Rome: An Empire's Blueprint Behind the Myth

A man presses damp clay into the gaps of a wattle frame on a low hill overlooking a river bend. He can see the smoke from a dozen other hearths rising from similar huts scattered across the slope. Welcome to PodThis and The Discovery Hour.

Today, we're delving into the Roman Empire, a civilization that spanned centuries, built unparalleled infrastructure, and shaped the very foundations of the Western world, only to eventually unravel.

We'll explore the subtle shifts, internal pressures, and external encounters that led to its profound transformation.

The fire crackles, casting long shadows on the faces gathered around. An old man's voice, raspy with age, recounts the tale of twin brothers, abandoned by a river. He gestures towards the dark hills beyond, where a she-wolf once nursed two infants. Edmund, that opening just sets up the central tension perfectly, doesn’t it?

The she-wolf versus the post-hole. The epic myth against the quiet, dusty reality of archaeology. It really does. And for centuries, the she-wolf was the only story anyone had. The story of Romulus and Remus wasn't just a fairy tale; it was a statement of Roman identity, of their divine origin and their right to rule.

It explained who they were, to themselves and to the world. So it’s a story with a purpose. It’s not just, "Let me tell you about these two babies and a wolf." It's nation-building, from the very first campfire story. Exactly. It creates a destiny. But the archaeology tells a different story. A much slower, and I think, more human story.

It's not about a single, dramatic founding event. It’s about a process. And that’s where the post-holes come in. So when did we actually start finding this evidence on the Palatine Hill that challenged the big, official story?

The first hints were in the early 20th century, but the big discoveries came after World War II. Archaeologists started finding the outlines of these very simple huts. We're talking about foundations for structures made of wood and reeds, plastered with clay. What we call wattle and daub. So not exactly the marble columns we associate with Rome.

Not at all. This is a small settlement, probably a collection of shepherds and farmers. You'd see a few of these huts on the Palatine Hill, maybe a few more on the neighboring hills, separated by marshy valleys. It's a village, or maybe a cluster of villages, not an instant city. Okay, but here's a question that always gets me.

The Romans were very specific about the date of their founding: 753 BCE. Was that just plucked from thin air?

You’ve put your finger on the most interesting part. It wasn't plucked from thin air. The archaeological evidence for those earliest huts on the Palatine… it dates to the middle of the 8th century BCE. Wait. So, 753 BCE is... actually about right?

It’s astonishingly close. The myth isn't a literal account, of course. There was no single man who drew a line in the dirt and founded a city. But the collective memory, the story they told themselves, remembered the right time frame. It remembered that something significant started to happen on that hill, in that century. Huh.

That gives me a little bit of a chill. So the myth isn't true, but it's not entirely false either. It's like a distorted echo of a real event. That's a perfect way to put it. The story of the she-wolf gave them a grand, divine starting point. The reality of the huts shows us a much humbler, more gradual beginning.

The truth of Rome's origin lies somewhere in the tension between the two.

A steady current rushes through the stone channel, high above the Campagna. Sun glints off the water as it flows inexorably towards the distant city, carried by massive, precise arches. This river, now tamed, will soon quench a million thirsts. That sound of the water… it’s so immediate. You can almost feel the steam from the baths.

It makes Rome feel less like a stuffy museum and more like a living, breathing, and frankly, a city. And it was exceptionally thirsty. What you're hearing is the lifeblood of the capital. We're talking about a system of eleven major aqueducts by the height of it, pouring over a million cubic meters of fresh water into Rome every single day.

A million cubic meters. I'm trying to picture that and I just can't. What does that volume of water actually allow a city to do?

It allows it to exist, first and foremost. That much water could sustain a population of over a million people, which was simply unprecedented in the ancient world.

But it’s more than just survival. Most of that water wasn't for drinking. Wait, really?

If it's not for drinking, then what's the point of hauling water across fifty miles of countryside?

It’s for the baths. It's for the public fountains. It's for creating a quality of life and a public spectacle that no other city could match. It was a political statement. The government was providing a daily luxury for its citizens that was unthinkable anywhere else. So the public baths we see in movies... they weren't just for the rich.

Not at all. They were the great social equalizer. For a very small entry fee, or often for free, any citizen could use them. They were community centers, gyms, libraries, and business hubs all rolled into one. And none of that happens without that constant, massive flow of clean water from projects like the Aqua Claudia.

