Appendix 12- Coming Full Circle One Last Time

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 12.

Coming full circle, one last time.

So this is the penultimate episode of the Revolutions podcast.

This is the last formal appendix episode.

And then next week I'll have one more final informal farewell, and then we'll be done.

I will have many heartfelt things to say next week, but to get a little head start on it, let me just say that it has been an incredible honor to produce this show.

An incredible honor that a bunch of people let me do what I do here.

And that if I look back over all the episodes I've produced and all the time we've spent together, that maybe the Revolutions podcast has shaped the world for the better.

or at least made your world a little bit better as you mow the lawn and go for a walk and wash dishes and commute to work.

All the things that people do when they listen to the Revolutions podcast.

Thanks for letting me spend that time with you.

I'll miss you too.

Now we've been talking about discrete historical events and eras and epochs that, despite their differences about where and when they happened, we can call them all revolutionary events.

With apologies to those of you who believe that the revolution never ended, whichever revolution it happens to be you're talking about, we do tend to put conceptual brackets around our historical revolutions and say, here is when it began and here is when it ended.

Now, there's often not a right answer to figuring out when a revolution ends.

If the French Revolution explodes in 1789, we can say that it goes to 1794, 1799, 1804, or 1815.

All of these are acceptable endpoints to mark a book or a documentary or a podcast focused on the French Revolution.

I said the French Revolution ended in 1799 partly because my daughter was about to be born and I needed to wrap up the season on the French Revolution.

She's um seven now, in case you're wondering how long we've been at this together.

But in the end, whatever date we slap on to the end of a revolution, we should say that at a certain point the revolution does end.

And so I want to start today by looking back at each of our 10 seasons and nailing down when precisely we say each of the revolutions ended.

Now the revolutionary period in Britain and Ireland runs through 1660, and it is easily marked by the collapse of the Commonwealth and the restoration of the Stuart monarchy.

And this is one of our revolutions that really does seem to look like a revolution, one full turn of the wheel.

Now if we mark this period beginning with the Bishops' War of 1639, We are talking about 21 years of revolutionary upheaval in the British Isles.

And then of course there's the necessary coda that it would all be recapitulated in 1688 with the Glorious Revolution when Dutch bankers staged a hostile takeover of the British crown.

But for our purposes, 1639 to 1660 is the revolutionary period.

Now the American Revolution marks its end at 1789 with the implementation of the Constitution.

We could say that the Revolution proper actually ended with the Treaty of Paris, and that the Articles of Confederation period was actually the first chapter of of post-revolutionary American history, a chapter that was quickly closed by some radical centralists who locked themselves in a room in Philadelphia and drafted an entirely new system of government even though nobody told them to.

But there is so much force around the notion that the permanence of the Constitution means that the Constitution must end the revolutionary period.

So if we say this all got going with the Stamp Act in 1764, we've got ourselves in America a good, clean 25 years of revolution.

Now, I don't want to belabor the point about the French Revolution, because it will sprout volumes of words, but the French Revolution can go through 1794, 1799, 1804, or 1815, and it's really just choose your fighter.

But the tumults that opened in 1789 do seem like they must be extended conceptually out to 1815, and that like the revolution in Britain and Ireland, it ends with the restoration of the monarchy that was ousted in the first place.

So, if we take the French Revolution and extend it to the restoration of the Bourbons, it took 23 years for the revolution to come full circle.

Now, the Haitian Revolution goes until the Declaration of Independence on New Year's Day, 1804.

After this, we enter the period where local leaders like Henri Christophe and Dessaline organized stable post-independence political regimes, or at least they tried to.

Dessaline promulgated the Declaration of Independence 12 and a half years after the Boisquan ceremony.

The revolutionary period in Haiti would have ended with the War of Knives in 1799, about eight years after Boiquéman, but Napoleon's attempt to reinstate slavery in Saint-Domingue kept the revolutionary period going and led, indirectly, to Lubucher's capture and death.

But with Independence Day 1804, we say the Haitian Revolution closes.

A Spanish-American independence has the same dynamic as Anglo-American independence, with the various declarations of independence coming in the middle of the process, declarations that are often retrofitted to serve as the beginning or the end of the revolutionary period, but mostly which just kind of appeared in the middle of it and were only truly recognized after the fact.

Most Spanish-American holdings declared independence in the 1810s or 1820s and then fought wars against Spain and each other to carve up South America into the chunks we more or less recognize today.

