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The Modern Myth of Step Back History (Featuring Tristan Johnson) -Modern Myth - Episode 9
780 Plays4 years ago
Its time for Tristan Vs Tristan! In this classic re-telling of the movie Face Off, Tristan Boyle and Tristan Johnson go head to head to find out who the real Tristan is,. Only kidding, Tristan Johnson is the content creator behidn the Youtube channel StepBack History, which seeks to talk about history in a meaningful way. During this episode Tristan J outlines the reasons why he started the youtube channel and what he aims to achieve; how we reach out to certain audiences, especially those susceptible to alt-right indoctrination and sympathetic to right wing memes. We also cover how history is changed by who tells it and even talk about the End and now restart of History.
Check out StepBack History on Youtube
Follow Tristan J on Twitter
Recommended
Transcript
Invocation and Introduction
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. I call upon my ancestors to judge me and my clan.
00:00:25
Speaker
For taking up the story of the knowledge that we seek, broadening the horizon's A to E. It's a modern myth, oh yeah. At this age of darkness, we will fight for truth at night. At this age of lies, we will rise.
00:00:47
Speaker
Now it's clear, misconception too healthy They told you what you want to hear Why can't you say that the truth will set you free Expose this modern bill for me
00:01:31
Speaker
Modern Myth, oh yeah!
Meet Tristan Johnson
00:01:37
Speaker
Welcome to Modern Myth with the Anarchiologist here. Today I have a very, very special guest. I'm speaking to Tristan Johnson from Step Back History. Thank you very much for coming!
00:01:52
Speaker
Thank you very much. This is going to be slightly awkward for the listeners of the show because we both have the same first name. Yeah, this is going to be a weird Tristan. So if you could just focus on this Tristan and not that Tristan, hopefully you can separate aside. Although I have been asked if I'm Canadian before.
00:02:11
Speaker
Well, there you go. Apparently, I sound Canadian. Tristan, do I sound Canadian? No, no, you sound somewhere between Irish and Scottish. Yes. Okay, I like that. You're already in my good books. So just to give people a kind of better idea of where you're kind of coming from. So you're like a content creator on YouTube. How would you describe yourself?
00:02:36
Speaker
Content creator on YouTube is a pretty good one. Yeah, basically my day job involves me making a mini history documentary in the 20 to 30 minute range once a month. And somehow that happens every month. Yeah.
00:02:55
Speaker
It's certainly on this podcast as is meant to happen monthly and never happens on every month. So I honestly would say that you've done a very good job by keeping it to every single month. Is there any particular part of history that you're particularly focused on or do you kind of like just go for everything?
Historical Focus and Career Path
00:03:11
Speaker
I mean, I started the channel, I went for everything because very early on there was actually not that many history channels on YouTube, so I was a lot more free to do the kind of stuff I wanted to do. But the field has thankfully actually grown quite a bit since I signed up. So now I'm trying to be Mitch, much more of an activist historian, I guess would be the term. I think I've been called the Howard Zinn of YouTube history.
00:03:36
Speaker
And while I still am global in scope, I also have been wanting to keep to more familiar waters, which means that things that I have more actual training and expertise in, which means I stick to major topics of like my major subject areas would be the United States and modern US history, but I've also delved into Canadian history and Middle Eastern history. Those are probably the areas I'm strongest in, but I've done stuff all over the place.
00:04:05
Speaker
So, what actually made you want to really do a video? Like, did you, prior to making the YouTube channel, did you have editing skills? Did you know how to put a video together? Okay. So, there's a couple things I built up to that. First of all, when I was a young 17-year-old Tristan, back in 2006,
00:04:34
Speaker
I graduated high school with a D minus average, which is basically like one point above failing. And I wanted to be like a record producer. So I blew the entire college fund on an audio engineering program that I took and hated with the fury of a thousand sons. And that's when I decided to drop out and go into academia and go into history and everything like that eventually.
00:05:02
Speaker
Then, in 2007, while I was actually in that school, I found out about YouTube and I started a YouTube channel that is not this one, that I had for about eight years. At the end of eight years, I had nothing to show for it. The videos were very low quality.
00:05:22
Speaker
When I decided to reset and start step back, I was going to do an actual job where I was like, I'm going to actually have a focused idea of what I want my channel to be about and try to do something particularly well. Honestly, most of the editing skills for making my videos look in any way good was just five years of doing it over and over again.
00:05:49
Speaker
Cause it's weird how our trajectories are almost a little bit similar because despite you saying you're graduating in 2006 from high school, like I graduated in 2010 from high school, you know? Like that's only four years between us.
00:06:05
Speaker
it's not it's not that much and at that time I'd already made a podcast for about two or three years and then when I joined uni I made another podcast about video games because I'm a nerd and
00:06:21
Speaker
then I was part of the student radio. And then I was like, no, I need to do a podcast that actually is much more structured. It actually talks about, you know, like the past and heritage and the way that I want to talk about it. And I'm going to use all the skills I've learned before. And I'm going to actually plan it out and make it good. It's just amazing how it seems like there's a lot of similarities there. Well, there's some distinct differences. Like you have red hair, not mine.
00:06:48
Speaker
But it's all burn. It's tinge with ginger, OK? OK, it's burnt sienna or whatever.
00:06:58
Speaker
Yeah, actually, it's funny you mentioned student radio, because actually I did that in grad school too around the same time I was about a year before I started step back until I moved to Toronto in 2017. I was part of and then eventually ended up running a grad student radio show that was like an interview series of graduate students at the university I was at, which then be syndicated in podcast too. So there's far too many similarities.
