Echoes Underground

We look at a book called The Roman Revolution by Ronald Syme, which tells the story of Rome’s transition from Republic to Empire - Octavian (“a cold and mature terrorist”) vs Mark Anthony (of Anthony and Cleopatra ). It was written in 1939, a charged year for any discussion about dictatorship, and is now required reading for university classics courses. It also turns out to have high relevance to...

We’ve both had reasonably legit shoulder injuries recently. How do we feel about it? What have we learnt? Well firstly it’s inconvenient. It turns out you use your shoulder for a lot of things. No more jiu-jitsu for a bit. Secondly, it hurts. While it’s positive to get the occasional recalibration of our pain scales, it is remarkable how debilitating pain can be. It is much better being uninjured...

Not content with one hour of arguing that Britain should double down on a powerful navy at the expense of all other military spending, we’re back for more - plus lamentations about not having joined the navy ourselves, examinations of our youthful decision making, tales of naval derring do from our family mythologies, and the slightly heretical suggestion that we’d perhaps be better off as the 51s...

Get your four piece guitar band in a room, deliver a killer performance, capture it with expensive microphones and set the levels on your mixing desks and what comes out of the speakers will sound… terrible. Turns out that we need bearded men called either Butch or Andrew spending days in a room full of mysterious and expensive boxes to get things to sound like what you hear on the radio. What are...

One of our co-hosts has started growing lion’s mane mushrooms at home. Is this the early phases of a midlife crisis? After all it’s all the fun of a veggie patch, for those who live in London and don’t have gardens. You get to deal with reality, with nature herself, which is a refreshing change for those of us with email jobs. But it’s also a lot more than a veggie patch - you get to buy all sorts...

Why does everyone love the beach? We can think of no better explanation than us having evolved there. This theory is clearly ridiculous, but very hard to argue against - to our knowledge the scientific establishment has offered no strong rebuttal. After all, it makes quite a lot of sense if you think about it. The beach is a great environment if you’re looking to escape the intense ape competition...

This is not an episode about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. We’re talking about games. We have racked up literally thousands of hours playing the Total War series, and countless Sundays spent staring suspiciously at each other over a gaming board. Why do we do this? Why do we enjoy it? Games sometimes have a reputation of being antisocial, but that’s not true at all. In fact you have to develop pretty robus...

Do you have the feeling that Christmas is just a LARP? Do you worry the perfect Christmas is always happening elsewhere? Do you find the pressure to have a good time overwhelming? Would you rather just be on your own? Well you’re doing Christmas wrong, and should embrace the LARP for the good of everyone around you. What we need to do is establish and maintain a ritual space that sits outside the...

Onto the third Discworld book, and we can see Terry Pratchett starting to hunt bigger game. This book is about magic and sex, as in biological sex, and really goes in on exploring a theme in a way that none of his later books do. It does this by looking at male magic vs female magic. Neither is seen as superior, but they are different. What is female magic? “Magic out of the ground, not out of the...

So our co-host has cast aside his smartphone, and has bought a £25 Nokia ripoff. No maps, no Whatsapp, no social media, no internet. It’s terrible. It’s transgressive. It’s the future. In this episode, he defends his life choices. This isn’t about the hazards of social media, he claims - this is about the addictiveness of the physical device itself. Being bored is actually great. Daydreaming is gr...

Controversial opinion of the day. Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst way of running a state apart from everything else we’ve tried. One of our hosts rejects this, and says that actually we know of and have tried far better ways of steering the ship of state. We talk of the original, some say ideal, democracy - Athens. Did Athens do better over the long term than its non-de...

We make our way chaotically through The Light Fantastic, the sequel to the Colour of Magic. We don’t concern ourselves too much with the plot, for what it is - a frenetic chase across the Discworld culminating in a special effects extravaganza in Ankh Morpork - and instead talk about Terry Pratchett’s philosophy. Gender relations: are wizards to masculinity what witches are to femininity? Hierarch...

We go through Terry Pratchett’s first Discworld book, the Colour of Magic, with a particular focus on the first six pages. A turtle swims through space to an unknown destination, a great city burns, and in the middle of it all the Discworld’s first tourist receives an inept guided tour from a failed wizard. This is a science fiction book written in a fantasy world - the Discworld is entirely logic...

Terry Pratchett has had an enormous intellectual impact on both of us, and we discuss how a man from the eighties who wrote frenetic novels about wizards and dragons could have that effect. We find one answer in a speech he gave about folklore. Pratchett’s stories are deeply grounded in the myths and legends of Olde England, and this allows them to draw on the wisdom of millennia to bring clarity...

We have both invested thousands of hours into activities with no obvious utility. Music, sport, photography, travel, poetry, writing an entire unpublished novel… starting a podcast. Is this all just a hubristic waste of time, a shallow self-indulgence, or is there some value to these activities that goes beyond the fact that we enjoy them? There is satisfaction in mastering a skill, there is value...

A riposte to our earlier episode on how the UFO phenomenon is best understood as the faeries of old viewed through a modern lens. Aliens are not faeries, they are portents. Carl Jung wrote a book about UFOs that functions well as an application of his broader theoretical work. When we observe a phenomenon, he argues, we apply the myths and narratives from our collective unconscious, so what narrat...

Baby naming ceremonies, except in the nude and with gifts of cuttlefish! Wandering shamans preaching the mystical power of numbers! A living oral tradition that goes back to the last Ice Age! Behold, the Ancient Greeks! In the face of some scepticism, it is argued that they were stranger and more interesting by far than we now imagine. Also featuring a whistle stop tour of the Mycenaean Age, the B...

Welcome to our failed attempt at a CURRENT AFFAIRS EPISODE. The aim was a discussion of unfolding events in the Middle East, now too long ago to be relevant (things move quickly). The actual result was twenty minutes of reminiscing about life among the Houthis in Yemen, followed by a MANIFESTO on why the UK should not have an army or air force and instead focus all its excess resources on a reinvi...

Are aliens just American faeries? One of our hosts read Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia: from Folklore to Flying Saucers and took it literally. UFOs exist, and they are the same phenomenon as faeries and elves but reinterpreted by a twentieth century audience. This view is met with some scepticism. “They’re all just part of the collective unconscious.” Regular listeners will become familiar w...

We look at alcohol’s ritual, psychological, and cultural function. Starting with Dionysus and the ancient Greeks, we compare alcohol with psychedelics and other drug and explore what’s going on beneath the surface at after-work drinks through this lens. Can you really trust someone you have never seen with their inhibitions lowered? Is transgression required for bonding? We attempt to reach some d...