamp.

And the only way to

set upon the city itself was climbing a ridge line.

So it required the Romans to build an entire earthwork because the city happened to be surrounded by something of a natural moat that was dry.

It was a really big pain in the ass.

So it eventually forced the Romans and Roman engineers to build earthworks 80 feet high.

in some places just to get into the city or at the city walls.

Yeah, for anyone listening at home, it's like bang in the center of France as well.

If you're thinking like where this is located.

Yeah, yeah.

So if you're familiar with France, it's like a little ways south of Paris and it's right near a town called a city called Bourges.

So yeah, like we're no longer in the Low Countries.

We are dead center.

Like find the hexagon map of France and put a dead center circle or like a point in the middle of it and that's where you are right now.

It's swampland.

It's cold in winter too.

Yeah, it's cold as shit, which is why Verson Gettericks forced them to march.

It's not Siberia cold, but it's fucking cold in winter there.

If you happen to be an army made up of fucking Romans from southern Italy or whatever, like this is not where you want to be in the winter.

This is anti-togo weather.

This is anti-sandals weather.

This is fucking anti-open air garden party discrimination.

All right.

They have to stay warm by slathering each other with olive oil.

They haven't invented immersion heaters.

They haven't invented underfloor heating.

They haven't invented coal.

It's cold.

It's just, but they're used to it.

You frostbite, your toes have fallen off.

You look down at your feet.

It's like, I wish I was at home where it was covered in ants.

These guys actually, they just put butter all over themselves and then the ants get on their feet, get stuck, die, and become a layer of insulation.

Impromptu shoes.

Everybody knows the traditional Roman Legion winter wears to slide into a giant human-sized tortellini.

That's why they were actually doing the turtle shield with all of the shields together to form like one big, you know, sort of massive tortellini formation.

They just like make a ravioli, and everyone's like, oh, I remember my mom made ravioli.

It was so good.

When they were in there, like, defending against like halberds and axes and spears and shit, they're all talking about like good-ass meals they're going to have when they get home.

It was just like Ranger School.

And when they come out of the tortellini, it's like that scene from Ace Vantura when he's coming out of the fake Rhinos butthole.

But rather than covered in sweat, he's just soaked in marinara sauce.

That's how Italians are born.

That kind of implies that if you get a critical mass of them together and have them all start talking about food, that they can spontaneously generate marinara sauce.

Yeah, it's like sweat.

It just comes out red.

Meanwhile, Verson Getericks and his men camped out 16 miles away from the city, literally watching the entire thing happen.

This is Italian nuclear fission.

But they stuck to their plan of letting the city die.

But they did see an opportunity to bleed the Romans while not getting bogged down at first.

The Romans now engaged in a siege would only survive via foraging parties, sending people out into the countryside to gather food.

Again, mostly from stealing from other towns.

So Vercingetorix only sent his men out to ambush the foraging parties and supply convoys desperately trying to reach the army from its original winter quarters.

Who knows if this plan would have actually worked, though it almost certainly would have bloodied Caesar quite a fair amount, trapping him into maybe an even longer siege while simultaneously not risking many of Versengeterix's own men.

But Versengeterix eventually decided that sitting back and playing the long game wasn't good enough for him.

So under the cover of night, he slowly began to send his men into the city to reinforce the garrison.

They joined the defenders who were really giving the Romans hell.

Like defenders were digging counter-sabotage tunnels under their own city walls to collapse the Roman ones, while the Romans were preparing that.

And they reinforced their own town walls, building them higher and higher and higher.

In another case, Verson Getericks used the bulk of his forces that were still camped far away to march out into the open, which is like they call it offering battle.

Like they were standing in combat formation, kind of goading Caesar to break the siege and attack them.

Caesar sees right through this, of course.

It doesn't work.

But this siege is bloody as hell for the Romans.

Eventually, Caesar gets inside the city and just a wholesale slaughter of everyone inside because it's revenge for Cenobum, which is how it's often framed.

They were also able to loot the city's massive grain stores, which undid a lot of Gaul's successes so far, which just goes to show that Verst and Getericks was right in the very beginning of this whole thing, that the city did need to be burned down and the grain needed to be taken away.

The Roman legionnaires are just there posting money spreads of grain.