00:07:23
Speaker
Yeah, this is weird. We shouldn't have met. We're going to ruin his space-time to continue him here. Cancel each other out. Yeah, I know. It'd be really weird. So you did end up becoming a historian. You've got a master's degree? Yes, I did two master's degrees. I did one in American Studies, which
00:07:45
Speaker
for many people who don't know it, it's this sort of weird hybrid field that tries to be this interdisciplinary study of the United States. It's really popular in like Germany and some parts of the US. But I was of one of two American studies programs in the entire country that that did it. And like the third year to go through it. And I think now the program is more or less dead. So it's a very small window. But yeah, I have an I have an MA in a
00:08:10
Speaker
American Studies with a focus on American Cultural Studies and then after that I did an MA in History and I was working on a PhD in History but I dropped out when Step Back started ticking off in a bigger way.
00:08:23
Speaker
Oh, okay. When you talk about like, I'm more interested in the history than American Studies, that doesn't sound really interesting at all. So when it comes to history, where is your kind of interest in history? Like what is, why history? And like, what is in history that you're kind of you were attracted to?
00:08:47
Speaker
Well, and this will fit really well for this podcast.
Interest in History and Memory Studies
00:08:50
Speaker
I started as a kid, my parents are pretty big on history. So when I was a kid, my parents did a lot of like road trips around the United States. So I've seen, I think I've been to 45 of the 50 States now in the US. And I've seen like every world's largest ball of twine that you can see across the US. Like I've seen like every civil war battlefield and all that kind of,
00:09:13
Speaker
crazy stuff. But then what I was really interested in when I went to university, when I first started and I was going to go into, I chose history as a field, but my interest was in pre-Columbian Mesoamerican stuff. I was interested in like Aztec stuff. But then I got about a year or two into the program and came to the conclusion that
00:09:34
Speaker
One, I did not speak NAWAT, which has a single program that teaches that I could go to, which is in the University of Chicago, which, you know, famously easy to get into for history, obviously.
00:09:52
Speaker
Also, I was already a year and a significant amount of student loan debt into a history degree. I had to way out of that and eventually move in. Also, it was going to be archeology and my school didn't have an archeology program. I was in this history degree at this university with no archeology program and I needed to learn a language that I couldn't really learn.
00:10:17
Speaker
So it was going real great. So I decided to change subjects, and the United States was just a country that I knew really well, and I had a lot of gawking interest in as a Canadian, as many Canadians do. Then my kind of research interest built up from there, and what happened
00:10:35
Speaker
I first did the American Studies MA. When I did the American Studies MA, I was focused on Islamophobia and the post-9-11 Islamophobia. That was the subject of the master's thesis there. I thought that was really interesting, but then what came out of it was
00:10:51
Speaker
this fascination with how the September 11th attacks in general have been used to justify wars, to justify surveillance state politics, all sorts of stuff. I was interested in how we fight over that story. I did a master's project on the rebuilding of Ground Zero and the
00:11:15
Speaker
politics of trying to build a simultaneously office building, war memorial, and actual memorial all on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. That led me to this interesting discussion about
00:11:32
Speaker
how we remember things and so i really got into memory studies and i think that like that's where i kind of finished off is this this this subfield of memory studies studying how different historical narratives compete with each other to become the dominant one and i was studying 9 11 when that ended and my most recent video that came out like an hour before we started recording has a lot to do with memory studies as well right okay um that that is really interesting um because
00:12:01
Speaker
um like i think that's perhaps something that people don't really associate with being studied you know what i mean like nobody thinks that you know when you leave high school that oh yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna go into memory studies oh you're gonna do go do neurology no no memory of place but it's weird because to me that sounds like phenomenology in archaeology you know like this kind of study of place and
00:12:31
Speaker
space and use of experience and stuff like that, I can see the lines drawn to it. I mean, you know what Tristan, I'm happy with giving anybody the title of archaeologist, so if you'd like, if you just bend down on one knee, I'll get the sword out and I'll pronounce you an archaeologist just because it sounds like you're really far too close to phenomenology for your own health.
00:12:57
Speaker
Because I mean I get to spend my summers in the middle of nowhere drinking beer. Only if you pay out of the house for it and have really bad job prospects at the end of it. That's me just short throwing shade at the industry of archaeology. But that's really
00:13:16
Speaker
I mean, did you really see did you see yourself going in that direction from when you finished high school? Like, was that was that pretty obvious that that's something you would go into? Or is it almost like a little bit of happenstance? Is it kind of something you kind of fell in? I mean, when I finished high school, I was like a metalhead who wanted to be a record producer. So probably not. But I always did have kind of a streak of fascination with
00:13:46
Speaker
the United States foreign policy and American culture and that kind of stuff. And obviously like 9-11 happened when I was 12 years old. So I have like, it was very formative type of time to have a major geopolitical event happen. But it's just old enough to be able to be cognizant of the changes that were happening around you as they were happening. And so that part of me was always something that I had, but I never thought it was gonna end up being
00:14:16
Speaker
my career, even though it was a passion, because my parents are very parental in the sense that like, oh, it's like you can't make it. I think my mother once told me that no one's ever going to pay you just to think or just pay you to have opinions. And it's like, I'll show you. And then like 20 years later, here we are.