And because we're talking here about a bunch of different countries spread out over an entire continent, divided by sometimes impassable terrain, marking the boundaries of the Spanish-American independence era is always going to be a bit vague.

But if we start it with the abdications of Bayon in 1808, we can say that it ends really once and finally for all in 1833 with the death of King Charles VII.

But really, by the mid to late 1820s, Spain was recognizing, at least tacitly, the independence of its former South American colonies.

So we're talking about a period of perhaps 10, 15, or 25 years, depending on where you want to mark the boundaries, still a very long time.

Now in contrast to this, we get the French Revolution of 1830, which was lightning compared to everything that had gone before it.

I mean, we call it the July Revolution for a reason.

It's obviously over in a matter of days.

Although, I have heard it recently posited by me that the June Rebellion of 1832 is actually a second wave of the Revolution of 1830.

But even if we we stretch the definition of the revolution of 1830 to its breaking point, we are still talking about something that was over in about two years, not a giant generations-long upheaval.

Although we will say more about this in a second.

The revolutions of 1848 are also much more compact in time, but remember, the revolutions of 1848 start in 1847 and last until 1849.

The result was the re-establishment of various dynasties on neo-absolutist terms in Austria, Hungary, and the various states of Germany.

In Italy, it marked a brief pause in the wars between the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia and Austria for control of Italy.

In France, the revolution moved quickly through the brief and dirty history of the Second French Republic, which takes them to the doorstep of Napoleon III, who was there to complete the farcical recapitulation of 1789 to 1794 to 1799.

The revolutions of 1848 lasted for about 18 months total, from the opening events in late 1847 to their closing events in early 1849.

Now, the revolutionary events surrounding the fall of the Second French Empire and the birth of the Third French Republic mostly ends with the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, but it takes its final form with the Constitution of 1875, which we didn't actually talk much about in the show because it wasn't pertinent to our revolutions.

Bloody week had already happened.

The French Third Republic was the first sovereign regime to last more than 18 years since the fall of the Bastille in 1789.

Now, as you know from the show, because we did talk about this, had the Bourbon heir to the throne been willing to serve under the tricolor, the events of 1870-1871 would have resulted in a constitutional monarchy for France.

But he wouldn't, and so it didn't.

And one suspects that it also probably just preempted the inevitable third overthrow of the Bourbons, which I feel like was all but guaranteed.

So we're talking here about six months of revolutionary activity from the fall of 1870 to the spring of 1871, an event which I also think closes a thing we might call the long French Revolution.

The Mexican Revolution is also tricky to mark the end of because like France and as we're about to see with Russia, There is no dramatic end point.

Things just shift and evolve.

In Mexican presidential history, it just sort of drifts from Carranza to Obergon to the PRI as armies demobilize, normal life resumes, and legends of the revolution like Villa and Zapata are assassinated.

Now, it does feel like the revolutionary process might run all the way through the presidency of Cardenas, because the radical economic and social possibilities of the revolution were not seized on until Cardenas in the 1930s.

But the revolution by that point already feels like a historical event.

So it's easier to say that it lasted from the election of 1910 to the election of 1920, a decade of winds sweeping Mexico.

Now, like the revolutions of 1848, the Russian Revolution of 1905 starts in 1904 and does not end until 1906.

And also, like 1848, it ends with the reentrenchment of the imperial dynasty on neo-absolutist terms.

The Tsar now recognizes a Duma and other certain types of public assemblies like the Zemstva.

This obviously rickety settlement does not last through World War I, and so in February 1917 we get this second revolution.

It's possible to say the revolution ended in November 1917 with the immediate survival of the Bolshevik regime after the October days.

Maybe you want to push it to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918.

I'm not going to argue with you.

But I personally think that the Russian Revolution runs at a minimum through the end of the Civil War.

It's only after the Civil War that the communist regime is actually on stable footing.

And with the coming USSR, it moves out of the revolutionary phase, a phase that lasts five, six, or seven years, depending on how you want to do the math.

So now that we've grasped the scope of all of these revolutions, we can start to compare how it started with how it's going.

Maybe haul back up our definition of what a political revolution is and make sure everything we've been talking about here qualifies.

And if it does does qualify, how exactly does it qualify?