How do you talk on the grain phone?

You know,

you're holding the stalks of wheat.

I need the accurate translation into colloquial vulgar Latin of I bin had bushels.

After this, Caesar commits one of his few mistakes.

He splits his army, sending half to chase some of the Gauls' allies, while he leads an army to Versengeterix's capital, Gergovia.

Here, the Gauls manage to pre-empt the Romans' coming siege.

While the Romans were still digging in, the Gauls launch an immediate counter-attack, ending in a battlefield victory.

A thousand Roman soldiers are killed.

Caesar decides that maybe he went about this wrong.

He pulls up stakes and decides to come back later with his whole army.

To the Gauls, this is a massive victory.

They're like, we chased the Romans away from the city.

We won.

And Verson Getorix immediately orders his cavalry to crash into the Roman rear as they withdraw, because that is generally how you'd use light horse, only to not realize that he hadn't routed the Romans.

Caesar had simply ordered a tactical withdrawal for the time being.

So the Roman auxiliary cavalry turns around and smashes all of the Gallic cavalry all at once.

It's an incredibly one-sided battle, but it forces Vercingetorix to retreat from there despite the fact he had just won.

And he retreats to the small town of Alessia.

It had a decent stockpile of supplies.

It was relatively defensible.

It was sitting on top of a 500-foot tall hill.

And Caesar quickly made for the town.

And as always, they get to work digging in around it.

Vercingetorix knew where this was going, and he used his last opening before the full Roman fortifications closed in around him to send a messenger through the unfinished Roman lines and put out word for anyone who wants to stand against the Romans to hurry, gather your weapons, and come relieve me.

Vercingetorix does not have a small army.

There's about 80,000 men inside this encirclement now.

Caesar had more or less the same amount.

However, by the time Verse and Gederic's reinforcements arrive, Roman fortifications around Alessia were complete.

Two lines went 11 miles around the town, another 14 miles around that first line.

The lines were made out of earth and wood and supported by deep and wide ditches.

Though as the area was made up of rough, broken terrain, had mountains, things like that, Caesar left gaps in the line where he thought the terrain was simply too bad for anybody to dare to march through.

Between all of this was seven different army camps and dozens of other strong points and towers scattered throughout.

In front of all of it was a series of obstacles, like for example, like the classic one of stakes sticking out of the ground to break up any incoming charge.

Building all of that only took a month, which is about as long as it took for the Gauls' reinforcements to park itself outside.

100,000 men under the command of Commius, the king of the Atrebatiae tribe.

The tribes dug in on the other side of the Romans, pinning them in.

So just so you can picture this in your head, you have Alessia in the middle with Vercingetorix being besieged by the Romans, who were now in turn being besieged by a different group of Gauls.

We have a very strange human sandwich situation.

Yeah, this is sort of like a siege warfare one-upmanship on a long enough timeline.

It just starts becoming like interlocking.

It's like, it's like, let's make a siege bullseye.

Let's be like, what's the dumbest way we can play like a tower defense game on a mobile phone?

Like, just keep slapping new encirclements, new concentric circles.

Hey, yo, this is exhibit.

We heard you like sieges, so we put a siege in your siege so you can siege while you siege.

Yo, dog, I heard you like balustrades, so you put a balustrade in front of your balustrade so you can siege while you siege.

But have you got any daughters that are under the age of 17?

A Westwood baby!

Oh, no.

That's legally been proven.

So, you know what?

We can just say it all we want.

No man in his 50s should dress like that.

I'm sorry.

Don't look at me.

I'm 70.

No, Tim Westwood isn't in his 50s, Nate.

He is in his 70s.

I know he is, but in the 2000s, when he was doing Pip My Ride UK, he was in his 50s and he was dressed like that.

I do remember when one of you showed me a picture of him for the first time, and I was shook to my core.

He looks like you took like a research astronomer from Oxford and you slapped him in weird like fucking fooboo and goddamn like Mark Echo Denim.

It's the strangest thing.

And Brits are like, oh, this guy is normal.

This is a regular real guy who exists.

And also his dad is a vicar as well.

Congratulations.

You managed to make exhibits seem normal.

I did like the thing about Pimp My Ride is everyone who reviewed their cars afterwards like, my car is a massive piece of shit now.