00:14:37
Speaker
Right, you're gonna have to stop ticking off the same boxes I have here. So when you say metalhead, this is gonna be a little bit of an aside, but when you say metalhead, like, what are we talking here, please? Like, what would you say is your kind of top five bands right now, metal bands? Okay, well, at the time,
00:15:00
Speaker
Metal has kind of dissolved from my life in a large way, as like most music has in a large way. That is disappointing. That is deadly disappointing, but go on. At the time, I was super into Iron Maiden, Nightwish, Sonata, Arctica. Those are the big three that I can recall. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, I see where you are. Pooser. Yeah, total power metal goth stuff.
00:15:25
Speaker
Did you ever like, did you ever do the gothy kind of stuff? Were you? No, no, I was more the leather jacket, t shirt and big beard type of metalhead. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
00:15:40
Speaker
I know the type. I know the type. It's the kind that either likes metal or sells meth. I don't know. Or both. Why not both? Please don't sell meth. Please. I don't know why I should give... That's the advice I don't want to be saying on this show. The profit margins are awful. I know. That's the main reason. And to be absolutely honest, at the end of the day, it's in this economy.
00:16:06
Speaker
It's strange that you talk about when you kind of went through your studies that you had a lot of like changes and you came out with practically two degrees. Because I actually when I started university, I was a pure chemist, I went in just chemistry. And just through electives, I kind of got absorbed into archaeology. And it was actually halfway through my third year out of four, that I was like, Oh, can I change my degree?
00:16:33
Speaker
And so they allowed me to change my degree to archaeology and chemistry as a joint. So that's what I came out with. One of like, I think it's really weird, it's like one of four people in the history of the university to come out with archaeology and chemistry. Yes. Nice. I'm special. Does that mean that you're like really into soil samples and like that kind of like, what's the what the hell is the name of that machine that everyone was using the
00:17:03
Speaker
God it sounded like a superhero thing, but it's like a electron. It's like a it's like a particle collider that Mass spectrometer. Yeah. Yeah That's easy like I've used those before I actually I did I think a Tron sink a Tron
00:17:21
Speaker
Well, you use a synchrotron to generate your high energy particles so that when you do things like mass spectrometry, you can actually get a better idea of what is in your samples.
00:17:38
Speaker
It's really cool. And like, yeah, that stuff is really cool. I actually did mercury analysis. So we use something called cold vapor atomic fluorescence spectroscopy, which is kind of niche even within chemistry is like really, yeah, it's, it's weird.
00:17:56
Speaker
But yeah, that kind of stuff is, yeah. But that never interested me. I liked archaeological theory and like history theory, you know, like putting the stuff together, like in a theory kind of way, and how data interacted with the modern world and how that was then reflected backwards.
00:18:15
Speaker
And I think that's what I really kind of think that we don't really, as a society in general, both I would say in Canada, in America and in the UK, I think there's definitely a kind of, there's not this kind of integration with
00:18:35
Speaker
the creation of history as a as a thing. A lot of people see history as just a retelling of events. And it's well just happened like that, you know, there's almost like an intuitive side to history. What's kind of your take on the sense of how history is created and people's intuitive response to history?
00:18:59
Speaker
I think that the statement that historians just are chroniclers of the things that happen is, it comes from an older school of the discipline. You have these books that came out in the late 19th, early 20th century, like the Annales School, where there's just like, here is the history of France in 15 volumes, each 1,000 pages long. But history has always been
00:19:28
Speaker
at least since big social science has taken over, this attempt to understand the past and by that being needed to go into more and more difficult to work with.
00:19:43
Speaker
sources, primary sources, since historians focus entirely on writing or at least heavily on writing as their primary source. And so the field has gone into all sorts of areas of how do you tell the story of people who, for example, don't have a writing system? And how do you tell stories of
00:20:04
Speaker
different aspects of society that people weren't writing about at the time, but you're trying to infer from understanding sources, things like race, things like gender, things like class. And that's sort of the really, really short history of the field. The field has always been hesitant of heavy theory, and there was this pushback against theory, but ever since about the 1990s, it's been coming in in a big way. And now many historians are
00:20:30
Speaker
of sort of post-structuralist in that sense, in my personal take, which comes from memory studies and a very, very post-modern idea, which is that there's this historian by the name of Hayden White, who I think recently passed away, but one of his things that he was a philosopher of history and the most poignant thing he wrote about was how
00:20:53
Speaker
History, the actual writing of history, is never going to be a 100% accurate representation of the past. It's just as good as you can do. And that is always well and good. But all at the same time, it's written by humans. And the ways that we structure events together is always going to be a form of storytelling, which means that history can be studied as a form of literature, like an English professor or something like that.
History as Narrative and Activism
00:21:19
Speaker
And in my mind,
00:21:22
Speaker
since I study memory studies, that mixed with this idea to say that history is very much how we craft the narratives of how we understand our own past, which means that it is just as how we fight about different Star Wars as we either like or don't like,
00:21:41
Speaker
part of a cultural understanding of how we see ourselves, and that is very much a deeply political battle of deeply in need of activists. Because if you treat yourself like you're being objective, just like you are, just like an author who claims they're not being political, you're going to end up with making a lot of careless mistakes. I find very many times that I am
00:22:11
Speaker
my work especially is my attempting to take a narrative of the past and looking at how our society has constructed the story of it and picking that apart and finding out where it doesn't work and where it's been constructed to serve other ends because it's a story meant to help us understand who we are today, not so much the
00:22:34
Speaker
the exhaustive, endless retelling of every single thing that happened because it's impossible. I always want to be like, well, this story we tell about ourselves has some problems. It ignores these things. These things happen to have all of the people who are oppressed in society in it. Maybe we should pay some more attention to that.
