And we're live. It is Friday, the 9th day of October in the year of our Lord 2026. And it is 8:00 a.m. And I want to tell you a little story. Sometimes I am lying on the couch early in the morning because I'm really incapable of sleeping past, oh, 5:00 on a good day, sometimes earlier. And I'm lying on a couch thinking that the time is ticking by and pretty soon, before I know it, it will be 8:00 a.m. and I will be doing what I'm doing now, which is talking to you about what the show is going to be about, and that there is this chance that nobody's going to show up and that I'm going to be extemporaneously, you know, explaining things.
And so, sometimes what I do in those situations — always what I do is I text the DSTV list who's joining the show. And this sets off a set of evasions in which, you know, everybody tries to get out of it. And but sometimes what I do is I scan Bluesky for somebody who has said something interesting with a — no, Algra, of course there's a dog shirt. In fact, there's an absolutely garish, outrageous dog shirt today because daily means daily. Anyway, sometimes I scan Bluesky for somebody who's said anything interesting with the idea of cheekily saying to them, 'I assume you're coming on Dog Shirt TV in an hour or at 8:00 to talk about this.' And if they don't respond, that I would say one in every five times they respond, 'Sure, of course I am.' But usually they respond, 'Who the [__] are you?' or 'What the hell is Dog Shirt TV?'
And that was what I was — well, that's not what I was expecting when I responded to a post by Ada Palmer about Hittite text discoveries: 'Are you coming on Dog Shirt TV at 8:00 today to discuss this?' which was one hour ago. And, you know, I was not expecting her to respond, 'Who the [__] are you?' because she knows who the [__] I am. We're friends, and Ada was a regular on the predecessor show of this show, which was to say, In Lieu of Fun. But nor was I necessarily expecting her to say something like 'Sure.' But she did, or something like it. And you can see the exchange if you go to Bluesky. And I have to say that this is my absolute favorite way to get guests on Dog Shirt TV because they don't know quite what they're doing here. I don't know quite what they're doing here. And all I really know is that Sarah Bond, who has herself been on this show as well as its predecessor show, In Lieu of Fun, posted about interesting new discoveries of Hittite texts, and Ada responded that these are very interesting discoveries because we don't have a lot of Hittite texts. We have — mostly they're mostly right.
Yeah. Well, well, most of what we have — I love this. Most of what we have is a library, one library of texts that are not in the Hittite language because they didn't have a written language. They bought enslaved literate people from neighboring kingdoms. So there's one library, right? There's one library, and it was maintained by enslaved literate people that they purchased from neighboring kingdoms because they didn't have a written language. And it was records of oaths made to mountain gods. They made a lot of oaths to mountain gods. So this would be a promise that you would sacrifice a certain amount of gold to a mountain god every X amount of time, or you would give certain amounts of wheat or agricultural goods or horses to a mountain god every X amount of time. And they wanted to keep close records of this so that if there was a plague or a flood, they could look up at the library and figure out which oath to a mountain god hadn't been kept, so they knew which mountain god to placate in order to get rid of the plague and other things. And this is almost all of the written text that we have about the Hittites. Everything else is the Egyptians next door describing these weirdos with their horses.
And what — what language? So when they brought in enslaved scribes, what language are they inscribing in?
So I believe, and this is where, you know, I'm not a Hittitologist. I'm friends with Hittitologists. I believe you get a mix, and that you do get some records in the Hittite language done phonetically, but that you also get texts in Egyptian, and that we use both of these sets of texts to understand the Hittites. Yeah.
Anyway, folks, the sun is shining, the birds are chirping. It is going to be a great freaking day, and it is going to be a great day with Ada Palmer, whose audio is going to be pristine in a moment. And you are watching Dog Shirt TV, and it is a goddamn revolution in morning television. And one of the revolutionary features is that on a day in which the president — we, you know, we're going to have a live firing squad execution by live stream — we reserve the right to talk about it: manuscripts. And another one of the revolutionary features is that we invite a guest on, we kick her off so that she can fix her audio, we invite her back, we kick her off so she can fix her audio. All of which is an eight-minute long-winded way of saying that we are not allowed to have fun anymore, but we are allowed to spend a glorious hour with Ada Palmer, whom I have not seen or spoken to in a good long time.
And the first thing we're going to do when she comes back is introduce her to Mike Fineberg, with whom she has a lot in common. For those of you who do not remember the days of In Lieu of Fun and Ada Palmer, Ada is a professor at the University of Chicago who does medieval and Renaissance history, but she is also the author of a number of science fiction books and is generally one of the most diversely educated people of my acquaintance. And she is somebody that I met because of In Lieu of Fun, and we have become friends almost entirely in this format. Ah, how do you sound now?
How do I sound? Pristine?
You sound pristine. Actually pristine this time.
Fabulous. Okay. So, so welcome back to the show.