So we said that a political revolution is when the existing structure of political power, how power is exercised, justified, legitimized, defended, and transferred, is displaced by a force originating beyond the bounds of that existing structure and replaced by something different.

So do our revolutions qualify as political revolutions?

Spoiler alert, of course they do, otherwise I would not have been talking about them.

So the revolutionary upheavals in Britain and Ireland had begun as a part of a long process of negotiation between the crowns of Britain and the Lords of Britain.

They're fighting over issues that go back to the Norman conquest, you know, through the medieval period, Magna Carta, into the age of the Tudors, the wars of religion, and the consolidation of something like a stable central monarchical apparatus.

This gave way to a cousin from Scotland who was himself the product of negotiated settlements between all of those groups and then also between the Scottish and the English.

But the great question of the day was really whether or not a parliament, an assembly of stakeholders of the realm, would be a permanent part of statecraft.

And the answer was unequivocally yes.

Britain would be a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy.

Everything that happened between 1639 and 1660 guarantees this.

When James II later tried to undo this very settled fact, it was him that went, not the wallpaper.

So even though we might say that the Stuart Restoration means that it was all a big hullabaloo over nothing, no, no, no.

The British monarchy of Charles II was very different than the British monarchy of Charles I.

Now it should be very obvious how the American Revolution changed the nature of its sovereign because we're talking about a colony that was now independent.

So right there, the seat of sovereignty and justifications for that sovereignty are going to be different.

In this case, the seat of sovereignty has moved across an entire ocean.

The new citizens of America also had to find new terms to justify their fledgling Commonwealth.

With no deep historical tradition to point to anymore, nor any divine will of God, They instead pledged fealty to a piece of paper that they wrote a week ago last Tuesday, which is, admittedly, very curious behavior.

But obviously, the United States is now a republic and not a monarchy, and that's actually a pretty revolutionary outcome.

So the American Revolution was absolutely a political revolution.

If we take the French Revolution all the way through the fall of Napoleon in 1815, we must look at how the restored Bourbon monarchy was organized.

When Louis XVIII was restored to power, he did not believe he could get away without ruling with a charter of government.

that at least mimicked a constitution.

There were guarantees for elected assemblies, balanced balanced ministries, and basic individual rights.

And I think there's a real sense that, just as with the English Revolution and the American Revolution,

is there going to be a parliament?

Some permanent assembly of at least some part of the population who would now participate in government.

Now, typically, at this point in history, this parliament is going to be full of the wealthiest members of that society.

and they tend to resemble oligarchies far more than democracies.

But still, the disequilibrium that caused the revolutions were in part caused by the sovereign refusing to allow even that much.

So a vital component of any stable equilibrium was the permanent recognition of a popular assembly.

So all of these revolutions, one of the main things they do is produce parliamentary structures.

But moving on from that, we can look at Haiti and find another very easy case to analyze.

The Haitian Revolution started with a slave colony administered by some rich stakeholders and colonial officials, and it ended with a full-fledged independent state run by the slaves who had freed themselves.

I actually cannot imagine a more dramatic revolutionary change.

We don't have to talk about it much, because it's so huge and so obvious.

Now again, Spanish American independence is a lot like Anglo-American independence.

There was once a colonial regime of intendants who were in charge of things.

But now all the various states of South America are independent and answerable to no one beyond their own territories.

So each of them will break into different sorts of constitutional or personalist regimes.

There are usually running battles between liberals and conservatives inside each of the newly independent nations, and coups and revolts and civil wars and foreign wars will continue unabated for another hundred years.

But in the immediate aftermath of the wars of Spanish-American independence, the regimes of South America were being run in entirely different ways than they were before the process of Spanish-American independence, especially because they too are all now republics.

And the Revolution of 1830 is a very subtle shift.

And as I've said previously, the Revolution of 1830 might actually be even more conservative than the American Revolution.

But it does take Louis XVIII's Charter of Government, that was pointing to God and saying that's where sovereignty comes from, and flips that around and says, no, no, no, sovereignty comes from the people.

The new Charter of Government, that was revised in 1830, recognized the people as the ultimate ultimate authority, not God, and the terms of the Charter were made far more legally binding on the king and every other party involved than had been going on under Charles X.

But 1830 is also mostly just a blip in the long French Revolution.

1848 was, of course, a year of mostly failed revolution, so most of the post-1848 regimes were just the dynasties restored to power.

But even in triumph, the regimes had been altered.