00:22:54
Speaker
I mean, you've basically described the premise of this podcast show. Like that's the whole point of modern myth is that we have so many modern myths that even the creation of history itself is a modern myth, the modern myth of objectivity. And I think this is something really special, but it's difficult because it sounds really meta to talk about now the
00:23:20
Speaker
you know, you're creating, you create content, you create YouTube videos, and obviously you're telling a story in those YouTube videos about other stories that are created, you know, which are then
00:23:33
Speaker
if they're based off primary and secondary sources are also based off other stories from history as well. There's a wee bit of a kind of like a fractal nature to it. But like, how, how do you how would you plan out your YouTube your videos? Like, do you how do you kind of how do you pick and choose which stories or narratives that you want to deal with?
00:23:58
Speaker
Okay. To start, I should mention that just because I'm seeing things in stories and narrative doesn't mean that I'm fudging the numbers or trying to take any facts out of the story. I'm not saying that that's what you said, but I'm saying that somebody who
00:24:12
Speaker
listen to this conversation might walk away with that interpretation. I would say that the story that I tell is accurate and based in up-to-date historical research. I do a lot of work and I interview a lot of historians for my videos in order to make sure of that. What I do when I'm trying to make a video
00:24:29
Speaker
is oftentimes I collect stories through various different means either it's something that I've always found interesting or something that is interesting going on in our current moment that hasn't been examined in a big way and is leading us in a bad direction or
00:24:46
Speaker
something to that extent, or something that people aren't looking at, or people don't find interesting that I think they should. I then go into the research to find out what's going on in this field. Usually, it's something that some ways already given me a little bit of a tease note. There's something more to the story than just what the common conception of it is, and then I will
00:25:09
Speaker
interview some experts. I will read some books. I'll write a script and go from there. For example, the video I just released is about socialism and how about how in the United States everyone's talking about socialism right now. But then the way they talk about it is they're talking about gulags and
00:25:29
Speaker
and bread lines. It's like, okay, this is not how socialism works. That's a very gross simplification of the worst parts. I decided to dig into that and break that apart to show how this is a much more big and diverse thing than it turned out to be.
00:25:46
Speaker
you know, to spoiler alert for next month, I'm going to look into Dinesh D'Souza and how he has selectively edited American history to support a right wing agenda. So that kind of stuff, that's the kind of stuff that I'm interested in these days. I used to be a lot more like
00:26:05
Speaker
homework help type stuff, even as recently as like last fall, making videos on things like the Zhou dynasty and stuff like that and trying to force it into a relevant story. But I don't think my heart was in it. And that's not what my viewers wanted. So now I'm trying to work much harder to make things much more connected to what's going on.
00:26:26
Speaker
No, I understand. And I think it also reflects like my, like I've now written for journals, I've written for books about podcasting and archaeology, that's kind of like been some of the research that I've done. And there is, there used to be a lot more kind of in what I call institutional content of like, here are the facts, here is the research that is going on. And that's kind of morphed recently into much more content that's about
00:26:56
Speaker
almost like a personality based content that's more about things that you wouldn't come across in a kind of institutional way. Like, you're never going to have the British Museum talk about decolonizing itself and getting rid of its own items, even though it should. And, you know, you have this change in how people are presenting, they're presenting shows like, well, when I created this show, originally The Anarchologist in 2014,
00:27:26
Speaker
I made it because there wasn't a show discussing the political and social side of archaeology and I've now seen people start taking on those things like you described, taking on things that are much more
00:27:42
Speaker
almost like activism, in a sense, but not in a crude way, not in a very refined way talking about things, not just in not just for the sake of pushing a certain agenda, but actually breaking things down and showing how narratives are created. How do you feel since you started the channel? How do you feel that the online space on YouTube about history and those kind of talks changed? How's that kind of developed?
00:28:12
Speaker
Well, that's a good question. When I first came on YouTube, history space was very small. It was predominantly people just reposting torrented versions of history channel documentaries.
00:28:29
Speaker
But also, there was just like, there was a very history channel aspect to a lot of the content that was coming out. Like I don't fault this because my bosses and also the content is great, but like Kings and Generals, the huge YouTube channel that does exactly what it says on the tin. It is wars, it is maps, it is arrows, it is soldiers. That's what you're getting. And a lot of YouTube history when it first started was a lot of that. It was a lot of
00:28:57
Speaker
let's let's go over kind of like how in science let's go over uh how a supernova happens all the time it's like let's go over the battle of hastings for the 40th time or whatever
00:29:06
Speaker
And I thought that there was a lot of room to explore other things, because like historians, like I came from the history classroom, where everyone was talking about, oh, like, let's study the way that proto feminism was developing in 18th century America through letter writing. And then I come on to YouTube, and it's like, the Roman legions against the Huns or whatever. And I was just like, okay, this is this, this is a voice that needs to be in there. And also what I came across in that period,
00:29:35
Speaker
which is much more sinister, is attempts to take the narrative, the common conception of history, which is usually fairly nationalistic and right-leaning, and stepping on it even more. I saw lost causes, who are people who have a more sympathetic view of the Confederacy and the American Civil War. You had the typical right-wing
00:29:57
Speaker
rewriting of history about the Democratic Party, being like not understanding the southern strategy, or other things like even darker places like where you're getting onto Holocaust denial.
00:30:10
Speaker
other very important topics. There was just not a lot of historians who were very politically active that were doing more of this TV show type stuff, but there wasn't really anybody going into that vein. I would say today that there are two, maybe three YouTubers who are really doing that.
