Andrew Schulz

And so Alexandria is like...

If you can have a university on this scale where this many people are literate and this intelligent, the separation between your power and even like the intellectual –

And psychological effect that it has on your contemporary neighbors, like people who are outside of Egypt, the effect that it has on their perception of you is immense, right?

Like they see you as an intellectual giant compared to them.

It's everything all in one, right?

And so Alexandria is kind of the...

culmination of all of the great things of the ancient world all arriving in one place and one you know one of the biggest things was that nearly the entire city was built out of stone itself that was not a thing like if you go and you look at the all the great temples that are in egypt if you go and look at all the great temples that are in egypt

According to the ancient sources, like when Herodotus is visiting Egypt, whatever, the town, the city that exists around it, all the thousands of people who live in the cities, it's really no more grand than just a poor village.

Like all the normal people are building houses, leaning up against these solid walls of the temple.

Yeah.

But in Alexandria, the average quality of life is so much higher, and everyone's apartment buildings are all made out of stone.

There's this famous saying that in Rome, there's no single time in Roman history where...

a part of the city wasn't burning down because all of the apartment buildings, even during the height, let's say during the period of the five good emperors, it ends with Marcus Aurelius, gladiator.

That's the height of ancient Rome.

A lot of people say, and it began with the emperor Trajan.

A lot of people say that the period of those five emperors is the happiest time in all of humanity.

It's when the Roman empire was the most stable.

Okay, even then, the vast majority of the architecture

in Rome was made out of wood and the buildings were constantly just burned down.

It was so common that Augustus, Rome's first emperor, had to create the world's first fire brigade to be watching out for fires to go put them out.