Hello everyone. Today I'm just going to talk off the cuff about the recent

John Crisostom episodes as part of the Byzantine story series. Don't worry,

the next narrative episode is only a couple of days away. But if you haven't

heard the episodes about John Crisostom then switch off now and come back to

this when you finished. I just wanted to talk about the things that I wasn't able

to fit into those episodes. I just didn't get to talk about the sources for John's

life. I think I mentioned in the introduction to creating the episodes that we

know more about John than we do about almost any emperor. And when I was reading

about him, I mean I spent day after day reading different points of view from

different historians on his life because of the sheer amount of information we

have from, you know, biographies written by fans and supporters and, you know,

those from a church background to, you know, pagan historians who are just

mentioning him and his exploits as part of the narrative of the life of the

empire down, of course, to all the material from his sermons and his own

writing. I had trouble keeping it down to four coherent episodes and really, I

guess it's only three as the first one was really an introduction to try and

get the mood of Byzantine stories right. So this is my Dan Carlin style

confessional episode just to let you know a few things that I never got to, you

know, how Dan tends to sum up his hardcore history episodes at the end and

talk about some things he was thinking about while he was putting it together.

There were lots of things I was excited to read about during my research, which I'm

not sure I conveyed in the episodes. I know I wasn't really able to give great

...