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Talking myths with Liv Albert
233 Plays2 years ago
On this week's episode, we talked with Liv Albert, the creator and host of the hit podcast, Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! We covered the origins of the show, how it changed over time and found its voice and all the lessons Liv has learned along the way.
You can learn more about the show at https://www.mythsbaby.com/
Follow Liv on Twitter at https://twitter.com/livyrants
Check out her book, Greek Mythology: The Gods, Goddesses, and Heroes Handbook at https://www.munrobooks.com/item/bC1DcsJZoXEFNJsPXAvQmQ
Subscribe to the Content People newsletter at https://meredithfarley.substack.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Liv Albert and her podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
Hey, everyone, and welcome to Content People. Tune in to hear from creatives, leaders, and experts in various media. I'm your host, Meredith Farley. And I'm the show's producer, Ian Servitt.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hey, Ian. Today we talk to Liv Albert. Liv's the creator, host, and producer of the very popular Greek and Roman mythology podcast, Let's Talk About Myths Baby. I love Liv's show. I was really glad to talk to her. If you're not familiar with it, it's a twice weekly podcast in which Liv dives deep into the details of ancient Greek and Roman myths and the history that surrounded them. She brings a really cool perspective, a lot of humor, sarcasm,
00:00:47
Speaker
and a modern lens to these stories. And she's built up a really huge listener base. The show gets millions of downloads per
Rise of podcasts and Liv's journey
00:00:54
Speaker
year. We talk to live about the origins of the show and what she's learned building such a successful podcast from the ground up.
00:01:01
Speaker
Obviously, podcasts have been around for a while, but I feel like so many other things, they really blew up during the pandemic. So it was super cool to talk to someone who really built a show from the ground up and grew an audience and a community around it. Podcasts are obviously a super interesting format for content. And with all of the attention it's been getting lately, it's something that a lot of people are looking at.
00:01:25
Speaker
And Liv had so many great things to say, not just about like what makes podcasts special, but also sort of what makes good content and how you can take your own passion and enthusiasm to make something that is going to connect with an audience. Yeah, it was great to hear from her on that. So without further ado, we hope you like it. Here's our convo.
00:01:54
Speaker
Thank you so much for joining Content People and being on this episode. Thank you so much for having me. It's very nice.
00:02:02
Speaker
I am so excited. I know we were just chatting a second ago about this, but I have been a long time listener of your podcast. My friend Brianna actually turned me on too. Let's talk about MythsBaby and she was actually also on a later episode of this podcast. So for listeners who aren't familiar with you, could you share a little bit about who you are and what your podcast is about?
Storytelling style and production process
00:02:27
Speaker
Yeah, so I am Liv Albert. I created and host the podcast Let's Talk About Myths, Baby.
00:02:35
Speaker
which is a thing I still dislike saying in front of other people. And just the name, not the podcast, obviously. Yeah, I started it about like five and a half years ago. I talk about Greek mythology. I retell stories. And over the past few years, I have taken to speaking with academics and experts and authors and all these different incredible people about the ancient world.
00:03:02
Speaker
basically every facet at this point. I will take anything if it features the ancient Mediterranean at all. Yeah, I mean, that's basically my entire life at this point. When did your love of Greek mythology begin and what do you think drew you to it?
00:03:16
Speaker
It's so funny, I get asked this literally all the time and I never have a great answer because it's basically that I've loved it since I was a kid, but I don't remember where that came from specifically other than I was a child. I do remember in grade seven, and I say grade seven because I am Canadian. That'll come out pretty quick. I had this teacher who not only taught us Greek mythology, but also he had us watch the, there was this mini series from the 90s that,
00:03:45
Speaker
I am of an age where when I was in grade seven and for him to show us, it meant that he had like a VHS recording that he had to roll a TV into the room and play this and it, we had to like fast forward the commercials because it was recorded from TV and all that. Um, but yeah, it was like this mini series of the Odyssey. And that's all I remember is like having to watch that. I barely remember what's in it. I just remember like watching that and have it be like, if it wasn't the catalyst, it just like drew me deeper into Greek mythology for sure.
00:04:13
Speaker
I think we're of the same age, so similar to the chess recollections. I think I watched that. Like, what's the name of the guy that's in it? It's like Armand? Yes, yeah, exactly. Armand's something. He definitely runs it in a lot. And like, I don't remember what parts of the Odyssey it featured. Just like, no, we watched it.
00:04:35
Speaker
Yeah, I totally remember that one. I think that was my intro to Greek mythology as well, although I didn't stick with it in the same way. That's really interesting.
Research and scripting deep dive
00:04:49
Speaker
Alright myths, kind of I think of it as the original content and I'm really tempted to dive right into questions about myths because I know you are such an expert but because this podcast is about creative work and a lot of creatives are listening
00:05:05
Speaker
I want to, one, acknowledge that you have achieved significant success through your content, and two, make sure that as we go, I'm kind of doing my best to mine your experiences for actionable advice for listeners who also might want to create something for themselves.
00:05:20
Speaker
And so first, one thing I'm very curious about is to ask you to share a little bit about the day-to-day work of maintaining such a successful, and it would seem to me really labor and research heavy podcast, like what goes into an episode and what is a week or two in your life generally like?
00:05:41
Speaker
Yeah, so first I would recommend to anyone looking to do this to not do it the way that I have done it, which is that I am now incapable of relinquishing control on so many things. And while I do have an assistant now, she basically just does this stuff that I would have never had time to do if I didn't have her. So hiring her just
00:06:03
Speaker
gave us more stuff. It didn't like take much off of my plate because I am a mess.
Podcast format and content balance
00:06:08
Speaker
But that is all to say, yeah, it is incredibly labor intensive. I often, I'm just constantly looking for like ways that I can make it easier on myself and I have yet to find them. But basically, so I release two episodes of the podcast every week.
00:06:23
Speaker
On Tuesdays, I do what I call a narrative episode. It's where it's just me telling stories from Greek mythology. Or in this case right now, I'm in the midst of this big history series on Sparta, which is even more research intensive in a way that makes me question everything I've ever done. But for the regular episodes, for the Greek myth episodes, it does require a lot of research. Thankfully, I'm pretty good at research now. And one of the things that's funny is I can't even
00:06:51
Speaker
really give up the research aspect to my assistant because everything I do in research, I do like simultaneously while writing it. So I'll have like eight books open around me with like 10 different websites. And I'm just reading these things and typing the script as I go. And so those episodes always have a script. It sounds really off the cuff a lot of the time, I like to think at least, but it is completely scripted for the most part. It's just like stream of consciousness scripted. So it still sounds like a person rambling.