Thanks.

But then once this, the double siege gets locked in, Caesar then orders his men to turn around and begin building outward fortifications, boxing themselves in.

So like in that situation, you have two options.

Immediately try to break out or double the fuck down.

Or this can, I think it's like quadrupling down.

I'm not entirely sure how many times we're down at this point, but it's a lot.

However, while the Romans are re-digging themselves in on the opposite side, Things inside Alesia have been really, really bad.

I said they had a decent grain storage, which is true for a small town, but Verson Getterix parked 80,000 people inside of it.

And that's not including camp followers and families, which was normal for these soldiers to bring with them.

So it's probably closer to 100,000.

They were rapidly eating through everything, and now people were starving.

So Verson Getterix ordered all the civilians to leave town in an effort to extend his supplies, but they have nowhere to go.

They're behind like eight different levels of fortifications at this point.

Verse and Geterix assumes that the Romans would take them in as slaves or let them leave, but either way, they would have been fed.

However, I oppose to you guys, there's a secret third option.

Do you want to guess what it is?

Kill everyone.

Deploy Tim Westwood.

Okay, there's a secret fifth option.

And that is...

Simply don't allow them to leave, nor enslave them.

So you now have tens of thousands of civilians camped out of the no man's land between the armies in the open in winter with no food.

Yeah.

Also look at like a topographical map of the siege.

Alesia is like on a slight hill and it's just, oh, there's two rivers flowing directly beside it parallel to each other.

And there's also, I mean, if you look at like a 19th century map, they are marking it out with the kind of like military map stuff and it's like, it's all swamp.

Yeah.

I will say the one benefit of making your winter camp in a swamp is the diseases really aren't there that you'd have in the summer yeah but it does mean you starve to death instead like i think like catching like dengue and dying would be faster but yeah it's not like people can't you know swim naked across it but like fro you know hypothermia is a thing and if you're wearing gear you're gonna drown like you're gonna get too tired you're gonna get hypothermia you're gonna

fall over and not be able to get up so like you're basically pinned you can't go that way you will die in the swamp and succumb to the soup you'll become goop yeah if you get out the other side without becoming goop you'll just be stabbed in the face by an italian man it's like so that implies that that the word goop is actually a portmanteau and it means gaulish soup.

Yeah.

All goop is gaulish soup.

Gwyneth Paltr doesn't want you to know this.

Yeah, exactly.

She's a big supporter of Vercingetorix.

Yeah, Angel Investors, Vercing Geterix.

She got turned on to the real way of being one with the universe by reading Asterisk and Obelix.

No, Nate.

The Angel Investor is like Verse and Getericks the 17th in the same way.

There's like a Napoleon running around claiming that he's the holy

Roman Emperor.

Outside of Alessia, the Gauls began to scout Roman defenses and using locals who had been drafting the Roman labor pools as spies.

And they discovered that a gap in the Roman lines was in a nearby mountain because Caesar thought, eh, nobody will be able to cross there.

So as winter was really closing in, the men inside of Alessia began to starve.

Some were beginning to starve to death, while others were, you know, just getting that Jesus on the cross look going on.

The Gauls launched a massive attack from the outside of the siege towards the inside at a gap near Mount Rey.

But just because a gap was left in the fortifications did not just mean the Romans left it open.

Roman soldiers were still there, waiting and posted, and they managed to plug the gap before the Gauls burst out the other side.

Tens of thousands of men charged down the hill and began butchering one another.

Fun fact, included in this whole episode is Mark Antony, kind of in the middle of all of it.

Just chilling.

It'd be funny if it was Mark Anthony, the singer.

But alas.

Yeah, a really, really bad time travel experiment.

It's like, I want to see the Roman Empire, you say.

I want to teach the Gauls bachada.

Yeah, I want to see the Roman Empire.

It's my dream since I was seven, and I couldn't shut the fuck up about it.

And they're like, all right, your wish is granted, but we've sending you to the siege of Elysia.

But Caesar watched the entire battle from his main command post, ordering in reinforcements to plug the gap even further.

But it turned out all of this was a massive diversion.

The main Gaul attack went straight for the fortifications, and they were ready for them.