Okay, I hear you, but I'm still stuck on the how. How did they build these things?

You see the pictures of these graceful arches stretching for miles. How do you maintain a precise water grade over that distance without modern tools?

It's an astonishing feat of surveying and patience. The entire system is essentially a gentle, man-made river, flowing downhill. The gradient was often just a drop of a few feet over a mile. They had sophisticated leveling tools, but ultimately it came down to thousands of workers meticulously plotting that course through hills and across valleys.

That’s a level of precision that seems almost obsessive. It’s less a flash of genius and more an achievement of pure, stubborn persistence. And that’s exactly what Roman power was built on.

But I think there's a version where that practicality is also a display of dominance. Think about what it means to build a river in the sky. You're not hiding the pipes underground; you're marching them across the landscape on colossal arches for everyone to see. Huh. So it's not just a pipe bringing water from point A to B.

The aqueduct itself, being visible for miles, becomes a piece of propaganda on the way into the city. It's the ultimate billboard for Roman power. It says: we are so wealthy, so organized, and so technically skilled that we can bend nature to our will, just to make life in our capital more pleasant.

It's that combination of engineering prowess and ideological confidence that really paves the way for empire.

A vendor in the Forum inspects the coin offered for a basket of olives. The silver gleams, heavy and true in his palm, bearing the strong profile of the Emperor. He nods, placing it carefully into his leather pouch. That image of the vendor, Edmund… the weight of that silver coin in his hand.

It feels like so much more than just a transaction for some olives. It feels like a promise. It was the central promise of the Roman state, condensed into a pocket-sized object. Under Augustus, that denarius was over 50% pure silver. It was a physical guarantee. When you held it, you were holding a piece of the empire's stability, its word.

A word that, apparently, didn't last. So, where does the rot set in?

An empire that vast must have had enormous expenses. Exactly. The military budget alone was staggering. And as the empire grew, so did the costs of defending its borders, paying its bureaucrats, and building its monuments. They simply needed more money than they had silver. So they started… cheating?

In a way, yes. It was a slow process, but by the early third century, emperors like Caracalla were in a bind. To fund a massive pay raise for the army, they began drastically reducing the silver content and mixing in cheaper metals like copper. They were minting more coins, but each coin was worth less.

I can't imagine that went unnoticed for long. The vendor with his olives must have realized his pouch felt a lot lighter at the end of the day, even if it was full of coins. He absolutely did. And that’s where the crisis really begins. It's one thing for the state to do this. It's another when the people realize it.

By the time you get to the emperor Gallienus, around 260 AD, that denarius has gone from over 50% silver to less than 5%. It's basically a bronze coin with a thin silver wash. Wait, less than five percent?

That feels like outright fraud. So what does that actually mean for the economy?

Is it just chaos?

It's hyperinflation in the ancient world. Prices for basic goods, like grain or oil, could double in a matter of weeks. People stopped trusting the currency entirely. They’d hoard the old, heavier silver coins from Augustus's time and refuse to spend the new, debased ones. Trade seized up. Why sell your crop for money that might be worthless tomorrow?

Okay, but I have to ask, from the emperor's perspective, wasn't this a necessary evil?

If you can't pay the legions, you're facing a military coup, which was a constant threat. Isn't a debased currency better than a civil war?

That is precisely the devil's bargain they made. In the short term, it worked. It allowed them to meet payroll and keep the armies on the frontier.

But it was a solution that consumed the very foundations of the state. It destroyed the tax base, because who wants to pay taxes in currency the government itself is devaluing?

So it's a death spiral. You debase the coins to pay the soldiers, which wrecks the economy, which makes it even harder to collect the taxes you need to pay the soldiers next time. You've just described the Third-Century Crisis in a nutshell. The trust that vendor had in his coin was the glue holding the entire economic system together.

When that dissolved, the empire began to come apart at the seams. That simple silver coin wasn't just money; it was faith in the idea of Rome. And they had spent it all.

Dust rises as a cart wheel grinds against the carefully fitted stones. A farmer shouts to his oxen, urging them forward, the scent of fresh olives strong from his laden baskets. He knows this road will take him to market before sunset. Edmund, listening to that... the sound of the cart wheels and the soldier’s boots on the same stone...

it really makes you feel the two sides of the Empire. One road, but two completely different worlds using it. They are two sides of the same coin, though. We hear the farmer and think of commerce, but the road was almost certainly built for the soldier. The primary, overwhelming reason for this network was military.

