Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead. I am your host for this week, Len, and I am joined today by Three Amaz Behind the Scenes Mastermind, Mike.

Hello.

And we are happy to welcome once again, visiting lecturer in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Dr. Brett Devereaux.

Hey.

Welcome back. Yeah. Glad tovereaux. Hey. Welcome back.

Yeah.

Glad to have you on again.

Tonight's topic was planned well in advance of the events of February and March of

2022.

And I didn't expect it to be topical because we're going to be talking about

empires. I think we are going to avoid current events as much as possible, just because this is not

a current events podcast. Wait, is someone doing an imperialism? Maybe just a little bit as a treat.

But yeah, the last episode that we had you on, Brett, we talked about like the state and what is a state and how do strategy games portray states and lead us to think about states in some ways that are interesting in a good way and maybe in some ways

that are counterproductive. So I thought kind of the natural evolution of that discussion would

be to move on to empires and imperialism, which often is kind of like the next stage. If you're

playing a grand strategy game, you know, you might, you might form a state or a nation and then go on to form an empire. Before we get into that, for anybody who's not already familiar with you, maybe you didn't hear the last episode you were on, do you want to talk a little bit about what you do on your blog? Yeah, so the general story.

So one, I'm a, you know, trained PhD having an ancient historian.

I study the Romans.

And then I also blog at a collection of unmitigated pedantry, acoup.

Dot blog, A-C-O-U-P-BW, where I do a mix of ancient history, military history,

and popular culture, including gaming, which I game a fair bit.

Right, and a lot of these discussions have been inspired by sort of the paradox blog posts you've done on there

...