The Gauls were armed with bundles of sticks to throw into the Roman ditches so they could cross them, ladders to scale the walls and earthworks, and ropes and grappling hooks to throw up onto the watchtowers and portions of the wall.

And it would be cooler if there were to ninja climb up it, but instead it's to literally just rip them down with force.

Now, none of this was communicated with Verston Getterix.

Obviously, there's no way to communicate with him at this point, but he sees the battle unfolding and is like, oh shit, if we have any hope of getting out of this cluster fuck still alive, we have to go charge to the gap at Mount Ray and meet it, like pin in the Romans on both sides so we don't starve to death.

Caesar watched the Gauls marching from Mount Ray and immediately sent reinforcements who happened to be under the command of Decimus Brutus.

That Brutus, the same one who would later plot his death.

This is just a series of that guys that's going to eventually fuck up Caesar's shit.

What is interesting here is that both the Romans and the Gauls cycled their soldiers in and out as they got tired, because you really don't want your soldiers getting a repetitive stress injury from hacking a person's skull in half.

So as men locked themselves into this murderous blob, the real competition would come down to who has the better murder cardio?

The Gauls or the Romans?

And it should come as a surprise.

That's only partially a joke.

That's legitimately how things worked in combat back then.

But it should come come as a surprise to nobody that the Romans were better in the situation.

They literally trained for this all the time.

Roman soldiers were kind of remarkable in how far they could march and how long they could fight, thanks to moving men up and down the line so they were fresh and rested and able to get water or whatever.

It was like you just got killed or you got left to starve or die if you didn't do it.

Like that's just the thing they did.

It's sort of like, I don't know.

Once again, it's like, look at the army's strengths here.

It is sort of the modern equivalent of like, would you pin down a massive tactical decision against, say, the U.S.

military based on who can consume the most energy drinks and dipping tobacco?

No, you probably wouldn't because there's probably not very many militaries out there that can do those things and not vomit so much that they would become combat ineffective.

You know what I mean?

So, yeah, the Romans, marching until you die, kind of their thing.

Yeah, marching and fighting for hours upon hours at a time is like.

The Roman Legion was an incredibly effective killing machine.

I'm not like gassing them up here.

It's just historically a fact.

Very professional military, fortunately slash unfortunately, depending on where you happen to fall.

Another thing, too, that you'll find when reading about this is that like one of the decisions, one of the sort of primary kind of points of focus for their commanders was if they saw a situation that they might be able to nudge or influence or point in a direction that would lead to something where then the soldiers, the legions, would be then, it would be appropriate to do the thing they trained on all the fucking time.

That wasn't necessarily a surprise, but like it is a bit of a surprise when it's like chaos and unclear circumstances and just ambiguity of battle.

But it's like, right, but what they're trying to do is put it into a situation, get it into a position where then they can just be like, do this thing we trained you on for months and basically killed you if you couldn't do it right.

And then wouldn't you know it, their legions can do that very, very well.

I said this years ago during when we were doing the Rome cast that HBO's Rome actually has a really good representation of what fighting in a Roman line formation would look like in the very beginning, which was you only fought for a couple of minutes at a time.

Someone would give the signal to switch and you'd switch out.

Yeah.

It's a very ingenious way to do this kind of fighting.

And not to mention, once at this point, possibly up to 200,000 Gauls are assaulting you from both directions and you have them pinned in by trying to fight through that.

Caesar does something very simple and simply sends the Roman auxiliary cavalry to circle around and attack them from the rear.

Like once they have them pinned in and you're in that slaughter machine, you start working the flanks with cavalry.

And exhausted after fighting the Romans for hours, the Gauls broke to the outside.

Now, Versingetorix, who was mostly attempting to break out of the siege in order to survive rather than score a victory, saw he was fucked and ordered to retreat back to Elysia.

From there, he understood that surrender was his only option to not die.

And as people write about Vercingetorix's personality, he was worried about leading all of his men to death.

Unfortunately, there's really no way out of that at this point.

And this is how his surrender went down, according to Plutarch.

Quote, Vercingetorix, the supreme leader in the whole war, put on his most beautiful armor, had his horse carefully groomed, and rode through the gates.