00:07:18
Speaker
But those are like five to six thousand words that I'm writing and researching Every week and then Friday episodes are either like I'll just read something from the ancient world That's like a translation that's in the public domain and thus is like copyright free or I will be speaking to to academics experts authors and things like that so that requires
00:07:40
Speaker
me to schedule and record and edit those conversations, which is why I do sometimes the reading episodes because they're considerably easier. So when I need to sort of make my life a little bit nicer in a week, I will do one of those instead. But often I don't because I have too many amazing people that I've already like recorded with or want to record with. And it just ends up like that. So like, I'm recording with somebody tomorrow. And so it's a lot of work.
00:08:07
Speaker
basically if that answers the question, but it's obviously done me well. Yeah, that's really interesting.
Podcast evolution and research challenges
00:08:14
Speaker
As you're talking, it's kind of reminding me a little bit of maybe like startup founders who've created something that's like wholly of them and even figuring out how to in any way divide and delegate feels absolutely impossible. So like what it sounds like such an interesting process. So
00:08:34
Speaker
you are researching and writing in real time and that's for the not but the scripted but the just you Tuesday episode and then you're also coordinating researching for editing the conversation episodes and that is happening like in real time every week or do you do do several ahead of time like how do how do you work that
00:08:58
Speaker
I try to do several ahead of time, but obviously because they're so labor intensive, it's often not really possible because like, there's only so many words you can write in a week and when one episode is five to 6000. They also keep growing like it used to be more like three to 4000 and I just keep getting wordier and wordier and like having
00:09:19
Speaker
too much to say in every episode. Like that's partially on me. But I'm also really conscious like I have ads in my show and that's how you know I pay the bills. But I also never want the episode so short that the ads are overwhelming. So while I used to do what I called mini myths were like short, brief episodes.
00:09:37
Speaker
I mean, one now, I don't really think that I have the ability to be that brief anymore because I am too obsessed with all of the intricacies in the ancient world that's just come with how many years I've been doing this. But also, I never want to release episodes that are so short that the ads become over the top. So it's always a juggling act with that as well, which is sort of like that wasn't really the question that you asked. But yeah, it's all happening in real time for the most part. And I do try to batch prepare
00:10:03
Speaker
So often I'll do that with like, if I'm doing a reading episode, because I can do those a little easier. So if I'm, you know, having a day where I can just bang out some of those, I will. Or like, I have a bunch of conversations, I try to edit them so that they're ready to go. For instance, like all my Sparta conversations are ready to go now. And I'm working more on the research ones as we go. Sorry, my, I'm like trying not to breathe directly into my, in the microphone, but I'm talking too much, my breathing's troubling. No, no.
00:10:31
Speaker
But yeah, so that's basically how I handle those. My goal is always to have at least a month prepared in advance. But because they're so labor intensive, and I struggle with ADHD, that was sort of not a problem until I became full time with the podcast. And now it's very hard to do things in advance because I need the deadline in order to force my brain to do them.
Interpreting myths with authenticity and intersectionality
00:10:52
Speaker
So it becomes, yeah, it's tricky, but that's always a goal is to sort of work ahead.
00:10:57
Speaker
Wow, that's really interesting. Well, I'm listening to the Sparta series for what it's worth. And I absolutely love it. It is so fascinating. And I feel like when you listen, you can feel the, like, they feel like labors of love and like a true dedication to you being as thorough and comprehensive and thoughtful as possible about this.
00:11:22
Speaker
these really interesting concepts and why do you even use for sources? How do you find your sources for these very complex and in-depth stories?
00:11:37
Speaker
The Sparta ones, for one, thank you. I'm glad to hear people are enjoying the Sparta ones. I've heard it from a few people and it actually, like it makes a really big difference because these are like a complete, like me stepping out of all of my comfort zones and talking about not only history, but this part of history that like I'm not that familiar with. I did my BA, but it's 10 years old now. And like, what do I remember from it? Not nearly enough.
00:11:58
Speaker
And so the history ones are much more like daunting for me and me wondering whether I'm just rambling and sounding like I make any sense. But so far so good. But so for the research of the Sparta series, the only way I was able to do it is that the assistant that I hired last year, Michaela Smith, she is one, amazing, but two, she is studying classics in university. And so
00:12:20
Speaker
She not only has like a fresher grasp on all of this, but she also has access to university publications and university libraries and everything. So thankfully, like all of the research, essentially she pulled everything that we could need and then put it into a means by which I could then use it. And we've been working on the scripts together a lot in a way that we don't for the mythology because it's just me storytelling in the moment.
00:12:46
Speaker
But for these ones, there's a lot more of she's been writing a ton based on her own research and knowledge and then I will go in and make it more my voice, my humor, all those different things and like flesh it out with what I want to say and make it a little less academic because she's stuck in that headspace, which is really helpful for me and I'll just kind of like pick through it and change what I need.
00:13:07
Speaker
So for the Sparta one that's been entirely based on her, but when it comes to the mythology, like I've now spent so many years doing this that like the research methods I use now versus five years ago are unbelievably different.
Influence of historical and societal factors on myths
00:13:20
Speaker
So where I used to just sort of Google things and see what I could find.
00:13:25
Speaker
and piece stuff together or I had like one book of Greek myths that I was doing that and it was like you know a retelling book like a book a scholar wrote of Greek myths rather than the original sources and now I'm like it's very rare that I will use anything that's not a primary source like from the ancient world and when it is it's this
00:13:44
Speaker
two volume set that I have, which is like completely useless to anyone who is just coming at mythology from like a hobby standpoint. And for somebody like me, it's like deeply so helpful. It's called Early Greek myths by Timothy Gants. And it's like a source book. Basically this, this academic went through and picked out every reference to every character in every ancient source.
00:14:07
Speaker
He puts them all together and talks about what is the same and what is different and what these weird things are and who said what and when. He often has sources that are fragmentary or partially lost in a way that it's often hard to find that as well. That's completely invaluable. There's also a website called theoy.com that's a lifesaver because it compiles a lot of ancient sources as well. Basically, I'm pretty familiar now with
00:14:32
Speaker
where to find ancient sources. I have so many books and so many different places where I can find that. So it's just, it's a lot of piecing through kind of a million different sources, trying to stick to original sources or ancient sources rather, or, you know, scholars writing about those sources. And it's pretty wild, but I've just sort of turned it into an art at this point and can pretty much find anything.