Thank you. So I hang out with Hittitologists because I find it fascinating as somebody who works on Renaissance Florence — by the way, good afternoon from Florence. As somebody who works on Renaissance Florence, I have the privilege of having mountains and mountains and mountains of documentation. And it leaves more documentation than any other blip as early as it is in the historical record. We have literally millions of pages of documents just about the funding of the building of the cathedral. And so I find it very important and grounding to hang out with historians who have the least possible written record that they're working with, which is this incredibly narrow array of texts where you basically have the name of the ruler under which the oath is being made, sometimes the name of the secondary figure who's making it, the geographic location of the mountain, and what's being given. And that's about all you have. And then for this entire civilization, but you can deduce things like, you know, ratio of male to female rulers, how frequently dynastic turnover happens, moments when they're getting wealthier and less wealthy because the scale of the gift changes. And Hittitologists make the most elaborate — they squeeze every drop out of this incredibly limited written record in a way that is a great proof of how the less you have, the more you learn to work with it.
So what do we know? What is this new body of texts that we found?
So it sounds as if it's probably a new cache within the same library, but I didn't have time to talk to Hittitologist friends about it yet. But sometimes when an oath is being made, it'll say why or for whom. And so you can deduce more from that. The way it was written up in the Quickie article, you know, mentioned other things like a will and so on, which could possibly mean that we have texts that are not just oaths to mountain gods, but it could equally mean this oath to a mountain god mentions these details which give us information like a will. It'll be fascinating when I do get to talk to Hittitologist friends to find out which. But the dates are cool because we know so little, right? Because they're peers of empires about which we know tons. We know tons about their Egyptian neighbors, and we know tons about their Mesopotamian neighbors. And in the later sections, their Greek neighbors are starting up. All of which are the ancient cultures of which we have the most written record, about which we study in the most literary way. And to have these incredibly wealthy, incredibly textual, incredibly long-lasting empires be peers and neighbors with the Hittites, who are so incredibly impoverished, right? And they live on the worst land, and they aren't conquered partly, it seems, because there's nothing there that anyone else could eke any wealth out of. And they basically have horses and nothing but horses, and agricultural land so poor that the Egyptians are like, 'We wouldn't want to bother farming that. We have the Nile. Why would anybody want rocks?' So that they manage to be peers and neighbors and defend themselves against civilizations we think of as far, far wealthier. And I don't like to say more sophisticated, because I think it's very sophisticated to manage with just rocks and horses to be a peer of a major and long-lasting empire. But we have, you know, sophisticated literary culture, sophisticated literary culture, nomads, and that's a very unusual triad to be neighbors of each other.
So let us start today by introducing you to Mike Fineberg. Mike Fineberg, former special agent of the FBI and Chicagoan, and Lawfare senior editor. You two should know each other. You both have —
I feel — but I feel like whenever you introduce me to people whom I should know, the fact that I was an FBI agent undermines the idea that we might have anything in common, because the people are always like, interesting from a humanities and scholarship perspective in a way that one does not associate with people who carried guns for a living.
Well, let's just say Mike was — when Mike was at the bureau, I had this long-running idea that I was going to — Mike was a China counterintelligence guy, and I was going to write a kind of Smiley-like novel about the film historian at the FBI who was really a China counterintelligence guy, but who was obsessed with film history and who had read — who had a large library that he had actually read. And that was going to be the conceit that Mike was sort of too — oh, and who was best friends with a knighted French chef. And so I was —
That's true. I mean, it is true. Then I thought the character was kind of like it would come off as precious and unrealistic. So I never actually tried to do it.
To get an idea of my background, Ben. Had I not gotten into the FBI, my backup plan was to apply to the Committee on Social Thought.
Well, this is like how, you know, Victor Hugo wanted to do a novel about his friend — oh, good grief, the name is blanking — but he's real, who was the head of the Paris police for a while during Hugo's lifetime, but the guy was too implausible. Vidocq, Vidocq.
Yeah, he wanted to write a novel about Vidocq, but Vidocq's life is too implausible, so he split him in half into Jean and Valjean, but they're actually one person.
And Vidocq was also — wasn't he also an influence for Vautrin in the Human Comedy of Balzac?
Yeah. But he was simultaneously, you know, head of the Paris police and criminal mastermind, and at one point, you know, was sent to the galleys, escaped, changed identity, worked his way back up through the ranks to be head of the Paris police again. Won a boon from the king. The king asked, 'What boon do you want?' He said, 'Please pardon my predecessor.' The king said, 'Done.' And then he took his disguise off in the middle of the royal court and revealed he was in fact his predecessor. Which is not plausible. So you can't — yeah, that's just true. So you can't put that in a novel because novels have to be plausible, unlike real life, which is not.
Ben doesn't realize this, but he is getting early next week a piece from me for Lawfare that begins with an exegesis of post-revolutionary French policing history. But I swear it is actually relevant to something contemporary.
So Ada, what are you doing in Florence? I mean, that's a silly question because you're a Florentine historian, but what is the specific matter that has you in Florence these days?
