To quote Seneca the Younger, I see clothes of silk if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes. He also said of the woman who wears silk, Her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife's body. And yet, all attempts to ban silk failed, which speaks to how much, even in the ancient world, wealth shaped governance. And with trade there was a way of becoming wealthy without being a king or a lord who takes part of what your citizens produce. The merchant class that grew along with the Silk Road came to have a lot of political clout, and in some ways that began the tension that we still see today between wealth and politics, whether it's, you know, corporations making large donations or Vladimir Putin periodically jailing billionaires. Mr. Putin, I just want to state for the record that I did not mean that in any way. I was... Stan wrote that joke.