"All roads lead to Rome" was originally about logistics and control, not tourism. Okay, I hear you, but was the economic impact really just a side-effect?

The farmer getting his olives to market feels like more than just a happy accident. That changes his entire life. It’s not an accident, but a secondary benefit that quickly became indispensable. The military built the skeleton, and then trade and communication grew like muscles around it. And the scale is just staggering.

We’re talking about a network that spanned over 400,000 kilometers. Four hundred thousand?

That's… I mean, that’s almost to the Moon. How much of that was just a dirt track versus the kind of paved road we picture?

That's the key distinction. About 80,500 kilometers—that’s 50,000 miles—was paved to an incredibly high standard, with layers of crushed stone, gravel, and fitted paving stones. These were the highways, the absolute arteries of the state, connecting everything from Hadrian's Wall in Britain right to the banks of the Euphrates.

So the legionary in that scene, his boots are on one of those 50,000 miles. But the engineering challenge... how do you build something so consistently across such different terrains?

From a damp British forest to a Syrian desert?

With a standardized blueprint and relentless hard work. Roman surveyors were masters of the straight line, using instruments to plot the most direct course possible, often cutting straight through hills or bridging valleys. Then came the labor. Which I assume was not done by highly-paid specialists. Not exactly.

It was often the soldiers themselves. The legions were engineering corps as much as they were fighting units. Building a road kept them disciplined in peacetime and was a very visible way of stamping Roman authority onto a newly conquered landscape.

So the soldier marching down the road might have literally helped build the section he was walking on a few years prior?

It's very likely. It gave them a stake in the territory. And it meant that the road wasn't just a path—it was a statement. It said, "We are here, we can move our armies faster than you can react, and we are not leaving." It was the physical internet of the ancient world, binding the provinces to the capital with stone and gravel. The internet...

that’s an interesting way to put it. It’s not just about moving goods, but moving information at a speed that was previously unimaginable. Exactly. Official messengers could use relay stations to switch to fresh horses and cover enormous distances. An urgent dispatch from Britain could reach Rome in a matter of weeks, not months.

That speed is what held the whole, sprawling enterprise together.

Ink stains the scribe’s fingers as he copies another passage onto fresh parchment. Around him, hundreds of scrolls, compiled and cross-referenced, await their place in the new code. The air in the Constantinople scriptorium hums with the quiet industry of systematizing a thousand years of law. That image of the scribe...

the quiet industry of it all. It’s easy to think of Roman contributions as being stone and concrete—aqueducts, roads, arenas. But a library of laws feels just as monumental, if not more so. What was the problem Justinian was trying to solve?

Was the legal system just a complete mess by the sixth century?

A complete mess is a polite way of putting it. It was a thousand years of accumulated, and often contradictory, laws. You had edicts from different emperors, opinions from hundreds of jurists, local customs… it was a legal jungle.

Imagine trying to run an empire where the law in one province says one thing, and a ruling from two centuries ago says the exact opposite. It was becoming unworkable. Justinian’s project wasn’t just a spring cleaning; it was a desperate act of legal triage. So it was a practical project.

But I have to wonder, was it practical?

Codifying laws sounds like administrative work, but the scale of it—the sheer ambition—feels like something more. Was Justinian trying to make a statement?

Oh, absolutely. Justinian was obsessed with the idea of —the restoration of the empire. He was busy trying to reconquer the lost western territories, like Italy and North Africa. The, the Body of Civil Law, was the other half of that campaign. It was a tool of conquest, but a cultural one.

He wasn't just rebuilding the empire's borders; he was trying to re-establish its intellectual and moral authority. So the law code was like a cultural legion, marching alongside the real ones. That's a good way to see it. And he designed it to last.

The project had three main parts: the Code itself, which collected all the existing imperial laws; the Digest, a massive summary of the greatest legal thinkers; and then—and this is the key part—the Institutes. What were the Institutes?

A textbook. A primer for first-year law students. Justinian didn’t just want to organize the past; he wanted to control how all future lawyers would learn and think about the law. He was building a pipeline of Roman-trained legal minds. A textbook. I find that genuinely stunning. It’s so forward-thinking.