So I was just teaching study abroad is the short version. But I'm doing a project on what corrupts and kills republics. And I've been working a lot on the different Italian city republics, which I think are very valuable for us to look at because we're in a world in which there are a lot of republics simultaneously, and they're being buffeted by the same circumstances and corrupted by the same forces in parallel to each other. And it's not easy to find very many other historical time periods when there are a bunch of republics in parallel being buffeted by the same stuff. So I'm looking at Florence and Venice and Genoa and Bologna and Siena and Lucca, and all of them are being buffeted over the course of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance by the same stuff. And then we see some of them endure and some of them give way to the kind of corruption where officially the republic still exists but one family dominates it, and others of them break completely into direct and official monarchy. And looking for patterns in what makes them endure, what makes them fail.
And so what — what would you say is the — you know, the parallel that everybody loves is the late Roman Republic for the United States. I think that is a — it's quite a mischievous historical analogy for a variety of reasons. But I'm curious what you think. What are the parallels in this collection of republics that work for modern America, and what are the ones that don't work? Like, what are the things about the United States today that just doesn't have any analog in any of those republics? And what are the things that you're like, 'Wow, that has real echoes'?
Yeah, I would say that, you know, the two biggest differences — one is scale. This is why people reach to Rome as opposed to tiny city republics, because we're looking at city republics with a population of 100,000 or 50,000, where obviously social dynamics operate differently, but where the scale of wealth is staggering. So that's very different from the modern US. And the other thing that's very different from the modern US, and also from the Roman Republic — or sorry, this is where the Renaissance republics and the Roman Republic are in one camp and the US in another. These are all oligarchic republics, and they presume that it would be a terrible plan to have every single citizen vote. That would be crazy. The vast majority of people, they believe, are incapable of understanding politics and voting prudently. So liberty and being in a republic does not mean you have the vote. It means your boss's boss's boss has the vote. And your boss's boss's boss can be in the Senate, and you are represented via the oligarch in whose patronage tree you operate. And there is the assumption in these societies that there is a small portion of the population that is capable of political thought and suited to rule, and that the majority of the population is not capable of political thought and not suited to rule, and that the government needs to be in the hands of that minority and not in the hands of that majority. Well, there are people today who believe that the principles of America and of modern republics are that, in fact, all humans are created educable, all humans are created capable of political thought, and that a true republic should in fact be a democracy and not a republican oligarchy. So that's the big difference.
Yeah. So what do you see as the big similarity? I mean, 'republic' covers a lot of ground. The term literally just means there's no king or no monarchy. You know, we tend to think of republics in more democratic terms than they historically were. What are the useful comparisons between, you know, medieval Renaissance Venice or Padua or Florence and modern America? I have one on my mind that —
I'll start with yours and then I'll riff off it.
Okay. So the last time I was in Venice, I was at St. Mark's Cathedral, and I was really engaged by how proud the builders of St. Mark's were by the theft of St. Mark's body. That mosaic depicting the men carrying it into the boat. For those who've never been to Venice or studied this particular set of reliefs and mosaics, the Venetians — it's called St. Mark's because the Venetians sent a raiding party into Egypt where the supposed gospel writer's body was buried and stole it and spirited it back to Venice. And this is why Venice is, you know, the Lion of St. Mark's, and why the cathedral is named for it. And the mosaics depict this great pride at the theft. There's never — there's no sense that this was ours and we recovered it, or, you know, it's really quite Viking in its — you know, we're raiders and this was there.
And this is partly because — yeah, well, so stolen relics had prestige compared to bought relics, because if you bought a relic, then it was tainted by money and by greed, whereas if you stole it, it was the will of the saint moving the thieves to take the relic. So they're proud of the fact that while many other cities bought their major relic, right? So Florence's major treasure is the right index finger of John the Baptist, and it lives in a special place at the baptistry, and on his feast day they get it out and they parade it around, and you can still see it. And they bought it, right, with Florentine merchant gold, and so it's tainted in that way by commerce, and something stolen is untainted.
But it's not tainted by the immorality of the theft.
No, that the saint moved the will of these people to take this thing.
So, so I think when I listened to Trump and he said talk about, you know, 'We're just going to go in and take the oil,' it has this weird, like, pride in theft. You know, 'Oh, maybe I'll name the Strait of Hormuz after myself' has a kind of, like, weird — and it reminds me a little bit of the — you know, before anybody got ashamed of — I mean, it's pre-imperial, so it's before people were conquering the New World. They're — they're —
We can call it — it's pre-age of global empires, right? But it's very much imperial in the sense that the assumption was that any polity in order to thrive must constantly expand and conquer its neighbors. Right? Right. Machiavelli is constantly saying that for a city to be strong, it has to constantly be fighting, and it has to keep its populace busy with warfare so they don't become indolent and disruptive. And so it either needs to be surrounded by enemies so that it's constantly fighting defensive battles, or it needs to be expanding. And he genuinely believes that a city cannot sit in its territory and thrive at peace, that peace will rot it, which is a very unmodern idea. We think that peace is good and causes prosperity and mutual benefit as neighbors trade with each other. He has — it's not quite zero-sum, but it's as if he thinks that politics are fertilized by the act of war, not only the wealth that comes from it, but the exercise and moral impact of it on the people.