00:14:56
Speaker
Yeah, that sounds like it. Well, somewhat related, the trailer for the show, or at least it was when I first started listening, which was a few years ago, you kind of referenced, you said, hey guys, like start at this episode number. And I think the message was something to the effect of like around this episode is when you feel like you honed in on how to tell a story and how we wanted the podcast to be. And
00:15:23
Speaker
One, I found that even just thinking about it now as someone who's done like 10 episodes of a podcast, I find that really comforting because it's like, yep, you got to do a lot of these before you really figure out how to do it. But I mean, you're so good at it. Can you tell me a little bit about what you learned about storytelling and podcasting from those early days?
00:15:46
Speaker
Oh God, yeah. The thing about podcasts that is like both amazing and so frustrating is that they just live forever, no matter when you recorded them. Like, so, you know, episodes I recorded and put out there five and a half years ago, people are coming to them as if they're a brand new thing they're listening to for good or bad.
00:16:02
Speaker
You know, it can be troubling. What you're referencing to is actually the very first episode of the show has a disclaimer up at the top that says like, around this episode, I got better at what I'm doing, I got better at researching, I got a better microphone, blah, blah, blah. And so I do have that at the very beginning of the first episode. And does it convince people? No. Everyone starts with the first episode. My first episode is always the number one downloads of my entire show, including like,
00:16:30
Speaker
I think it was, it's about one tenth of my total downloads for this year, which like for reference, so yeah, like 2022 I had, or a total of 400 episodes, like obviously not released in 2022, but by the end of the year, my show had 400 episodes available in the feed.
00:16:48
Speaker
And out of those 400, like our total, I got something over 10 million, I think downloads last year. And 1 million of those downloads was my first episode.
00:17:03
Speaker
Yeah, like why are you doing this to me? It gets so much better because a lot of people stop after the first one too or leave me reviews where they're like She's bad at researching and i'm like, well, I told you that I acknowledged it I am better now. It's almost like i've been doing this for five years and there's 400 episodes like maybe the first five aren't the best best reference points Anyway, I feel very strongly about it. But uh, also they get the most downloads so they're not getting deleted um, but that is all to say like
00:17:31
Speaker
I started this podcast as a hobby explicitly because I was really depressed and I hated my job.
Survival of ancient texts
00:17:39
Speaker
I'd gone through like a full blown quarter life crisis and like quit my career that I'd worked everything for and moved across the country like home-ish but not home.
00:17:49
Speaker
And so it was just like I was in a deeply messy place and I was super depressed and lonely and all I did was listen to podcasts and even like we kind of talked about before we started recording like you develop these kind of relationships with the podcasters that you listen to and they're like friends and that was just kind of my whole thing and I started one purely because I was like well this
00:18:08
Speaker
could be my thing too. I could just do this as a way to pass the time, to feel less depressed, what have you. And that is 100% why I started the show. And so it was really piecemeal. I explicitly remember probably the first three or four episodes, I wrote the script primarily in my phone's Notes app while I was not doing the job.
00:18:30
Speaker
that I hated while I was sitting in my office typing. And so I was reading on Wikipedia and whatever other websites I could get on my cell phone while I was also writing in the Notes app. So they were very just like... I mean, they were stream of consciousness, but in a very different way from what I do now. And it was just sort of thrown together into sort of whatever came to me.
00:18:51
Speaker
And so I think they're good, and I don't think that they were bad in terms of storytelling, but they weren't as accurate as I would like, as detailed. They glossed over a lot of things. All the misogynists out there who hate my show would say that I mentioned the patriarchy too much. I didn't really change that, but I got better at it.
00:19:12
Speaker
And so, you know, I think it's just a matter of like the more you're doing it and the more sources you get to like, I think the episodes where I decided I got better at it was when I started the Iliad. And that's because I was reading the Iliad, whereas before I had been reading like books of Greek myth that are written by people today versus the ancient sources. But with the Iliad, I had to inherently go to the ancient sources. And I think that kind of
00:19:38
Speaker
switch something for me. And I realized the value of being exclusively or wherever possible exclusively with ancient sources and kind of what that did both for my detail and accuracy and so many different things. And so yeah, I mean, I think it's just a matter of like, it's just practice, right? It's just with podcasts, practice remains in the feed forever.
Misconceptions about Medusa
00:20:03
Speaker
Whereas like,
00:20:05
Speaker
If you're writing a novel, you're going to go through like 10 different drafts and no one's ever going to see those, but a podcast, especially when you're not starting it with a company backing you with producers, with editors, with all these different things. Like you're just starting it with however you're going to start it. And so yeah, like the first probably 20 episodes of my show are practice that everyone gets to listen to forever.
00:20:28
Speaker
that like a million people a year listen to and perpetrate. Yeah. I actually just heard from a professor at a university who was like, I just wanted to let you know that I assigned your first episode to my class and they really loved it. And she said all these incredibly kind things, but I was like, Oh God, no, not my first episode. Pick a different one. And I'm so much better now.
00:20:51
Speaker
Well, I wonder, do you think that, okay, do you think they really are that bad or do you think you were, were you hard on yourself, harder on yourself in the early days?
00:21:03
Speaker
So I think bad is the wrong word to use in terms of like how I really feel. I don't think that they are bad. I just think that they're not a good representation of what my show has been for the last three to four years. And I am proud of what the show is now. I'm proud of what it was back then too, but it was a different show. It was
00:21:26
Speaker
entertainment. It was just like, here's a fun and quippy myth. It's going to be 20 minutes long. It's going to be really surface level. You're going to have fun. It's fine. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But what my show is now
00:21:40
Speaker
is a real deep dive into the ancient world, the ancient sources, the context, the nuance, the history, the everything in a way that I love that part. And I think a lot of people also just prefer the storytelling. So probably those early episodes are best for them, but I love everything I've learned and the detail I can go into now and the nuance and the history, literally
Complexity of Greek myths and oral tradition
00:22:02
Speaker
everything. Like I'm obsessed with that. And so to me,
00:22:05
Speaker
Like I'm just way more proud and I think that my current show is just like It's just better in in all of those respects, but it is like a preference thing probably more than anything When you say ancient sources I I love like i'm trying Can you explain exactly what that is? I don't know. I really know
00:22:27
Speaker
That's fair, yeah. I'm gonna use a lot of terms that are totally normal for me, so please ask about anything. The ancient sources, so what I mean by that is the sources that actually come from the ancient world. So I read them in translation, but they are from the ancient world. So I'm talking the Iliad, the Odyssey, Homer's works, quote unquote Homer, he probably wasn't a real guy. But those are the works that we have his name on.