And that connects directly to the second scene we heard, of the modern judge. So this isn't just an artifact in a museum. Its DNA is really present in courtrooms today?

Its DNA is the foundation for entire legal systems. The common law tradition, which we have in the U.S. and Britain, is one branch. But most of the rest of the world—from France and Germany to South America, and even Japan—uses a civil law system. And that system is a direct descendant of Justinian’s code.

When Japan modernized in the late 19th century and needed a new legal framework, they studied German law, which was itself based on a revival of Roman law. Okay, but let's play devil's advocate for a second. Roman society had values we would find abhorrent. The law upheld slavery, it treated women as property in many cases.

How can we celebrate a legacy that’s built on such a problematic foundation?

You're right to point that out. The content of Roman law is often deeply troubling by modern standards. But the enduring legacy isn't the specific rulings on slavery or family. It’s the. It's the radical idea that law should be a coherent, written, logical system that can be studied, debated, and applied with a degree of consistency.

That's the framework that modern nations adopted, even as they filled it with entirely different, and far more just, principles. So it’s not the answers they came up with that we inherited… it’s the way they structured the questions. The system itself is the ghost in the machine. Precisely.

The structure, the logic, the very idea of a unified code—that is the ghost. And it’s still shaping how justice is delivered for billions of people.

A procession of carts creaks through the Roman Forum, their wooden wheels groaning under immense weight. Each wagon is piled high with heavy, dull yellow ingots, gleaming faintly in the midday sun. Soldiers with stern faces guard the precious cargo, newly arrived from the mines of Dacia.

Hearing those scenes, Edmund, it’s hard not to connect the dots. The carts of gold rolling into Rome, and then the sound of hammers and chisels building Trajan’s Column. Was it really that direct?

Did the wealth from one new province literally pay for the monument celebrating its own conquest?

It was exactly that direct. The Dacian Wars were less a standard military campaign and more the greatest heist in Roman history. We have ancient sources that claim Trajan brought back something on the order of half a million pounds of gold and a million pounds of silver. Half a million pounds of gold?

That's a staggering figure. It sounds like a national treasury bailout. That's a perfect way to put it. It completely refilled the imperial coffers. It paid for a massive program of public works—not just the column and the forum, but roads, aqueducts, and repairs all across Italy.

It allowed Trajan to give a huge cash bonus to every single citizen in Rome. For a moment, the empire's financial problems simply vanished. But that model of expansion paying for itself… and then some… feels fragile. Did the Romans see it that way?

Or did they just assume there was always another Dacia out there, waiting to be conquered?

They certainly acted as if the model would last forever. For centuries, warfare had been a profitable enterprise. You conquer a territory, you take its treasures, you enslave a portion of its population, and you tax whoever is left. That's the engine of the early empire. The problem is, Dacia was the last great jackpot. The last?

So after this, they're not finding treasure troves on the frontier anymore. Exactly. They've expanded to the natural or practical limits of the empire—the deserts of Africa, the forests of Germania, the mountains of Scotland. The neighbors who are left are either too poor to be worth conquering or too organized to be conquered easily.

After Trajan, the military’s primary job shifts from offense to defense. I'm not sure I'd ever thought of it in those terms. The army goes from being a revenue generator to being a massive expenditure. A line item on a budget sheet. And it’s the biggest line item by far.

Suddenly, you have to pay to maintain garrisons along thousands of miles of frontier. You have to build walls, like Hadrian's, not to launch attacks from, but to keep people out. It’s a complete reversal of the economic logic that had powered Rome for 300 years. So Trajan's Column… it's not just a celebration of a victory.

It's a monument to the end of an era. The last time the old model worked so spectacularly. I think that's the perfect reading of it. It’s a stunningly detailed record of a kind of war—a war of profitable conquest—that Rome would never really fight again. It’s a victory monument, yes.

But with hindsight, it looks more like a high-water mark, carved in stone. The peak from which the long, slow descent would begin.

The great bronze doors of the Salarian Gate groan open, not from force, but from neglect. A single, tattered purple banner hangs crooked from a balcony, swaying in the breeze over deserted streets. The echoes of distant shouting have faded, leaving only the whisper of dust across marble floors. That image of the end... it’s not what you expect.

