My takeaways and endnotes from the life of Augustus Caesar. Plus a conversation with Alex Petkas, and a review of Gladiator II! ---- Come join us at the Austin Cost of Glory Retreat - Use code Takeover for $200 off. Subscribe for the full episode at takeoverpod.supercast.com.
What are Ben Wilson's key takeaways from Augustus Caesar?
Hello, and welcome to How to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson. I've got a Rome mega episode for you today. I'm going to start off with my takeaways from the Augustus Caesar episode, the seven things I learned about how to be great in the style of Augustus.
Then I had a few of you ask about this comment that I made that perhaps the United States can no longer be thought of as a republic, a res publica, because it is so partisan and pulled apart by factions that no one even agrees on who the state is supposed to serve.
So after my takeaways, Alex Petkus is coming on to discuss the similarities between Rome and the United States of America, where we are in terms of the spectrum from republic to empire and what we can expect in the future as the U.S. gets further from its republican past. And then to close it out, I'll talk about my end notes and some of the other notes and quotes from the episode that I liked.
And, and... I will be offering my review of Gladiator 2 which I won't say anything about right now. Maybe I thought it was the greatest movie of all time. Maybe I thought I would rather eat broken glass than watch it again. I'm not telling because you have to subscribe to hear my Gladiator 2 review. So again, for you free listeners, you are going to get about half of this episode.
And if you would like to support the show and get the full episode, subscribe at takeoverpod.supercast.com. You can find that link in the show notes or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Thank you, premium subscribers. You guys are the best. You mean the world to me. By the way, for those of you who would like to interact with
the how to take over the world community and learn more strategies from the greats, I'm going to be doing a retreat with Alex Petkus of the Cost of Glory podcast in Austin, Texas on January 23rd through the 26th. We'll be learning about the ancient art of rhetoric and how to be a better speaker and leader.
Sponsor limited, Alex just released his first ad for it and we're already more than halfway sold out. So if you wanna come, apply as soon as you can at the link in the show notes. It's going to be a really cool experience. We hope to see you there. Okay, takeaways. My first takeaway, if you have to be harsh, do it at first. If there's any unpleasant business, take care of it at the very beginning.
So Augustus does this with the proscriptions. He's really harsh in taking revenge on his enemies, totally clearing them out of the Roman state, prescribing them, making sure that they are dead and gone and no longer a threat to him. And then he he is able to take on this persona of the benevolent dictator who loves everyone and treats them great.
This reminds me, I've told this story on the podcast before, I'll reiterate it again. It was a key developmental lesson for me, is in college, I became a teacher's assistant for Poli Sci 2100 with Jeannie Johnson, great professor at Utah State University. And so she gave a quiz to the students on the first day of class to see if they'd done their reading before the semester.
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