Post-1848 neo-absolutism allowed for measures of electoral participation in carefully managed assemblies.

The majority peasant population of all these kingdoms and empires could be reliably turned out to support the regime politically, as one of the great weaknesses of the radical Democrats inside Vienna or Budapest or Prague or Berlin was how small their numbers were.

The vast majority of the population in all these places was still rural and poor, not urban and upwardly mobile, so they voted conservative.

But it is unlikely that even these compromises and concessions would have arrived absent the shock of the revolution.

So, 1848 absolutely changed the regimes where they happened.

In France, 1848 ultimately produced the Second Empire, which fell apart in September of 1870.

This might have been another motor point of the long French Revolution, with the Third Republic following its predecessor, the Second Republic, and just giving way to some successor state after it had outlived its usefulness to the political factions involved, whether they be Legitimists or Orleanists or Bonapartists or Radical Democrats or Socialists.

But instead, the Third Republic just kept lurching forward and even persisted through World War I, which is quite a feat when you really think about it.

Now, in Mexico, comparing 1910 to 1920 actually produces some stark similarities.

The presidency of Porfirio Diaz and the presidency of the many faces of the PRI have very similar political monopolies over a nominally democratic system.

The PRI also winds up having some technocratic post-Cientifico influences that scan a lot like the group that was surrounding Diaz in his latter days.

But there were also major progressive advances inside the Mexican Constitution of 1917, especially about social guarantees, the right to an education, and sweeping anti-Catholic legislation that did have a major impact on property, social, and cultural relations in Mexico, where the church had once loomed so large and was now dispossessed and barely tolerated.

Now, comparing and contrasting the Bolshevik communist state that followed the Tsarist regime is also pretty simple.

They are very, very different things.

And although you can kind of unfocus your eyes and see, yes, authoritarian police state, authoritarian police state, and let's just call these things the same thing,

the regime of Tsar Nicholas II and Stalinist Russia were absolutely not the same thing.

A major political revolution had happened.

Now in each of these cases, the new regime was able to answer some of the questions the old regime could not.

Mostly, this turns out to be a question of the extent to which other stakeholders in the realm would be allowed to participate in the crafting of laws, taxation, and spending.

Feudal arrangements that were based on contractual mutual obligation and spheres of influence gave way to a modernizing state that was more all-encompassing in its grasp, ambitions, and organizational worldview.

This disrupted the former contractual bonds between sovereign and subject, so the powerful interests of these various states sought new modes of retaining a degree of influence and power.

This is why parliaments arise, because they become an assembly of those interests.

And the population of the ruling class was subtly shifting away from the old medieval houses and towards these rising bourgeois houses as modern capitalism set out to conquer the world.

So as we can see, all of our revolutions have been political revolutions, but only some of our revolutions were also social revolutions.

And remember, we said a social revolution is when the economic relations and or cultural hierarchies of a society, their personnel, rationalizations, habits, norms, obligations, and modes of production, are rapidly transformed such that the society is organized in a fundamentally different manner.

About half our revolutions don't really come with a massive reorganization of economic relations and cultural hierarchies.

They simply continue a line of socioeconomic development largely unbroken by the revolutionary period.

It's not hard to look at the American economy before, during, and after the American Revolution and recognize that it's not like the founders took a sledgehammer to the economic relations that had made them all so wealthy and influential in the first place.

In the realm of economic and social relations, there was no break or overthrow of the past in America.

But we can contrast this with the Russian Revolution, where the Bolshevik Party undertook the massive reorganization of huge parts of the Russian economy with dramatic results.

Say what you will about collectivization, it was quite a radical break from the past.

Now, following on that, One of the great changes that comes to these greater revolutions, these social revolutions, is in land ownership.

Places like France, Haiti, Mexico, and Russia all come with mass confiscation of land by revolutionary and post-revolutionary authorities, particularly the largest estates of the most conservative defenders of the ANSEN regime and, inevitably, the Church, whether it's Catholic or Orthodox.

There was also quite a bit of land churn during the British Revolutions, which Charles II wisely left for Parliament to figure out after the Restoration.

When Louis XVIII came to power, he faced the question of those national lands, the stuff that had been confiscated and then resold at auction to people in good faith, and he decided he didn't want to touch any of it with a 10-foot pole.

His brother Charles X would have restored all former owners to their lost property, but the verdict of the revolution was too strong at that point.

