#498 – Anthony Kaldellis: Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire, Rise & Fall of Empires

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Anthony Kaldellis, a historian of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description at lexfridman.com/sponsors.
It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Upwork for hiring quality freelancers, Fin for customer service AI agents, BetterHelp for mental health, Element for electrolytes, Shopify for selling stuff online, and our old friend, Proplexity, for curiosity driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely, my friends. And if I may call you as such, my fellow Roman history enthusiasts, it is not always true that the memes on the interwebs carry within them an accurate depiction of human nature. But when that meme said that all men think about the Roman Empire, it is in fact true. Anyway, now on to the full asheries. Try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact.
Since I'm traveling the world, there you can give me feedback, send them for a coffee, or since I'm traveling the world, give recommendations for travel. Oh, and you can also apply for the various positions that we're hiring for. We have an incredible team, but we also want help. Translation, editing, all of it. Anyway, speaking of which, this episode is brought to you by Upwork, a platform that helps you find expert freelancers to help you build, design, and scale your business. Now, I should mention that Upwork is a place where you can hire people for consumer use cases for smaller things, but you can also hire people for big business use cases. Both are extremely effective. I think hiring requires great tools, and Upwork is a great tool that I have used many times throughout my life. There is nothing as fulfilling, as valuable, as awesome in life as working with a great team, and the process and the tools and the effort of hiring a great team is truly worth it. It's just a really nice mechanism for matching employers and employees. Plus they're starting to integrate AI into the whole process by giving you an AI-powered shortlist. Visit upwork.com/lex right now and post your job for free. That's upwork.com/lex.
This episode is also brought to you by Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service, used by many incredible companies including AI companies. That's when you know you're legit. If an AI company is using you for an AI service, that's what Finn does. It takes a niche, specializes it, and becomes the best in the world at doing that thing. And very few things are as important as communicating with customers. And from the business side, managing that communication, because you have to do all kinds of complex things like returns, exchanges, disputes, and through all of it, you have to deliver high-quality, personalized answers, and you have to integrate the AI in a way that maximizes the average resolution rate. And Fin does just that. You can go and check it out for yourself at fin.ai.lex to get $500 bucks per month in Fin credits for your first three months. That's fin.ai.lex.
This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need to match it with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours. You know, some people will say that I'm traveling around this beautiful world of ours because I'm running from something. Maybe there's demons somewhere deep inside there that I'm trying to reverse engineer, deconstruct, whatever it is. No. I just am so f-ing happy to be alive. And there's nothing like travel that makes you open your eyes to the beauty even in the mundane because, you know, you show up to a new place, it's new, and that newness forces you to kind of really look around with open eyes. And you see every single thing, other people's faces, other people's smiles, the street signs, the way the streets are, the cars, the smells, the flowers, the food, all of it, all the things that you just take for granted in the incredible city, in an incredible town that you live in or that I live in, that is called home.
Sometimes you need to take a leap out into the unknown in order to see the very thing that makes life worth living back at home too. Cause it's the same awesome world everywhere. Anyway, why I mention that? Oh, because of demons. And you know, I do believe that talk therapy is a really powerful mechanism for doing that. BetterHub is super accessible. It's easy, discreet, affordable and available worldwide. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex.