Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. Well, sort of. So when Crispus is alive, it’s all, like, praising Crispus as, “Oh, Constantine, you great emperor, and your wonderful son who will…” whatever. And then Crispus is executed, and he just disappears from the, like- … they never talk about him. Yeah. Actually, as another side to a side, I think you mentioned whether it’s on your podcast or elsewhere, that if you had to have a beer with any of the emperors, you probably wouldn’t. So it’s not like some of the most impactful, some of the most influential and great emperors that we talk about, they might not be very pleasant people. Right. So let’s set aside whether you’d like to have a beer with these people. The reason I put Constantine at the top of the list is because the decisions that he made were so consequential, just important, and for the most part, not bad decisions. So I couldn’t not put him at the top of the list. The, you know, creating Constantinople and converting to Christianity and setting the empire on a path to conversion, these are major, like, world history level decisions. Right? Now, not many emperors do that. In fact, Constantine is in, like, his own league when it comes to those kinds of decisions. My other criteria for top emperors were basically those who did the job well, right? Not making, you know, these kinds of earth, you know, shattering decisions or, you know, world history changing decisions, but just who performed the role competently with results that impacted the lives of their subjects for the better. So those are the other criteria that I used. It’s difficult to juggle these different criteria, right, in order to create a systematic list. And by the way, we, historians, generally don’t do these kinds of things. But you said it’s fun.…

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