00:22:51
Speaker
or the ancient plays, you know, the plays of Euripides and Aeschylus and Sophocles. Those are some of my favorites to cover. Euripides is my favorite. He's the absolute best. So these are plays that were written in the ancient world, written in, you know, the fifth century BCE, performed in the fifth century, and they just survive for us to read today.
00:23:12
Speaker
So the comparison between something that was written in ancient Greece and survives for us to read in translation Like the alternative is say books of Greek myths that are written by people in the last hundred years. So Edith Hamilton is the most famous I would say But there are you know, so many I wrote one like mine is a is an example of this people writing about the Greek myths
00:23:39
Speaker
but from now, just over the last hundred years. And often what they're doing is looking at a bunch of different ancient sources and they're putting it all together. But often they are doing that and then they're inserting their own narratives and sometimes biases. Like the book that I had that I was using at the early days of the podcast, I just found, it's just called The Great Myth and like it was on sale at a bookstore and I was really broke and doing this just for fun. So that's the one I bought and that's the one I read.
00:24:08
Speaker
and I've looked back on parts of it now, and it has all of these completely invented things that are often super misogynist, and it presents them as if that is exactly what was said in the actual Greek, the ancient sources, the Greek mythology. Whereas this is absolutely a man inserting his own wild insults to women that are not in the ancient sources at all,
00:24:36
Speaker
So often when you're reading these ones and unfortunately, they're the most accessible. They're the most comprehensive. They're the easiest way for you to find all of the stories as just like an everyday person accessing them, but they can often be super inaccurate in terms of what we do know about the ancient world. And they can often be, because for the most part, everything's been written by men up until very recently. They can often be really misogynistic and you don't know when you think like the ancient world was super misogynistic, but it wasn't
Guide for new listeners
00:25:03
Speaker
that bad. Like this guy can even make it worse, which is saying something.
00:25:06
Speaker
Um, yeah, so it like that's the big difference and why I am so specific now where I'm going to be referring to the ancient sources wherever possible That thank you that makes you so
00:25:21
Speaker
You take what I perceive as a very deliberately intersectional lens when telling and interpreting these myths. And I'm curious if, and you're kind of answering it, but a question I came into this wanting to ask you was, do you think that these myths
00:25:39
Speaker
initially spring from a patriarchal heterosexual lens? Or is that a more latter day retelling that we're still disentangling ourselves from? I don't know if that's clear. Basically, I'm wondering, I was wanted to ask you if you thought the myths started off as sexist as they seem. The first phrasing of your question I think is even better and I completely get it. So I'm absolutely going to answer that because
00:26:04
Speaker
It's a little bit of both in a way that I think is really interesting. So there's going to be a lot here. Basically, the ancient sources as we have them now were absolutely developed in a patriarchal society. Patriarchal, yes. Heterosexual, no. Which I think is interesting.
00:26:23
Speaker
The time in which these pieces like say the Iliad and the Odyssey, I'm just going to use those as the best example because they are also the earliest surviving sources we have from ancient Greece. So they're from about the 8th or 9th centuries BCE, some of the oldest.
00:26:40
Speaker
So they were developed in a patriarchal society. They were developed around that time. They might not have been written down until later because everything comes from an oral storytelling tradition. So around that eighth, ninth century, these were oral stories that were told by traveling bards. This is why we think Homer was probably not a real person. It was probably a number of traveling bards that would travel the Greek world.
00:27:06
Speaker
They would tell these stories, but they would sing them. They're songs. They're songs set to music. So it's not even just poetry. They're absolutely songs set to music. They would sing them in front of a bunch of people. Night after night, things would change because there was different people singing them. So they all sung about the Iliad. They all sung about the wrath of Achilles.
00:27:25
Speaker
But they would insert things, change things, adjust, possibly based on where they were telling the story to whom all of these things they would want to feature that region more heavily or like, you know, there's all these different connections that could kind of make and why these things were constantly changing because it was only ever spoken aloud. And then eventually they were written down into things that have survived today.
00:27:50
Speaker
So they were both developed and written down in a patriarchal society. However, the groups that existed in the same areas before and influenced the gods that exist in the Greek mythology that we know were, you know, however long far back, probably a good thousand years before, they were matriarchal in a way, or we think that they were. We don't have writing, but we have a lot
00:28:17
Speaker
of figurines that are women that have breasts and everything. So, you know, we have a lot of those that suggest that they were generally fairly matriarchal, if not completely like they were, they worshiped goddess way more than they did by the time of the works that we have. If that makes any sense, like in the bronze age and earlier, they worshiped women a lot more
00:28:44
Speaker
And so there's a lot of goddesses that were probably developed in that time and then passed down to become the goddesses of Greek myth, Athena, Aphrodite, Gaia. They originally probably were more goddess-based, and then they just became these lesser characters that they are in the works that we have. A lot of it is just based on archaeology, not text, because we don't have
00:29:08
Speaker
We don't have like stories from that time. We only have like if we have any writing it tends to be like really practical like what existed in the palaces of the time. And so all to say like
00:29:19
Speaker
They were all kind of developed in that world, but they also have these leanings of goddesses and you can kind of feel where those goddesses come in. Like Aphrodite is incredibly strong. She is incredibly sexually transgressive. She gets to do whatever she wants and she like, you know, she's married, but she doesn't, she's not with her husband very much. She has kids with a bunch of other people. Like she is a really good example of this goddess that probably
00:29:44
Speaker
comes to us through an originally matriarchal society and turned into what we know of Aphrodite today. And so there's like a lot in there but when it comes to the heterosexual side that is for the most part something that came about more when Christianity took hold and that we are still pulling apart today. Like the ancient Greeks were not particularly heterosexual but they also weren't
00:30:10
Speaker
homosexual in the way that we think of it now. A lot of different city-states, primarily Athens and Sparta, where Sparta was a little bit different. I'm going to talk about it when it comes to Athens because they had this practice called pederasty, which is super gross because what it is, is that older men would have a young man slash boy who they would mentor, but it was also an inherently sexual relationship.
00:30:36
Speaker
Um, and it was like, it was definitely affection based and romantic at times as well. They usually had wife wives as well. So there's this really, they just did not consider sexuality like we did. There's no notion of gay straight by whatever. There's just nothing. It's just sort of like whatever is going on. They didn't like marry the same gender or things like that. Um, but they definitely had sexual relationships.
00:31:00
Speaker
And if women did, amongst other women, we don't really have it clear because they didn't really think of it that way. They probably wouldn't have seen it as sex, so it doesn't come in, you know? But it was probably happening a lot. But because it wasn't penetrative, they didn't see it as sex, and so we don't hear about it. It's really interesting. We do have the poet Sappho,
00:31:22
Speaker
from the Island of Lesbos. She is why we have the word lesbian because she wrote love songs to women and she was a lesbian because she was from the Island of Lesbos and like that's literally where the word comes from. So there is that but she's kind of like sort of the one-off and a lot of people will tell you that her love poem songs were not about women that she was writing them for a man to give to a woman because they like to completely erase her sexuality whatever it was
00:31:50
Speaker
It's really fascinating. But yeah, basically the heterosexuality that we assign to all of that is definitely like Christian slash modern. But also like it's just you kind of have to ignore everything you know about gender and sexuality when it comes to the ancient world in a fascinating way.
00:32:09
Speaker
I could go on forever, so I will stop myself now. Now that is so fascinating. Like I want, okay, I want to make sure I have it right. As you're talking, I'm almost picturing like a chemistry set. That sounds weird, but it's like these, these ancient prototypical myths are, you know, this
00:32:31
Speaker
liquid that then like through these different lenses of the culture of the time get distilled in different ways. So it's like if anybody tests, I think I have the order right, but correct me if I'm wrong. So Bronze Age, probably more matriarchal. Some of the Greek goddesses that we know were probably bigger players and worshiped a bit more than it's into the ancient Greeks where
00:32:57
Speaker
There's not necessarily a heterosexual lens, but there's certainly a patriarchal lens applied to the mores of the stories. And then we unfortunately lose a ton of the ancient texts. And then there's these bards in more like dark around, did you say around like 800 BCE though? So the bards are actually like really early ancient Greece.
00:33:20
Speaker
Oh, okay. And so, and I'll clarify too, like it's probably before the Bronze Age when it was matriarchal, but the Bronze Age had like a little bit more of it left over. But the Bronze Age is where we first get like all the major stuff that we think about, but there is no, or there's minimal writing that comes from that time. So there's a lot of different periods in Ancient Greece. The Bronze Age is like 2000 BCE to like
00:33:48
Speaker
1200 ish and then there's like this big decline a lot of people debate a lot of different things about what happened So I won't try to do that. But then there is like this early Iron Age period where it's really transitional We're dealing with like a complete change in writing systems So the writing that we have from the Bronze Age like there are like elements that are come into the ancient Greek that we know now but it's pretty different and then that's when we kind of have the
00:34:14
Speaker
This emergence of the oral storytelling tradition, so we're talking like almost right after the bronze age and then there's the archaic period which comes after that which is like Some of the ancient greece that we think of like the persian wars. That's like sixth seventh century
00:34:30
Speaker
And then we move into like the classical period, which is what you really think of. That's when all the philosophers are around. That's when all the playwrights are around. That's when Athens goes to work with Sparta. And then from there, it's like the Hellenistic period, which comes after Alexander the Great and all of this, and then the Roman period.
00:34:47
Speaker
Um, so basically like all of that is patriarchal beforehand. There are these goddess figurines that we think suggest a matriarchal society, at least in some areas. Um, but yeah, the trial, the storytelling is actually the oral storytelling of the traveling bards is like the earliest writing or stories that we have now. Um, also I realized, so the early iron age is sometimes called the dark ages. It's a super problematic term though, actually, because dark ages.
00:35:17
Speaker
suggest something about the people when actually what it just means is a lack of sources, which is why we have the dark ages, the time period, like I don't even know, but you know, like more recently, I'm really bad with everything after BC. But it just refers to a lack of sources, but it suggests something about the people that ends up kind of being harmful. But in Greece, they call it the dark ages, but it's actually the early Iron Age period because it's not dark. We have writing, we have evidence, like all these different things make clear it's not actually a dark ages.
00:35:45
Speaker
but people do sometimes call it that still. But yeah, that's like the early dark ages. It's like the Greek dark ages versus like a thousand years later when there's another quote unquote dark ages.
00:35:56
Speaker
So the oral tradition is happening and that is happening before the more classical era. Is that right? Yeah. So that's when we got like the Iliad and the Odyssey and like so much more that we don't, that has been lost or never written down in the first place. And then the classical period is where we get lots of writing because it's when the philosophers are coming in, they're writing so much stuff. Plato wrote way too much. He was over the top.
00:36:24
Speaker
And then the playwrights where we have so many of their plays surviving and hundreds that we know are missing And then there's also like we only have three surviving Tragedians so writers of tragedy when we know there were so so many more but only three Like work from three of them survive and then there are the comedy writers too of the classical period so there's just like so much
00:36:47
Speaker
Content from the classical period whereas in the archaic period there's less and on the early iron ages. There's even less So yeah, so the kind of the progressive progression of that but one thing that's really important too to think about is that Everything we tend to talk about when it comes to ancient Greece from the philosophers to the playwrights to just this general idea of what we think of for the classical period broadly and like that kind of influences how we see ancient Greece generally tends to come from Athens and
00:37:14
Speaker
Athens was a major player in that period, but they weren't as big earlier. And they certainly weren't like the be all and end all of ancient Greece. It's just that that's where the writing that not only the writing that survives to us today tends to come from, but particularly also the writing that people have been studying for the last like thousand years. And over the past few decades and century, I would say people are starting to look at things from other areas. But up until this point,
00:37:43
Speaker
were really heavily influenced by Athens. So everything kind of comes through this really strong, Athenocentric lens that influences what we think. And so Athens was super patriarchal. Women in Athens, their lives sucked. But we can't say that with certainty about the rest of Greece. Their lives were different in Sparta, like marginally better, but mostly just different. And then
00:38:06
Speaker
Elsewhere there's like even more kind of question marks. So a lot of what we tend to say about ancient Greece Especially in the classical period and archaic too to an extent is just like Athens Whereas Athens is a small part of the larger Greece Which is also a good reminder that like ancient Greece was not a unified place whatsoever They were always fighting with each other. We call them ancient Greece now, but it was like a bunch of small states
00:38:30
Speaker
that sometimes would like team up with one another, but ultimately they were all like individual people, individual like states, and sort of doing their own thing, writing their own stuff, having their own dialects of Greek, like all that. It was really broadly spread out. And we just kind of now put it all under one, like umbrella of ancient Greece.
00:38:51
Speaker
So for the sources that are not from Athens of that time, like have they always been around and just of less interest or were they, those other areas, just so much less prolific that we have to kind of try and surmise things about the culture as opposed to Athens. There's such a body of work we can really dig in. Like why haven't we focused more outside of Athens yet?
00:39:16
Speaker
I'm less certain about that. That's like more of a question for academia, I think, and especially also like how much exists from beyond Athens.
00:39:25
Speaker
Broadly because I'm researching Sparta now, I have a better idea of that. And when it comes to Sparta, almost everything we know about Sparta was actually written not by Spartans at all. Most of it was by Athenians who were their enemies. So it's really interesting trying to piece apart what happened in Sparta. We have writing from a couple of poets of Sparta, but just poets. So we have a bit of poetry, but it doesn't really tell us anything about the society.
00:39:46
Speaker
Um, so we think for the most part it's like I would say it's probably 90 percent That the work from Athens is what actually survived Primarily because like Athens was a place where they were more interested in writing things down for survival Um, it wasn't that they were like smarter or more interesting. It's just that they were specifically more interested in
00:40:06
Speaker
things that are survivable now. They were the big place for the tragedies, the plays, and so that's what survives from there. That's where the philosophers were. And then just generally, it's not coincidence because you can see why, but it isn't because that they were like,
00:40:25
Speaker
particularly special. They were like a powerhouse, but they're also just like interested in stuff that happens to survive. But also the key to all of this is like, in order for something to survive from the ancient world, like hundreds of different people and groups have to make conscious decisions for it to survive, except for a few really rare cases. Like, because the physical work from, you know, say the Iliad and the Odyssey, where it was probably written down in like the seventh century, so like
00:40:55
Speaker
600 BCE. In order for something to survive from that time, it doesn't just survive in the form that existed back then. Because for the most part, unless it was written all on clay tablets that somehow survived, which is unlikely, these things will have fallen apart. And so it tends to be like people have to have copied them for posterity. A lot of that comes in during the Byzantine period where they had all these libraries and the Byzantines were copying a lot of stuff.
00:41:23
Speaker
So we have the Byzantine period and that area to thank for like most of what survives today Um, and so like a lot over time like so many different people had to make these decisions to keep copying these works so that they survive um, so it's like It also is like it was because the Athenians wrote down a lot of things and then it was because these different people were interested In the Athenians writing and then next like hundreds of years later those people were interested so it's just like it's a series of
00:41:53
Speaker
different people that we have no control over having to have decided that they want to keep a thing, with the exception of really rare things, but really interesting ones. We know that there were a ton of tragedians writing these Greek tragedies every year. They had this big theater festival and they performed a bunch of them every year.
00:42:12
Speaker
We know a bunch of names of people who wrote them down, or who created these plays. We only have surviving plays from three different people. East closencephocles, we have, I think it's like between like six and nine plays that survive from each of them that we can read now. And those ones survive, and the same general number from Euripides, survive because they were taught in Byzantine schools.
00:42:34
Speaker
So the Byzantine school system used them to teach their students and so we have all these copies that then were able to survive because the Byzantines who were probably what like almost a thousand years after if not like close to that because they were choosing to study these things they survived for us today with the exception of Euripides where
00:42:54
Speaker
He had a bunch of plays where they weren't taught in school. So there are the plays that a lot less people cared about. They were less popular. People probably thought they were bad. It's like any filmmaker or artist creative now, you're going to have works that are not ideal and people are not going to remember them or they are and it's not going to be for good reasons.
00:43:14
Speaker
And for the other playwrights, we don't know what their work was bad. We don't know the bad ones because they're lost. By Euripides, we have a bunch that survived because this Byzantine collector had all of Euripides' plays on these scrolls. And the scrolls each contained, I don't know, a handful, maybe like 10 plays in one scroll. They were alphabetical.
00:43:36
Speaker
And one of his scrolls survives. So it's like English letters H through K, I think, or something. It's like only like a few different letters in the alphabet.
00:43:50
Speaker
that his this one scroll survives and so we now have like I think it's like maybe 10 of Euripides's plays that are meh they're the ones that people didn't love in the ancient world were not studied in schools they're just sort of the random plays in this letter group and they're called the alphabet plays now
00:44:09
Speaker
And but basically because it's one thing to manage to survive not intentionally it was a random We have all these plays that we wouldn't otherwise have and we have this indication that like not everything was perfect But like that said too. We have these plays that were not
00:44:24
Speaker
beloved in the ancient world but are like so fascinating to study now. So one of them is the Helen, which I've covered on the show. And the Helen is so interesting because it's this alternate universe of the Trojan War where Helen doesn't go to Troy at all. This like ghost version of her goes to Troy and instead she is brought to Egypt where she just like lives waiting it all out for all of that time.
00:44:46
Speaker
And we would not have that play otherwise because nobody cared about it in the ancient world. But we have it now. And it's fascinating and weird and cool. And it's just completely random, dumb luck that we actually have it to read today.
00:44:59
Speaker
I'm really obsessed with the alphabet plays, if that isn't obvious. So when you had Emily of Fuck, Wise, of Literature on, and that was the first time that I really heard about this, and you were talking about the idea that there's really only like a handful of the greatest hits that were really preserved and survived, but there are so, so many other texts from this time that we just don't have access to, and it really blew my mind. But then you talking about the,
00:45:29
Speaker
alternative universe, Helen of Troy Blight, it makes me think about it. It's been like 500 years. People are studying our Netflix cues for clues about our culture. And it's like, yeah, these weren't that good. No one was that into them, but we did watch them after dinner sometimes.
00:45:45
Speaker
Yeah, no, there's just so much and like I think we have this idea that everything from the ancient world is like brilliant and fascinating and cool but it's like that's because that's the stuff that enough people decide it was brilliant and fascinating and cool that it exists today.
00:46:01
Speaker
And like today we don't think about that because everything is inherently so much more preservable between the internet and just like the quality of books and all these different things like it's just so different. But back then with the things that they had and the writing structures and the general tradition which was like
00:46:17
Speaker
especially with art in this way, the tradition was not to write it down. The tradition was to just go sing it to your friends. And so it had to be really intentionally written down because there was a purpose behind it. But what's really fascinating is how we know all the things that we don't know, because there's got to be a lot that we don't know existed, but it did, but we'll never know. But there's a lot that we know existed and it's lost.
00:46:43
Speaker
And that is just because like other people would reference it in their writing and their writing survives. So like somebody would be like, so there's this, this poet, there's these two poets where like they wrote a ton, but not a lot of it survives. Farah Caidis is one and Simonides is another. Farah Caidis I think is the one I'm thinking of where it's like, we know he wrote so much mythology, but almost nothing survives in full. Whereas instead it's like somebody like say Pseudo-Apollodorus was like,
00:47:12
Speaker
Farah Qaidis wrote this whole story about this and this and this.
00:47:17
Speaker
but we don't have it, but we know it existed because Apollodorus wrote that it existed. So we like know that he read it, but we can't read it. And I think actually it might even be Farakites. Somebody wrote a version of this story where Helen doesn't go to Troy, this ghost of her goes. We know that it wasn't invented by Euripides. He got the idea from an earlier poet, but like not much of that poet's work survives. We just know it existed at all.
00:47:47
Speaker
Yeah, God. They're so much. It's really cool. Or see the play Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. No. It is my all-time favorite play and maybe one of my all-time favorite works of literature. And one of the main characters in it is she's in the 1800s. And she's obsessed and so saddened.
00:48:12
Speaker
to the to distraction by all of these like ancient texts that were lost in fires and it's um And actually in some ways the play is kind of about like humanity coming to the coming to grips with the fact that like We will lose and forget things all the time and we have to like reinvent it constantly And this conversation is making me think about that a lot
00:48:36
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I think about these things all of the time. Like I have like a running list of all the Euripides plays that I know existed, but I can't read and I'm mad about it all the time.
00:48:48
Speaker
I could write them for you. I want to think about it, but like there's also so many big question marks about like versions of stories or like one thing that's come up for me recently is like there's this really famous myth of Cupid and Psyche and like everyone thinks of Cupid and Psyche or certainly everyone in my circles. It's a really major story, but the only version we have that tells that story is written by a Roman novelist named Apuleius and
00:49:18
Speaker
I think it's pretty clear that he made most of it up, but we can't be sure. There's no evidence that the story of their whole relationship existed in any similar way in the Greek world, and so we have to assume that he made it up.
00:49:35
Speaker
But also he could have read another thing and developed his story based off of that that's lost and we'll never know. Or the bit of the Trojan War where the Trojan Horse exists and where Achilles gets the arrow through his heel and we get all of that stuff that's the most famous parts of the Trojan War. None of that actually exists in an ancient Greek source that survives.
00:50:00
Speaker
It exists in a Roman source, and we know that he was basing his work off of Greek sources that survived for him, but don't survive for us now. We know the Trojan horse and Achilles' heel existed in Greek mythology and in Greek history, but we don't actually have that physical work. Does that make sense? I don't want this to be an overly gimmicky question.
00:50:27
Speaker
I would hate getting a question like this for the record, but if you only preserve one Greek myth for the next millennia, do you know which one it would be?
00:50:40
Speaker
Oh, like I know I have an answer. I don't think it's like a great answer based on a ton of different factors that probably should be put into such an important question, but I would just say the Odyssey because it's great. And I love the Odyssey. Yeah. So that's my like easy go to it. Or like, well, no, Greek myth. You say Greek myth. So I'm going to say the Odyssey. Yeah. Because otherwise I would have said the Euripides play, but plays are different. They don't count. It's fine.
00:51:05
Speaker
And without the Odyssey, you would never have had your VHS miniseries. Exactly. Yeah, I would have never become this. I mean, it's still my favorite Greek epic. Odysseus is my problematic love. He does a lot of bad things, and I love him forever. Yeah, it's all the Odyssey for me. Well, I know we don't have too much time left. I'm sorry. I rant a lot. No, I loved it. And I presume.
00:51:32
Speaker
So I want to talk a little bit about Medusa with you. And I know that it's something that you talked about a bit. You've talked with other guests and had really interesting questions and conversations around. And I also know I'm not on Twitter, but I know you've mentioned on the podcast that this is one that for you seems to light up your Twitter whenever you're tweeting about Medusa.
00:51:57
Speaker
I've always been really drawn to it for some reason. I shouldn't say it for some reason. I think there's a lot of complex things about women's power in that myth, and it really hits on some archetypal nerves in a lot of ways. One, maybe could you give us a one-minute summary of Medusa, and why do you think it hits such a nerve with folks today?
00:52:23
Speaker
Okay, I'm gonna do a really, it's gonna be quick and thus I will speak a lot of words very fast. So Medusa, oh gosh, there's so much. So the earliest form of Medusa is this guy named Hesiod and he says that she was a Gorgon. He doesn't describe what a Gorgon was. He says that she's a Gorgon who was born to Forkus and Keto, who are these like sea monster goddesses or gods and goddesses. And then he says that she suffered a woeful fate. She was essentially assaulted by Poseidon and like eventually Perseus cut her head off.
00:52:50
Speaker
And so that's like the earliest form of her story, like essentially all of it. And then like a bunch of different things change. There's like a few different versions of it, but the big one that gets picked up is Ovid, who's a Roman author. He's writing like probably at least 700 or 800 years after Hesiod wrote that earlier bit.
00:53:09
Speaker
And Ovid has this whole story where like actually she's this beautiful woman and she's a priestess of Athena and Poseidon again assaults her but in Athena's temple and then she gets punished by Athena for that. Her hair turns to snakes and she turns people to stone.
00:53:24
Speaker
And then again, Perseus comes and kills her. And so those are like the basics of it. But what people I think take hold because of pop culture and so many different things is this idea that she's this like terrifying monster who's out to hurt people and like deserves death by Perseus. But none of that actually exists in the Greek myth. That was probably a minute.
00:53:44
Speaker
No, no, that's so like a weird story in that the, in the telling of it, she's kind of, she's punished for being assaulted, essentially. In Ovid, yeah. Okay. But then like, it's, there's this cultural understanding of her as this monster who loves turning people to stone.
00:54:06
Speaker
Yeah, none of that exists in Greek myth. In actuality, in ancient Greek sources, so before Ovid and not Ovid, she is not ever shown as hurting anybody. We don't know that she turned anybody to stone, we just know that she could.
00:54:24
Speaker
Yeah, we don't have evidence that she ever did it. We just know that physically she could. And we really only know that because her head afterwards turns things to stone. But until her head is physically caught from her body, she doesn't actually harm anybody. And Perseus is not sent to kill her because she's dangerous. That's a really common misconception. He's not sent there because she's causing trouble or she's harming people. He's sent there because this king of Seraphos
00:54:53
Speaker
wants him dead so that he can marry Perseus's mom. And the way that he thinks he can kill off Perseus without angering the mother is to just be like, hey, go get me her head. Prove that you're a hero. Go bring me Medusa's head. So it's purely that he needs the head. It's not about
00:55:14
Speaker
preventing any harm or saving anybody like it's just totally randomly picked because he like this Kang thinks that it's gonna kill Perseus to go get her head.
00:55:26
Speaker
But yeah, so this whole idea develops that she's like, people on Twitter have told me, by people I mean men, have told me that the reason she had to be killed is because she was terrorizing the lands and her death alleviated a pressure on the earth. And it's like, that is all in your head, dude, and I can see your misogyny showing. What are you talking about? Nothing about that exists in Greek myth. The worst we have is in Ovid where she is surrounded by statues, and the implication is that she turned people to stone.
00:55:56
Speaker
but again, that's only an off it and he's already made her a victim of assault. Like he already makes her do a sympathetic character. So it doesn't even like add anything to the argument that she hurts people. All right, maybe this is a good way to wrap it up is that I love the Greek meds. I'm a very linear thinker. And one thing that I find complex about them is I'm like, where do I start? Like, how do I, you know, right now, it often seems to me like,
00:56:25
Speaker
it's like trying to understand an eight season TV show by starting in season four. So if someone was like, I really want a foundational understanding of like the who's who and the basic narrative here, where would you set them? So the number one thing I tell people when you're coming to Greek myth is like, you can't have that viewpoint if you want to actually understand it from the ancient world. If you want to understand it,
00:56:55
Speaker
through a completely modern perspective, but kind of lose all of the ancient nuance, then you can kind of pick up any book of Greek myths. I would recommend one written by a woman because we tend to be able to like push aside a lot of the misogyny. Edith Hamilton's is pretty good. It's very old. So it does have more of that. There's like, I mean, I wrote one, but it's very surface level. So there's like, you know, there's books, but the thing about Greek myth is that like,
00:57:24
Speaker
back to the oral storytelling I mentioned, that is the way that they intended the stories to be understood. And it was never about linearity, it was never about narrative structure, it was never about like, basically you have to
00:57:40
Speaker
forget everything you think you know about what a story or a narrative should be because that was not the intention of any of these. They were told to just share stories around a fire or to explain something in the natural world or to explain the importance of certain regions and cities
00:58:03
Speaker
like every every area of ancient Greece has some story connected them to Heracles because he was like the hero for all Greece and so they would all make up their own stories of how he was connected to their culture and often it's like five words and that's like a whole story
00:58:19
Speaker
because it wasn't about what we think of as stories. It was about the overall purpose of what was being shared. So I think the best way to understand it in terms of the ancient world is to ignore everything you think you want to know about stories and to just sort of pick up anything, honestly. But I understand that that is difficult. So there are
00:58:41
Speaker
I don't know. There's just so there's so too much to know to like put it into one easy thing I think my show is a good reference point because you can almost start On any episode as long as it's not one that says like part two of three in you know in the title And I'm gonna give you enough background and stuff But I think that the key and what I think makes the way I'm coming at these myths Particularly relevant for the myths themselves is the way
00:59:07
Speaker
that they originally were meant to be told, which is that it wasn't about this structure, it wasn't about understanding all of it. You cannot have in your head a timeline, because timelines did not exist, because these stories were told over like 800 years. A lot changes over 800 years. So it's just not about, it's not about like,
00:59:27
Speaker
dotting the I's and crossing the T's because that they didn't care. It was like 800 years of culture melded into these stories. And so the way I do it is like story based. So you can just click a story you want to hear, but also, you know, it's like I give enough background and history and all these different versions and why and everything. So I think
00:59:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean I have a lot of episodes to listen to it's kind of daunting but I think that that's a good way to understand like how it worked and why Because it's so much more interesting if you understand the why All right, I mean that is fascinating is there a particular episode of yours that you play if you just want to dip your toes in start here I mean
01:00:14
Speaker
Let's say the Theogony, not my first episode which is also about the Theogony, but I did one last year or the year before where I went back and I did like a much more detailed look at the Theogony and I should explain what the Theogony means. It literally just means like the birth of the gods. So essentially it's like the origin story of all of the gods. So it introduces a bunch of people and where they come from and why and
01:00:38
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know, there's just, there's so much, there's too much. No, we can find that, the agony and put it in the show notes for sure. And I would also say, I love your book. So I have your book, it's called Greek Mythology, The Gods Goddesses and Heroes Handbook. Illustrations are gorgeous. I found it a helpful reference point. I'm definitely like at times been like, wait, who is this person? And so I, for what it's worth, I'd really recommend that too. It's really been helpful and just like so fun to page through for me.
01:01:08
Speaker
Good, thank you. I think it is probably, I think of it as being so surface level and whatever. Also, I was commissioned to write it. But that's why I talk about it like that. And I love it, to be clear. But yeah, I do think it probably is a really good starting point because also the whole commissioning aspect of it from the publisher was that they wanted a book that also connects in like where you might know certain characters from pop culture, which is a good way to like get a grip on kind of what you're reading and
01:01:34
Speaker
what names you might remember or recognize and things like that. So all of that is in the book. And it does cover a lot of the introductory level myths and the gods and why you should be interested and what their major stories were. So yeah, maybe my book is a perfect introduction. All right. Well, thank you so, so much, Liv.
01:01:56
Speaker
We'll link in the show notes. Everything you gave us, a trillion great references, which we'll try to get in there. And I feel like I could have picked your brain about this stuff for hours. You are such a fanta wist. Thank you for how generous you are with your info and your experience. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I hope I talked enough about content rather than Greek myths, but I could certainly talk about Greek myths forever. Thank you. Thank you.
01:02:26
Speaker
OK, everyone, we hope that you enjoyed our conversation with Liv as much as we did. Next week, we'll be talking with another podcaster and YouTuber, Caroline Winkler.
01:02:36
Speaker
Caroline held a really creative, wonderful YouTube channel with more than 400,000 subscribers. We talked to her about what it's like to have a successful career on YouTube and her new podcast, Not For Everyone. To support this show, you can rate, review, and subscribe. Those things make a huge difference. And if you like today's conversation, you'd probably like the content people newsletter. Subscribe at the link in the show notes. And that's it, folks. Thanks so much for listening.