There’s no great battle for Rome, no heroic last stand. Just a boy handing over a crown in a quiet room. It feels so... hollow. It was hollow. By 476, the Western Roman Empire was a ghost. The real power wasn't in that boy, Romulus Augustulus, but in the Germanic generals who were propping him up.

The moment he was deposed by Odoacer wasn't a great historical climax; it was more like an administrative change. The office of Western Roman Emperor had become redundant. So the date we all learn in school, 476, is really just a convenient fiction?

A neat end-point for a story that was already over?

It’s a useful bookmark, but it tells you almost nothing about the book itself. If you’re looking for a moment that truly shattered the Roman sense of self, you have to go back sixty-six years earlier, to 410. The Sack of Rome by the Visigoths. That sounds more like the dramatic end I was picturing. It was certainly dramatic.

For the first time in 800 years, an outside force entered and looted the city. The psychological shockwave was immense. People across the Mediterranean couldn't believe it. Saint Jerome, writing in Bethlehem, said, "The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken." To them, it felt like the world was ending.

But it didn't end. The Western Empire continued for more than half a century after that. So what was actually happening?

If the sack of the capital wasn't the end, and the deposition of the last emperor was just a formality... what was the 'fall' really like?

It was a slow-motion disintegration. Think of it less as a building collapsing and more like a shoreline eroding, year by year. It arguably begins much, much earlier, with the Crisis of the Third Century. For about fifty years, the empire was torn apart by constant civil war, economic collapse, and incursions. I’ve heard of that. That's when the currency became almost worthless, right?

Exactly. Emperors were debasing the coinage to pay the armies, which led to hyperinflation. The empire that emerged from that crisis in the late 200s was a different creature. It was more rigid, more militarized, and its economic engine was sputtering.

The events of the fifth century—the sacks, the loss of provinces, the boy emperor—were really just the final symptoms of a disease that had taken hold two hundred years before. So Odoacer, the man who took the crown from the boy... he wasn't some barbarian destroyer kicking down the gates. Not at all. He was a Roman general.

He had served in the Roman army his whole life. He didn't see himself as ending Rome; he saw himself as managing its Italian territory more directly, on behalf of the still-thriving Eastern Emperor in Constantinople.

He sent the imperial regalia—that little diadem—to Constantinople, with a message that basically said, "We don't need one of these over here anymore." Huh. That changes the whole picture. It’s not a story of destruction. It’s a story of... transformation.

And a transfer of power that had, in reality, already happened long before that quiet moment in the palace.

Dust motes dance in a single shaft of light, illuminating the cracked tesserae of a mosaic floor. A half-eaten loaf of stale bread lies forgotten beside a broken column, ants tracing a path across its dry surface. Edmund, those images we just heard… they’re so quiet. A forgotten loaf of bread, a shivering guard.

There are no clashing swords, no burning cities. It feels less like an ending and more like something just… fading away. That abandoned villa, with the ants on the floor, that’s what really sticks with me. And that’s precisely the right way to think about it. The idea of a dramatic, sudden collapse is mostly a modern invention.

For most people, the end of the Roman Empire in the West wasn't an event, it was a process. That villa is the perfect symbol. The owner isn't there because the tax burden became impossible, or the trade routes that brought him wealth have dried up. The bread is stale because the local farms aren't producing a surplus anymore.

It's a story of economic unraveling, not just military defeat. So the foundations are crumbling from within. Which makes that second image, of the Gothic soldier on the Rhine, even more potent. He's wearing Roman gear, he's defending a Roman border, but he feels like an outsider.

What does that tell us about the army that was supposed to be holding everything together?

It tells us that the very definition of "Roman" had changed. By the late fourth and fifth centuries, the empire was desperate for soldiers. So they made deals with entire peoples—Goths, Franks, Vandals—granting them land inside the borders in exchange for military service. These were the. So that man on the wall...

he's defending Rome, yes, but his primary loyalty might be to his own king and his own people, who are now living just down the road. I hear you, but that sounds like a recipe for disaster. You're essentially outsourcing your own national security to groups who, just a generation before, might have been your enemies.

It was an enormous gamble born of necessity. The Roman state was running out of money and, crucially, running out of its own citizens to recruit. This was the pragmatic, if risky, solution.