00:30:29
Speaker
Today, though, history is a lot bigger and a lot of people are exploring more different topics, so I'm glad that the variety of what is available for historians are getting up there. I love that we have everything from kings and generals, which is still making great content, to a 16-year-old English girl who's
00:30:48
Speaker
making videos specifically to fill in all of the questions and summarize the notes of the British standardized testing history classes. And I love that we've got everything in between those two.
00:31:03
Speaker
That channel's called a long long time ago, I highly recommend it. I am trying to, at least in the ecosystem, I'm trying to carve out a niche as the guy who straddles this world and the new and upcoming
00:31:20
Speaker
I guess it's not so much new or upcoming anymore, but the growing germinating space of what's called BreadTube colloquially, the leftist YouTube space. I've been trying to straddle that line for a few years now. I think I've fallen more into the BreadTube space, but I think that grounding myself in history still means that I live in those two worlds.
00:31:43
Speaker
Yeah, no, I can see that. I mean, I want to pick up on some of the stuff that you've talked about that's quite dark and dangerous just for a little bit. And I feel like this is something that I've tried to tackle in what I do. You know, I've talked about repatriation, I've talked about the need of
00:32:07
Speaker
promoting indigenous voices. I think it's really important that, you know, things like, you know, what cheddar man has resurfaced again, I don't know if you remember cheddar man. I do. Yes, that's just for it was the skull was discovered in England that it turned out that through DNA testing that British people had a bit more of a tan complexion, you know, several thousand years ago, and that
00:32:33
Speaker
made people have a meltdown because pasty white skin is so pretty or something. I think I think the ultimately the thing was that like, oh, you know, the the DNA basically said that definitely dark complexion with blue eyes, the dark complexion blue eyes was really interesting. Because a lot of people have thought that the blue eyes kind of came from Anatolian farmers who'd come over. But
00:33:00
Speaker
and thousands of years ago, whereas it seems as if the genetic blueprint for pale eyes or blue eyes seemed to almost already be there and it was also coinciding with darker complexion.
00:33:19
Speaker
I tried to make fun of it and I tried to kind of call it out but I don't, looking back now, I don't think it was as effective a way of doing it because I basically was saying this is ridiculous but I realise now, having looked back on that, I think the problem with things like, for example, Cheddar Man
00:33:40
Speaker
you know, they're the main points were intuitively, why would cheddar man be black and an ancestor for people in Britain if people are Britain or white, you know, of course, people if you're British, you're white, you know, that's the intuitive answer. That's the well, the answer. And I think you almost have to you almost have to say, well, like, I know most people think
00:34:06
Speaker
British people are white by default. But history isn't, it's not as clear in history, where these DNA strands go. And it's not you can't you don't when you're talking about the Neolithic, you can't talk about black and white because those categories did not exist. But it's difficult to get that pass that intuitive kind of sense, isn't it?
00:34:30
Speaker
Yeah, this is one of the more frustrating conversations to have on the internet because this isn't a perfect example of the concept of the social construction. There's a weird segment of the internet that seems not only to not understand what social constructions are, but are very opposed to the idea
00:34:52
Speaker
mostly because discussions about it have been used to try to be inclusive to trans people, but the use of social constructions and how race as a category is one that is created and one that's created out of colonization, which was ... I mean, maybe I got my timeline mixed up, but quite a few years after the Neolithic age,
00:35:16
Speaker
And so, yeah, I think that that is an interesting – to me, that sounds like a cool video where you would talk about how race is a category that we create socially by using the example of Cheddar Man and his adoption.
00:35:39
Speaker
are the controversy surrounding him. I think that's a good example of the kind of topic that I would go for with my channel. I mean, what's frustrating is that when I – I remember exactly somebody today or yesterday was annoying me about it. I mean, what frustrated me is I go straight to the – if I go to the – I went to the Twitter profile and I mean, the first thing I read is like, Trotsky invented the word racism to be anti-European.
00:36:08
Speaker
Like, ugh, it was awful. And it was like, Holocaust? Which Holocaust? And I'm like, oh, okay, so this is this kind of person, you know? You know what I mean? Like, but it's difficult for me to say to other people, like, this person is a Holocaust denier. Oh, no, Tristan, you're just being, you just don't like his him challenging your cheddar man opinion. I'm like, no, he's actually, he's actually a bloody Holocaust denier, you know?
00:36:36
Speaker
It's weird, but we've seeded so much conversations to the right now that in some circles of the internet where a lot of young men are being radicalized, you actually now the video has to be made to explain why the Holocaust happened and you have to make the case for it because apparently we're not done with that conversation.
00:36:58
Speaker
And I think that the important to do this kind of work, like the work you do Tristan is like, that felt so self-indulgent of how important Tristan's work is. That the work that needs to be done shows that we've seeded a lot of ground in these conversations to
00:37:23
Speaker
reactionaries, nationalists, and in an age where they're emboldened, where they're committing more acts of racialized violence.
00:37:34
Speaker
and the rise of very overt sexism, transphobia, homophobia, that these are areas of the world that these people have been around for ages. These are stories that exist and we need to be intervening to talk about it in some way. And so the fact that we still have to talk about the Holocaust doesn't, I mean, the first instinct is to sigh and be like, are we still having this conversation? And the second one is,
00:38:04
Speaker
I guess somebody's going to have to have this conversation, and I have to now make a video about why this is wrong. You're going to get a thousand angry comments. You're going to get people threatening to kill you on the internet. That's always fun. All these things are going to happen, and you need to do it.