He couldn't undo it.

The land churn remained.

But aside from these material changes, I think we can also talk about changes in cultural attitudes and mentalities, changes in psychology caused by the revolution.

I'm thinking specifically here about something I read at the end of the Mexican Revolution.

It was a quote from an old hacienda manager noting the change in the attitude of the peasants.

That even as things settled back down and appeared to return to normal, that there were things you simply couldn't do anymore, ways you couldn't talk to the peasants anymore.

That the revolution had like bathed the population in the waters of self-respect.

This is also something I find for French peasants and workers and tradesmen and sailors and soldiers after the French Revolution.

It stamped a certain insolent egalitarianism on them all.

There was much less tolerance for things like natural superiority or natural inferiority.

And all this is especially true if education and literacy are one of the results of the revolution.

A better educated population naturally thinks differently about itself.

We know this.

Now, anything that involves a lot of trauma and instability and bloodshed and threats to basic survival are of course going to impact how people think about themselves and think about the world.

But it's also the case that many of these revolutions take place over decades, like over an entire generation.

And we do need to control for the fact that human society can simply change over time, whether there was a revolution or not.

And for example, we can talk about economic changes before, during, and after a revolution and ask ourselves whether any of this was the result of the revolution or simply the changing nature of an economic system at a time of great theoretical and technological innovation.

The Vittaboom happened under the Tsars after all.

Napoleon III and Porfirio Diaz inaugurated and oversaw economic leaps forward far more dramatic than anything produced by the revolutions that preceded them and followed them.

Which brings us to the last big question I want to talk about here.

Was the revolution worth it?

What were its benefits?

What were its costs?

We can compare and contrast the beginning and end of the revolutionary process and then ask if the middle bits were really necessary, whether the ends justify the means, whether the means were the only means of achieving these ends.

And to be specific here, what we're talking about here is basically all the deaths, the injury, the trauma, the the dislocation, and the destruction that comes with revolution and war.

But since any prolonged period of human history is going to involve a lot of death, injury, trauma, dislocation, and destruction, we can only fairly talk about the excess casualties caused by the revolution.

Was the revolutionary result worth the price paid in all those extra dead?

A corollary to this question is whether the revolution was even a necessary event at all to achieve the final outcome.

What would have happened had there been no revolution?

What changes can be identified and attributed to the revolution and the revolution alone?

Was the revolution necessary to get from point A to point B?

One might look at the restoration settlements of 1815 and the nearly unfathomable suffering and devastation unleashed by the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars and wonder if maybe so paltry an end maybe doesn't justify the enormous cost.

But these are not questions that I'm going to have good permanent answers for because they are questions that everybody is going to have to answer for themselves in their own way.

Now in terms of hypotheticals, we can look and say, well, there's always a scenario where better leaders, smarter leaders, would have done the compromises necessary to avoid revolution and arrive at a conclusion that very much looks like the result of the revolution without the revolution having ever taken place.

I mean, wouldn't it maybe have been better for everyone and less dramatic and destructive and bloody if Louis XVI had simply issued a charter of government in 1789?

Sure, absolutely.

So we can always conjure a hypothetical where we say, no, the revolution was not worth it because if they had just done X, Y, and Z, they could have avoided the revolution.

But they didn't know what X, Y, and Z was at the time.

And most importantly, we don't get to redo history with a new set of leaders.

Our leaders were great idiots, and so they blew it.

But there are other times where it's even difficult to see a hypothetical where the leaders who were present in the Ancien regime managed to produce the revolutionary settlement without a revolution.

And I'm thinking here specifically of the Haitian Revolution.

Can you imagine a world where it's possible for the major merchants and landowners and stakeholders in Saint-Domingue, right, the big whites, to willingly abolish slavery, pick up and leave the island, and give full control control of it over to the black population.

Absent a revolution, I really don't see that happening.

No amount of hypothetical enlightened self-interest is going to lead that group of people to make those choices, at least not in that time or that place.

So we can say, well, wouldn't it have been better if the French had just said, you know what, slavery is wrong, let's withdraw from the colony and allow our former slaves to create an independent republic for themselves?

Well, yeah, sure, that would have been better.

But the the question is, could you have gotten from point A to point B without a violent revolutionary upheaval in Saint-Domingue in the 1790s?