Caesar was sitting down and Vercingetorix, after riding around him in a circle, leapt down from his horse, stripped off his armor, and sat at Caesar's feet, silent and motionless, until he was taken away under arrest, a prisoner reserved for the triumph.

So, yeah, he surrendered like a really sad dog.

But again, this account is also debated.

Like other stories, as like Verson Getterix surrendered, like you'd imagine a king would.

He didn't curl up on Caesar's bottle, like Caesar's feet into a ball and like go to sleep like a cat or whatever.

Maybe he won't notice me if I just curl up.

It's like my dog, whenever, like, she thinks she's in trouble, she just rolls onto her back and pees a little.

When my daughter is very obviously getting into something she knows she's not supposed to, and I say her name, she moves with a start and then does these little like quick steps, like

trying to run away.

Like, I wasn't doing it.

You didn't see it.

I'm like, I absolutely saw it, and that's why I said your name.

Verson Gedrick's running away from Caesar like a scolded toddler, like waddling back and forth.

Verson

basically doing the PP dance running away.

Well, from there, regardless of the situation of the PP dance or the curled up dog, Verse and Geterix and his army surrenders.

The Gauls are put into chains, and so many are enslaved by the Romans that Caesar gives one slave.

to each of his soldiers, and it's their decision to keep them or sell them.

And this is like a crazy amount of money for your average soldier.

Then also, my God is that evil.

Like imagine if the Montgomery GI bill was like just three people in chains.

Like what the fuck?

Spoils of the siege of Alessia worth the entire GDP of Yemen.

Yeah.

The victory at Elesia marked the end of the Gallic Wars and would chart the continued and rapid ascent of Caesar into why we all know who Julius Caesar is.

The death and destruction that the wars brought to Gaul is kind of hard to calculate.

Historians often argue argue about this.

I am not a Roman historian, I should point out.

But generally, it's agreed upon that about 15 million people were killed between the beginning of Roman incursion until the end of the conquest, which includes the near total relocation or destruction of the native Gallic population.

It is one of the most thorough and extended genocides in recorded history.

Something that I found interesting about this is that I recognized the name sort of when I saw the prompt for today because I lived right by the Rue de Lesia in Paris when I lived there 20 years ago.

I didn't actually ever look it up and know anything about it.

It's just the name.

It's the metro stop.

But it's interesting to me because obviously modern France has far more lineage to do with the Roman Empire than it does with the Gauls.

Pretty much every Western European country knows the reason they're all wiped out.

French is

a descendant of vulgar Latin.

But it's just interesting because I'm pretty sure it was named kind of in commemoration of the Gauls in the 1860s.

So it's interesting.

It's like, that's, it's, it's like, you know, famously, the textbook used in the French Empire, every country that they occupied, you know, had like a primer for children, like an early reading manual for children.

It started off with like, our ancestors, the Gauls.

It's like, yeah, our ancestors, the Gauls, who got extirpated by the Romans, and that's why we speak a language that's based on Latin.

Yep.

Yep.

As for the Battle of Alessia itself, the numbers are quite honestly all over the place.

Caesar himself himself writes about it.

In his accounts, he claims he killed nearly a quarter million Gauls during the battle, which seems quite high, seeing how that was more Gauls than were physically present at the time.

But if generally agreed, if you cut that number in half, pretty accurate.

As for Verson Geterix, he survived a lot longer than you probably imagine he did.

He was brought back to Rome and imprisoned for six years.

The reason for that is he was being kept in chains for Caesar's triumph.

So he could be brought out and paraded around, at which point he was brought to the temple of Jupiter and ritualistically strangled to death.

How do you ritualistically strangle someone to death?

Do you have to wear a pair of Giovanchi gloves?

Exactly.

That's exactly what I was going to say.

You have to put on your murdering gloves.

Like, I personally killed 250,000 motherfuckers.

Sounds like a rapper boast, but Julius Caesar was actually saying it.

Instead of holding up the money phone, he's just holding up two slaves to each side of his head, wearing Givenchy gloves.

Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, I mean, like the Roman equivalent of Giovanchi gloves.

The Roman equivalent of the Autobars Piaget watch.

That's worth the entire GDP of Yemen.

If I go broke, the economy is going to fucking collapse.

People are going to die.

The end.

Because I have to end this on a nice light-hearted note.