But it created a strange new reality. You had a "Roman" army that was increasingly composed of non-Romans, often led by their own commanders. It’s a military that is no longer a melting pot, but a mosaic of different groups, each with its own agenda. So you have this internal decay, and then you have this fragile, outsourced border defense.

Everyone always points to the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 as the final nail in the coffin. Is that fair?

Was that the moment the lights truly went out?

The sack of 410 was psychologically devastating, without a doubt. Rome, the Eternal City, hadn't been breached by a foreign enemy in 800 years. But was it the end?

Not really. Life went on. The Western Empire limped on for another 66 years. I think of it less as a nail in the coffin and more like a massive tremor that revealed just how unstable the whole structure had become. Huh. So if it wasn't one event, what was it?

How does an empire that ruled for a millennium just… stop?

It stops piece by piece. A province stops paying taxes. A trade route is no longer safe. A general in Gaul or Spain decides he'd rather be a king in his own right than a servant of a powerless emperor in Italy. It's a slow cancellation.

For the man in the field or the woman in the market, one day the Roman administrator is there, and then, a few years later, he's been replaced by a local Gothic lord. The change was often gradual, almost imperceptible, until you woke up one day and realized you weren't in the Roman Empire anymore.

Rain slicks the asphalt of a modern city street. A yellow taxi speeds past, its tires humming on the smooth, straight road. Above it, a sign reads 'Via Appia Nuova.' Edmund, those moments we just heard... a taxi on a Roman road, a lawyer in a courtroom... they feel so ordinary. And I think that's what's so powerful.

Rome isn't just in the grand ruins. It's hiding in plain sight. It's the invisible scaffolding of the modern world. Take that road, the Via Appia.

The original is still there, but the idea of it—a state-funded, straight, durable road built for military and commercial speed—that blueprint was stamped onto the landscape of Europe for two thousand years. So when we drive on a highway, we're... what?

Following a Roman impulse?

In a way, yes. The idea that the state is responsible for connecting its territory with high-quality infrastructure is a profoundly Roman concept. They were the first to do it on such a continental scale. It wasn't just about getting from A to B; it was about projecting power and unifying a diverse territory.

The mail, the legions, the tax collectors... they all needed the roads. Okay, the roads I can see. Literally. But the courtroom scene... that feels more abstract. The lawyer, the judge. How much of that is a direct inheritance versus something we just tell ourselves?

I think the line is surprisingly direct. That scene could be happening in Paris, or Bogotá, or Bucharest. The legal systems in all those places are built on a foundation of Roman civil law. The idea of codifying laws into a single, accessible body of text—that comes from things like the Twelve Tables and, much later, the Justinian Code. So it's the structure of it all?

The idea that there should be a book you can open to find the law?

Exactly. And not just that, but specific principles. The burden of proof, the idea that a person is innocent until proven guilty... these are concepts that were debated and refined by Roman jurists. It's not just the architecture of the courtroom with its arches and columns; it's the architecture of the legal argument itself. Huh.

I find that genuinely unsettling in a way. That the software running in a modern lawyer's head has its roots in a system that also practiced slavery and crucifixion. And that’s the complicated truth of any legacy, isn't it?

We don't get to pick and choose the parts we inherit. Rome gives us the principle of universal citizenship, but it's a citizenship born of conquest. It gives us engineering marvels, but they were often built by captives. So, after all this—the rise, the fall, the centuries of chaos and rediscovery—what's the final legacy?

Is it the roads?

The laws?

The language?

I think the ultimate legacy is the idea of the state itself. A multicultural, multi-ethnic entity, bound together not by shared blood, but by a shared set of laws, a common currency, and a network of cities and roads.

For all its flaws, and there were many, the Roman Empire created a template for a world that was bigger than a single city or a single tribe. We are still living in the echoes of that attempt.

A man sinks a wooden post into the damp soil of a hilltop overlooking the Tiber. He has six more to place before the frame of his wattle-and-daub hut is complete. So Edmund, if there's one idea our listeners should carry forward from our conversation today, what would that be for you?

I think it's the realization that while the world changes so much around us, the fundamental human questions, the challenges of connection and understanding, they're surprisingly constant. We're always navigating echoes of the past. That's a profound thought. It really puts things into perspective, doesn't it?

It does. It reminds us that our struggles aren't entirely new. Edmund, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. For everyone listening, please share this episode with someone you think would enjoy it. Until next time, keep questioning, keep discovering.