00:38:26
Speaker
Otherwise, there's nobody stepping in to stop the curious teenager going on YouTube looking for, looking about history of World War II. And you got to stop them from stumbling upon like, I don't know, Black Pigeon Speaks or something and ending up going down a dark hole so that you have to put
00:38:44
Speaker
less dark holes around for them to fall into instead. And then it's, it's on to the pipeline. It's on to the algorithm. And then you have like, Stephanie, he was like, Well, I was recently in Poland. And guess what? There's no there's no crime in Poland. Why is there no crime in Poland? Because it's 99% white. What a wonderful society. I'm an empiricist. You know, that kind of weird kind of like, it comes back to the objectivity thing, doesn't it? It's
00:39:12
Speaker
Oh, it's yeah. But should who who do you feel your audience are? Who should we be? Who should we be talking to? Because I don't know if I can actually get to those angry young men or women who are being sucked
Radicalization and Audience Engagement
00:39:31
Speaker
up and radicalized by like far right ideas. Like I don't know if I can make content that
00:39:40
Speaker
really deals with a Holocaust denier, I can get somebody who knows that the Holocaust denial is wrong. But who should we be talking to? Who needs to hear this? Well, there's an interesting aspect, because one of the things that comes up is you make these videos that argue for these things, and then you find out that
00:40:02
Speaker
nobody who disagrees is watching but what you can say is that you are inoculating people you are giving them weapons to because in my mind I think that a lot of times talking somebody out of being radicalized sometimes you can do with media if you catch people at the right right time like
00:40:20
Speaker
young people, teenagers, especially men, especially people who have low to no economic prospects, who feel like they've been cheated by the world because of capitalism, but they don't know that yet. They can stumble upon content and they can come back. I do have some teenagers in my audience. I do feel like their memes make no sense to me, but I feel like I've pushed them at least in a
00:40:49
Speaker
Away from a dark direction in life, but also the same time there are a lot of people who are our age in their 20s or in my case 30s who are Millennials who have also gotten a raw deal in life and are looking for what's wrong with the world and It's still very easy. In fact, I would probably say in the case of like older people It's really easy to convince them that you know, it's it's this group of people. It's this group of people and so
00:41:17
Speaker
In many ways, getting through to those people who are older is about personal conversations. It's about being – I think on average it takes about 100 interactions with an opposing idea for you to actually change your mind on something once it's been entrenched.
00:41:38
Speaker
You might be number 100, that'd be nice, but oftentimes you're somewhere in the middle and what you can do is give the people in those people's lives the ammunition, the talking points that they need to have those conversations. That's why I'm still, even if I'm preaching to the choir, so to speak, at least I'm still helping the process.
00:42:03
Speaker
I think it's important to, obviously I completely agree with you that a lot of the times people are vulnerable because of their material conditions, but I think we can't shy away from people who are actually in comfortable positions.
00:42:20
Speaker
and are still being attracted to this, you know, because the perceived slight against them is manufactured, you know, it's not even like, I mean, I've seen people who are financially pretty well off they've, you know, they've got stuff in life, and yet, they're heading up right wing think tanks, they're, you know, doing horrible things, you know, because they, you know, maybe they don't
00:42:46
Speaker
they think they should have women at their feet, maybe they think they should have even more power, you know? It's almost like there are so many kind of unifying things that happen on the right. I feel like the right always have the ability to unify much easier than the left. I feel I don't know if you feel that as well, but I feel like
00:43:08
Speaker
when conservatives, traditionalists, alt-right, neo-Nazis, they all seem to have lines that they can link up on. But it's not so easy when you're trying to break that apart, because anywhere on that spectrum, anywhere in that space, there's common themes that hold them together. Do you see what I'm saying?
00:43:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think that the reason that happens is because there's a lot of the social constructs who live in help you default back to that line of thinking.
00:43:49
Speaker
If you live in a culture like the one that I live in, like the one that you live in, where white supremacy is default, where settler colonialism is default, where sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, it's all the default position, it's easier to double down on the things that already exist than to try and make big change in the other direction. If there's any way that we can fix that is that it's culture.
00:44:19
Speaker
We are – you're a podcaster. I'm a YouTuber. We literally are culture. We are the people making culture now. The best thing that I think we can do is add to the culture of the ideas that permeate society and try and push them in a more positive direction. Unfortunately, and this is the part where this whole thing is difficult, is that the people on the other side are much richer and have way more
00:44:46
Speaker
money to advertise for things. That makes an uphill battle, but also not one that we can give up on it. If you know of any solution, I would recommend that you write to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. They might have an award for you if you can actually solve all of these societal issues.
00:45:10
Speaker
Unfortunately, there's no silver bullet, unfortunately. I'm very much of the opinion that if there's a plurality of creators out there, that really assists
00:45:26
Speaker
in the kind of information and message that can get out there. I think that I think we need to have lots of different ways of communicating history and lots of different forms of communicating it. I mean, what would you say to somebody who wants to
00:45:46
Speaker
Maybe somebody who wants to start something like this, somebody who wants to start a history YouTube channel, like somebody who wants to create content. What are your kind of like, I don't want to say tips, but tips is probably the best one. How does somebody go about that? How does someone start that kind of stuff? What should they be thinking about? I get this question all the time and I've prepared statements.
