Yeah.

So I'm tell- I'm following the, quote-unquote, "Roman Republic" through this, this very large 50-year period.

Now, the Lafayette book is also covering about 50 years.

Um, he, he sort of enters the world stage around 1777 and dies in a, in 1834.

So it's, it's a similar sort of like two, two generations, a, a single generation or two generations worth of, of history.

One of which looking at it from a very sort of third person, holistic, universal account of everything that's happening, which d- is, is a really interesting way to capture everything that's going on in the society.

But history is made up ultimately of individuals living their lives.

So I'm guessing that considering that your podcasting focus has been on revolutions for quite a while now, finding a guy who played in two of them very much, uh, was like hand the lever on a golden platter.

is there a moment where, you know, Ben Franklin comes sauntering into the room and is there a relationship there? And what's that like?

Oh yeah.

Franklin, Franklin and Lafayette wind up having a very good relationship.

Um, but they, they miss each other the first time.

Uh, when Franklin comes over, he, he is in Paris by before Lafayette gets on his own ship and leaves for what is going to become the United States.

Uh, But Lafayette is in the process of like running away from home and dodging orders from the king not to leave France.

So he wasn't he wasn't making too much contact with anybody.

How much just that simple fact sort of complicates that story and adds a little bit of perspective.

Tell me a little bit about what's a day in the life of Mike Duncan at BankJoy look like?

Yeah, so I'll just kind of zoom out first and kind of zoom in on that day in the life.

We center everything we do here in our work here on a mission, right? And I've been in the industry for a long time now.

I think once it pulls you in, you stay in it.

And so I started by working at a credit union and realized there were some challenges on the digital banking side and went to go start.

start this company.

And when we set up the company, we started with this mission really to go out and uplift communities in partnership with, you know, as many credit unions and community banks as we could.

And so I have nothing but optimism in general, although I do think that there could be some short term bumps in the road.

Right.

Like, this is where so much is happening and, like, so many of the pivots of history, like, exist in this and it's so chaotic.

There's so many p-...

Like, there's...

The French Revolution is inherently interesting.

The Russian Revolution is inherently interesting.

So I did wanna, like, go through these and I thought it would be a...

Like, Mike, i- is the bar to revolution in a society like ours higher than it was in the 1800s where society is maybe not as industrialized, not as developed? Was it easier to inflame revolution then?

Go ahead, Mike.

... infighting in the Democratic Party.

You look at this in- infighting in the Democratic Party.

They don't look like a team.

They got locker room problems.

A lot of infighting between all of this.

(laughs)

They need to bring in some free agents from the outside.

Wow.

If you had one of these things, because then wherever you went, you're like, "You have to treat me differently because I have citizenship.

You can't mess with me." And so these, these, yeah, these are very, very important things that people would have.

When, when the empire starts to run into troubles, militarily, socially, politically, like in the second and cer- and third century, there is a run of emperors in the third century who, who become emperors because they had risen through the ranks from the lowest rank all the way up, because w- when you're in a crisis, there's kind of two paths in front of you.

You can either cling to the leadership that had been leading you before and, in fact, like, probably created this crisis, or you allow talent to rise up and you're like, "Okay, let's, let's have the people who know what they're doing, wherever they come from, like, who cares, let's have them be in charge." And so there's this run of, of emperors from Illyria who, when we look at their biographies, it's always like, they ca- they, they ent- they were peasants, they were commoners, they enter in the lowest possible rank and then they rise up through, through talent and through will and through merit to become generals, and then that's the transition point into becoming an emperor.

But, like, when you actually dig into it, there, there's this way of, like, if you're really rich and you're like, "Oh, that person came from nothing," a lot of the times they're just talking about, like, a regular middle-class kid, not, like not really somebody who grew up in poverty.

Did regular people live in fear at the time? Did they, because if you were just a peasant, just a regular person, was a lot of your life dictated by what your gov- not, I guess, yeah, your, what your government chose kind of for you?

A lot of people who are just living their lives don't encounter the government at all.

Yeah.

That's not a thing.

Like, any outgrowth that comes from our description of what human society is like, whether it's defense or the division of labor, begins with the fact that we are already a group.

There is a mother, there is a child, there is a father, there's- there are aunts and uncles and o- like whatever the group is, there's- we are always doing this as a group.

And hyper-individualization and hyper-atomization of our society is something that is trying to undo one of the most fundamental parts of what it means to be human.

This is something that I thought about a lot too because when I started having kids.

And-You know, I have, I have two kids, and the model for, like, having a family at this point is, like, you have a mother, a father or, or whatever, you have kids, but the point being that they are a unit that is unto itself, and they live in their own house, and they have to supply their own food, and they are in charge-

Yeah.