Now one can point to other constituent parts of the French Empire and the Caribbean, or if you want, the British or Dutch or Spanish.

Those places often wind up with the result of the abolition of slavery and independence for the polity in question without necessitating a revolution as we witnessed in Saint-Domingue.

And so maybe you want to say, well, those places did it without a revolution?

To which we might say, yes, but absent the experience of the Haitian Revolution, do those other imperial powers make the same choices they do about divesting themselves from slavery?

And then, more to the point, was it in fact better to make all those slaves wait another 30, 40, or 50 years just because we think it might have been better for their freedom to have come without a bloody revolution?

Because ultimately, there is a moral component to all of this where we have to set aside questions of efficacy and practicality and more in terms of what is morally justified or not.

If a person is held in slavery against their will, are they not allowed to commit maximum violence in order to free themselves from their bondage?

This is to say that the crime of enslavement is so morally intolerable and so fundamentally anathema to the human condition that you can't morally rule out any tool a slave might use to free themselves.

This includes killing their master, killing their master's family, killing the master's society.

How could anyone possibly complain about this?

They were a bunch of slavers.

And what would you say to these slaves rising up?

Oh, no, wait, hang on.

Your masters will eventually get around to freeing you.

Well, maybe not you, maybe your grandchildren, but you get my point.

I mean, how do you ask the last person to be a slave for just a little while longer after you've decided that slavery is a horrendous evil that must be abolished?

But that said, there are other times, of course, where none of that pertains.

And when you look at the grievances of the British North American colonists or South American Criollo elite, the big whites of Haiti we were just talking about, or what about events in Mexico or events in all these various regimes in France through the 19th century?

Was the violence and destruction that accompanied lurches forward politically and socially really vital?

Couldn't these changes have come without everyone breaking into armed violent camps?

I mean, we often see societies change and transform over time.

Land changes hand, economic modes are altered, attitudes change.

I mean, if you just let a society go for another 20, 30, or 40 years, when you check back in, it's going to be different than it was 20, 30, or 40 years earlier.

A violent revolution is hardly the only thing that changes human behavior.

It has been suggested to me that what I should do after the Revolutions podcast is maybe start a podcast called Reforms, where we just talk about all the really boring, mundane ways that societies have progressed and transformed without resorting to violent upheaval.

That if you compare and contrast, say, the British and the French, we find that today they have very similar political rights and economic systems and modern social relations, but they took very different paths to get here.

The British traveled the same tumultuous revolutionary times as the rest of Europe and mostly navigated the the waters by a series of calculated concessions and compromises.

They didn't feel the heat of 1848 because political reform bills had cleaved the interests of the middle class from the working class.

In places where 1848 did start to pose a real revolutionary threat, we also see a bunch of sovereigns eagerly capitulating to demands for reform.

The crowned heads of places like the Netherlands and Belgium and Denmark and parts of Scandinavia all very quickly signed on to constitutional reforms.

That's why most of them are still monarchies today.

So if they accomplish the same thing using reform instead of revolution, is revolution really this vital component?

Maybe, maybe not.

I think that there is something to the notion that all the chaos on the continent caused by the French Revolution did impact British decision-making.

That with the great example of the French Revolution staring in the face, the leaders of Britain kept coming back to the idea that maybe it would be better to just avoid all of that, make a few requisite concessions, and then get on with the business of getting on with it.

Now, even after all these years, I do not ultimately have great answers to these great questions.

No two people can ever look back on the history of revolutions with the same pair of eyes.

Certainly I can tell you from all the emails and messages I've gotten over the years, that different people take exactly the same set of podcast episodes and draw wildly different conclusions from them.

Some people write in to talk about how revolutions appear to be the worst possible idea that humans have ever had, while others write in and ask me for the best specifications of a good barricade.

Mostly, I just think it's my job to present you with all the information, to tell you what happened, and then leave it to you, my fine listeners, to figure out what to do with all this information.

But there's not going to be much information left, is there?

Next week will be the final episode of the Revolutions podcast.

It will be a fond and bittersweet adieu to a show that has consumed my life for the last nine years and will at least partly define my life forever.

I mean, I'm pretty sure it's at least in the first couple sentences of any obituary that gets written about me, even if I live another 40 years.

And that's not a bad thing.

I'm very proud of this show.

It means a lot to me.

And I'm glad that it's meant a lot to you, too.

So let's all get together next week, one more time to say goodbye.

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