88 - Mysteries of the Scrolls — with Nat Friedman

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Julius Caesar's father-in-law owned a villa on the shore of the Bay of Naples, in a little town called Herculaneum. This is the father of Calpurnia, who was the longest standing and most respectable of Caesar's wives. His final wife, the one who is a character in Shakespeare's play, Julius Caesar.
Well, this man, Calpurnia's father, Piso was his name, Calpurnia's Piso. He was a personal enemy of Cicero. He was the consul in 58 BC. Cicero wrote a speech against him, delivered it in the Senate. We still have that one. But Piso was also a dedicated student of Epicurean philosophy, and he invited a famous philosopher named Philodemus to come and reside at his villa in Herculaneum. And Philodemus brought a vast library of Greek philosophy with him from Athens. A hundred years or so later, that library Philodemus curated was still in that villa when Mount Vesuvius erupted. And along with the city of Pompeii, the Vesuvius eruption buried that villa in Herculaneum too, carbonizing those scrolls in pyroclastic mud and ash and thereby sealing a treasure trove, a time capsule, to be uncovered centuries later.
Scholars have known about this library and these scrolls for more than two and a half centuries. Hundreds of scrolls have been unearthed and possibly thousands more still lie buried in that villa. But for the most part, we've been unable to read these scrolls or we've only been able to read certain bits of them and with extreme difficulty until now. We are on the verge of some of the most incredible discoveries about the ancient world since the Renaissance. And in this interview, I am talking with one of the people who's at the center of the story of decoding the Herculaneum scrolls. His name is Nat Friedman. He's not an archaeologist or a historian, but a technologist, a company founder, a former CEO. And we'll get to the details in the interview.
I'm Alex Petkas. You are listening to The Cost of Glory, where it is our mission to retell the lives of the greatest Greek and Roman heroes following the lead of the ancient philosopher and classic writer Plutarch. In order to try to unearth the characters of these men and their insights, if we can, to resurrect some of the ancient spirit of greatness those real-life heroes exhibited, and with which they have, over the centuries, periodically in times of great trouble, inspired the more active classes of society.
I'm happy to announce, by the way, that The Cost of Glory is now an infinite media collaboration. Well, without further ado, here is the interview with Nat Friedman, where Nat tells the story of Herculaneum, the Scrolls, and this fascinating contest that he co-engineered to help push the scientific research and technological innovation past what seems to be a tipping point in the effort to decode these texts. And we'll talk about some of the other very important people involved, modern people, and also about Epicurean philosophy, about Philodemus, and many lessons that you can apply for bringing out the best in your own work and life. I hope you enjoy it and find it as inspiring as I did.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:44)
Nat Friedman is an entrepreneur and investor. He's a co-founder of Zimian and Xamarin. I hope I said those right.
The latter of which was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 that stayed on at Microsoft. And in 2018, he led Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, an important open source platform of which he became the CEO of in 2018 until 2021
Then he moved on to other projects, which brings us to maybe the number one reason and occasion for our conversation. One of these cool projects has come across your desk at the Vesuvius Challenge, which is in some, we're gonna get into the details, a mission to scan and digitally unroll and read a large trove of ancient scrolls that are preserved through the famous Pompeii destroying eruption of Vesuvius, but it's never been possible to read them before until now. So, you know, at The Cost of Glory, we're all about bringing to life great ancient figures and texts and ideas from the past, from the Greek and Roman world that you can use today. So for that reason, I'm really thrilled to have you. Thanks for joining us, Nat.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:57)
Thank you for having me. I love your podcast.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:59)
Great. Why don't we start by just you telling us, for those who don't know the story, how did a guy like you get interested in a project like this?

**SPEAKER_2** (5:09)
It was really pretty random, honestly. One of those sort of sequences of events that seem so contingent and unlikely that you have to wonder how predetermined anything that ever happens really is. But yeah, I mean, it was sort of started back in early 2020 I was out here in California. I was running this company called GitHub and COVID struck and the lockdowns kicked off. And we were in that early period of COVID when there was so much uncertainty about kind of what it was. You know, I don't know if anyone really remembers, but obviously COVID was not good. But there was a lot of concern at the time that it was actually much, much worse than it ended up being.