00:46:10
Speaker
The first thing that I think a lot of people need to do at the very beginning when they're thinking about making content is decide whether this is a thing that you want to pursue as a drive in your life. Is this something you want to make a career out of or is this artistic expression, something you just want to do for fun? If it's something you want to do for fun,
00:46:30
Speaker
make whatever you want, it's you, do you, that's fine. If it's something that you want to take very seriously, and by the way, I don't fault anybody for doing that. Artists making what they want to make is what makes a lot of the world a better place. I know that a lot of people go into a space like YouTube and they want to build careers out of this stuff, and that's a tougher place to exist in. I would say that
00:46:55
Speaker
The thing that – the number one advice is don't get discouraged because most people drop out because they get discouraged. You have to be able to withstand months of bad views, years possibly. You have to deal with – even when you're successful, you might have to deal with a video. You put 100 hours into getting no views and another one that you put five minutes into getting 100,000
00:47:20
Speaker
Maybe just Patreon drops, all sorts of stuff that can grind you down. First of all, to do this, you'll have to have a bit of an iron resolve because the internet is a cruel place and will grind you to the bone. The other thing is to know where you are going to place yourself. There's a wonderful book called How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
00:47:45
Speaker
One of my favorite books, by the way, which says that the importance of a book is sometimes, actually in many times, almost as much about where it fits in a discussion rather than the actual content of the book itself. Understanding where the book belongs in context to other books is a huge deal. If in a media ecosystem, a YouTube ecosystem, a podcast ecosystem, you need to know
00:48:14
Speaker
what everybody is doing, what field you want to go into and what's going on. And then once you have an idea, you have to think about then where do you fit in that? And there are different strategies you can use to figure out what you can do. You can I think I boiled them down to three main ones.
00:48:33
Speaker
One is the hardest, which is doing something that no one's ever done before. That is looking at the whole ecosystem and saying, all right, I'm going to do something no one has ever heard of before in their entire lives.
Content Creation Strategies
00:48:46
Speaker
These are the people who do weird experimentation and all sorts of pushing the medium forward in ways to change things. These are the real pioneers.
00:48:56
Speaker
Most of the time, it's really hard and doesn't work, but for the people where it does work, they become the true greats. The second is to take what somebody else is doing and do it better. If you are the best
00:49:12
Speaker
you know, archaeology podcast on the iTunes Play Store, that's going to give you some cache. But to be the best, you're going to have to make everything a hit, you're going to have to have the most polish, the most work, everything's going to have to be amazing. And unfortunately, in a lot of these ecosystems, that is very gated by money, because all the top podcasts are now taken up by radio stations and
00:49:39
Speaker
all the top YouTubers are now late night talk show hosts. Even in MySpace and YouTube, the biggest YouTube channels in MySpace are run by PBS and Complexly, which is the company started by Hank and John Green. In BreadTube, it's
00:49:58
Speaker
It's Philosophy Tube and ContraPoints, both of them who have a team of people who make each of their videos and spend thousands of dollars on props and hire research assistants and have editors. That stuff is not cheap. That is the option if you have a crap ton of money and you want to invest in something big.
00:50:22
Speaker
It's not the easiest option. Is that a request, Tristan? Please, please invest in me. I mean, someone wants to. I'm not complaining. But the next angle, and this is the next angle I would go down, and this is one that I think is one of the better ideas people go for, which is to take two ideas of things that are going on and see where they meet together.
00:50:48
Speaker
Very much, this will come out of your own personal interests. I am a YouTuber, or I made a YouTube channel where I'm a historian who also happens to give a lot of shit about politics and the way the world is, and is always mad at the oppression and cruelty towards people who don't deserve it.
00:51:11
Speaker
I merged that into a YouTube channel that sticks out from other YouTube channels in the history sphere because I get to be that Howard Zinn of YouTube history, I should say. If that's a thing you can do, if you can figure out the chocolate peanut butter strategy, if you will, that'll help. I think that's a really great issue to look for.
00:51:34
Speaker
you know, different strategies for different people. And but those are the three. And actually, all of those come from science. Because that's basically how evolutionary strategies work. That's really good. No, it's a really full answer. I was Yeah, that's, I mean, this is the it's quite similar to the kind of advice that I give to people. I've done a couple of workshops before by podcasting and really, you know, the technical aspects to it are not as important as like,
00:52:03
Speaker
trying to make up new ideas in like a full way, you know, like, it's not enough just to have the title of a video, you have to do the research, you have to have the script. You know, there's so much that goes into it. And a lot of people they know the first five shows or episodes going to be but they have no idea what their 20th is, you know,
00:52:25
Speaker
and like it's changes over time like this is much easier to do on a new platform as it's taking off but like you could literally just like talk talk like bullshit with your friends for two hours in a podcast if you had released it in 2008 but now it's 2020 and you've got
00:52:45
Speaker
you have NPR making fully casted radio documentaries featuring celebrities and things like that. We're in a post serial podcast universe where you have to deal with the fact that every Tom, Dick, and Harriet, as I heard yesterday, Hillary Clinton apparently are going to have a podcast. No, no, no. No, no. She should be banned from the podcast scene. Oh, man. Can't wait.
00:53:12
Speaker
Although, you know, I really want to point out here that my first podcast started in 2008, and it was a recording of me and my friends just talking, and it just goes to show you that it can also fail. Don't worry, even if you're at the start of everything, it can fail as well.
00:53:32
Speaker
the strategy when you go forward. You then also have to make stuff that people want to consume. I think that's the other piece of advice I'd give forward because a lot of people who want to take this content seriously, they want to make stuff because they enjoy the craft of making content. I get that. I have that fun. I like editing videos. I like writing. I like researching.
