Nobody tells a better story about ancient Rome than the great Steve Pressfield.

And what I learned from his new book is that they had the post office in ancient Rome,

that you could send a letter. Hey, it's Seth and this is a Kimbo.

We'll be back in a second to talk about stamps and open APIs. But first, here's a

message from our sponsor. Hey, it's Seth, I wrote a new book.

It was originally called Trust Yourself,

but my editor persuaded me correctly to change the title to The practice. If you'd like to see a free excerpt

in a summary, visit trustyourself.com. Gotta do something with that domain. Check it out.

I, well, it's not quite true. You couldn't send a letter. Well, at least I couldn't send a letter.

The post office, the idea of sending a letter across the Roman Empire was only available to people who the

emperor permitted to send letters. That the Romans built extraordinary roads.

They spent a fortune connecting all the way from Jerusalem to Rome and beyond a network of

roads that connected far-reaching countries that had never been connected before.

And one of the things they did on those roads

was they created the post.

And the post was a relay of 10 or 12 riders, each waiting for the next one.

A giant relay race to enable a message or a passenger to move from one place to another at really high rates of speed.

It enabled travel, safe, fast travel for the first time in human history.

And while you were busy taking passengers,

you could put in your sack,

otherwise known as a male, a bunch of letters.

So here we have the postal service.

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