So gentlemen, we do a thing here called question from the legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question, you could support the show on Patreon and ask us on Patreon in Patreon DMs or on our Discord, and we will answer it on the show.

And today's question is: you have retired to a cabin in the mountains.

A helicopter touches down, and a fatherly but deadly commanding officer comes out.

He is recruiting you for one final mission based on your skills.

What are you being recruited for?

Being annoying.

I have to go to assassinate a a guy that is like Rasputin, but the only way I can kill him is out-drink him.

So we require your very specific skill set.

Nate

is being recruited to like, sir, we have six different audio cables and we need them categorized by where they come from and their capabilities.

You're the only man who can do it.

No, that's Nate in the Mission Impossible situation of disarming a bomb.

He's like, but all the cables are the same.

And you just see Nate come out of the background.

No, they're not the same.

One of them is made from copper alloy.

The other one is made from blah, blah, blah.

I mean, in fairness, I'm thinking it would be more along the lines of like the cafe scene from Inglorious Bastards, but I have to win over the confidence of some kind of like enemy commander by being able to speak authoritatively on insane fucking nonsense topics that he's just got really into on Wikipedia.

That's like the only one guy we know who can do this.

You're just describing what every shift on staff duty looks like.

I mean,

for me, it's like recruited for a thing.

Like, if I was being serious, it's probably just because of like having experience in a certain thing or a a certain place.

Like, if someone's like, We need you to go do something in like this part of the ville outside of Camp Casey, Korea, or you know, whatever, you know, I have some experience with that.

But, but, uh, yeah, keeping with the joking tone of the show, it's like, uh, yeah, it's either like, we need you to go in and charm the most, the crustiest and most curmudgeon-ly venue manager in order to make this thing come off.

And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I find out this guy famous for being a huge dickhead in this venue in Manchester actually used to fucking, uh, he he helped engineer and do so for some um some rehearsal sessions for the happy Monday so I just get him talking about the happy Mondays and he fucking loves me Nate if it was a combined mission between me and you it would be a agents your cover is you are two employees of amoeba records

I'm honestly not sure what my mission would be I would say for Joe it's like a combination of like you have to be able to walk into a room very unassumingly and be able to like know the subject matter incredibly well and like not reveal, not blow your cover, but also just like blend in as someone who knows the subject matter really well.

And then this part two of your mission is stand outside in the rain for 12 hours motionless.

And you'll be like, Yep, I hate my life.

This is what I do all day.

Yeah,

my mission is: listen here, you have to chug a four pack of white monsters, stand outside unmoving in like February in a horrible part of the country, unmoving, and only complain in your head.

Like, yeah, I can do that.

It's really funny because, Joe, you would have been like premium material to get recruited into the old guard, and instead you just got to like do old guard shit of being miserable and getting rained on non-stop, but like you weren't in the dress uniform, you know, with caissons and stuff like that.

Yeah, yeah, it's true.

Yep.

I could stand in one place for so long, guys.

You have no idea.

All right.

Fellas, I do believe that is an episode of The Lions Led by Donkeys of this podcast.

We have casted one entire pod, but you host other pods that you cast.

So plug those other pods.

Trash Sucher, Kill James Bond, What a Hell of a Way to Dad.

No Gods, No Mayors.

I'm either a host, co-host, producer, or executive something with all of them.

They're all funny.

They're all nice shows, and they're all both free and have Patreon content.

So check those out, please.

Beneath the skin, show about the history of everything, Told you, the history of tattoos, and uh maybe by the time this episode comes out, I'll have announced.

Uh, there's a couple of projects I'm working on as yet unannounced.

So keep an eye out for those.

This is the only thing that I do.

So thank you for listening to it.

Maybe consider supporting us on Patreon.

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Leave us a review and wherever you listen to the show because it helps us immensely when we go to get venues to do live shows.

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People who own venues care about that kind of stuff.

So good reviews.

And until next time.

If your haters surround you, then just fucking get some other haters of your haters and build a siege wall around them and just keep on going.

Eventually, you will find who's got the most haters.

Unending encirclement of haters.

Eric Adams warned us.

If you'll excuse me, I need to be ritualistically strangled at the Temple of Jupiter.

Bye.