00:53:49
Speaker
But then also, you have to, and this is the big difference I see between creators who don't go very far on those who do, and that is thinking about what you're doing from the other person's perspective and realizing that you're not, if you really are serious about what you want to do, you're not making this content just for yourself. If you are, that's great, and I recommend that you do that, but then if you do that and nobody is checking it out,
00:54:15
Speaker
don't blame the world for not understanding your perfect vision. When you're making content to get out there, you have to see things from their point of view. When I make videos,
00:54:30
Speaker
I love to make videos about all sorts of things. I've been wanting to make a video about Don Carlos, who's the only Native American to ever be executed by the Spanish Inquisition as part of the spiritual conquest of Mexico. Love to make that video. No one would watch it because that is not a thing that resonates with anybody in our day and age.
00:54:52
Speaker
The things that you talk about need to be relevant to people who are searching out this kind of content, which means that I have to think about what they want and where that, in my interests, overlap. That's where you're really going to find the content that you want to make. Definitely. I was wondering, here's a little bit more technical question. Are you familiar with Fukuyama?
00:55:15
Speaker
Yes, I actually just quoted him in my latest video.
00:55:32
Speaker
It's fresh on my mics that came out an hour, about two hours ago now. So through the power of Tristan Mindmelt, we were able to kind of have these talking points already pre-made. And do you – obviously Fukuyama, for listeners, basically talked about the end of history, which was – would you mind briefly explaining what Fukuyama meant?
Critique of 'End of History' Thesis
00:56:01
Speaker
a little country called the United Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed. With it was basically the end of this little geopolitical tiffy called the Cold War, in which the popular idea afterwards was that communism socialism is done. We're done. Cold War is over. Fukuyama took that to the next degree and he published a book called The End of History and the Last Man.
00:56:26
Speaker
which was a book that argued that, well, now that the Cold War is over, we have now proven, to be honest, shadow of a doubt, that capitalism and liberal democracy is the best political economic system that could ever exist. Now that we have stumbled upon the perfect system, history is over. There's not going to be any more big political grand stories anymore because we're just going to be just improving things around the edges because we solve the big question.
00:56:56
Speaker
But, obviously, big question mark over that. Do you think history's restarted itself? I mean, there were thinking face emojis showing up even when that book was published. A lot of people were like,
00:57:15
Speaker
dude, what? But some people in really bad ways. Like Samuel Huntington, I think, is one of the most famous responses to Fukuyama, where he said, actually, no, because there's these cultures that have Muslims in them and they're
00:57:30
Speaker
fundamentally opposed to freedom. It's a wonderful book called The Clash of Civilizations. I recommend you never read that book ever. That says similar things about how Chinese culture is incompatible with democracy and liberal capitalism.
00:57:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's not good. The biggest opponent to Fukuyama's claim in the end of history though now is this obscure political scientist by the name of Francis Fukuyama.
00:58:03
Speaker
He's been doing some interviews probably in the last three or four years, basically since 2008 was I think when he started questioning his stuff. I think it was 2008 or 2009 when he recanted his support for the end of history of the perfect system when the entire financial system came crumbling to the ground.
00:58:22
Speaker
But then on top of that, he started doing interviews, like I think there was an interview on, I don't want to plug another person's podcast, but the Ezra Klein show where he interviewed Fukuyama and Fukuyama started from what I could tell, he was very concerned about income inequality. And I think last year it was that he
00:58:45
Speaker
said that socialism ought to make a comeback, which immediately started with the meme that Fukuyama announces history too.
00:58:56
Speaker
That's amazing. But that's so that's so interesting how I think that that goes to show how history is this narrative. You know what I mean? Like, for people who may be on this side of like, oh, well, no intuitively history is just history. The fact that Fukuyama could no longer be a is a post Fukuyama ist.
00:59:24
Speaker
in the sense that he's rehabilitated history shows you how how fluid history is and the concept of history. I think that's just something fascinating in that kind of situation. And I hope it kind of shows people who are not too clued up about history and theory and stuff and even politics to see right so this guy basically said end of history. Oh, he's not saying that anymore.
00:59:52
Speaker
I think there's something valuable in using that less and more than just a meme. I think it's actually a really good example of how that history happens.
01:00:09
Speaker
is the best system, the free market rules, everything else rules. The world we live in, that's great and everything's perfect. That weird happy feeling 90s thing where everyone was like, everything's great, don't worry about it. We've solved all the world's problems.
01:00:26
Speaker
is coming down, it's crashing down in the hugest way possible. In this period we're in right now, which I've dubbed the long 2016, is this time where the story that was pushed forward by so many world leaders that the market-based solutions are good, capitalism's good, everything's fine, don't worry about it.
01:00:48
Speaker
are now seriously being called into question because of income inequality, because of climate change, because of financial instability. There's a stock market crash happening as we speak right now. There's the rise of the far right and their fascism has made a comeback. All of these things are showing that this story that we crafted around ourselves, even when it wasn't true, even when
01:01:18
Speaker
Yugoslavia tore itself apart in the late 90s, even when the Taliban took over Afghanistan and al Qaeda started to become a stronger media operation, or a stronger and stronger terrorist organization, I should say.
01:01:34
Speaker
that in the West, we were saying, no, we solved it. Everything's good. Then, of course, the first crack in that mirror, I think, happened on September 11, 2001. I think it's been cracking ever since, and I think that now we're at the point where it's actually shattering. What happens next? We don't know. That's kind of
01:01:56
Speaker
probably the the underlying terror that everybody in the world is kind of feeling right now which is that we know that the order that we were raised on that our parents were raised on is gone and we kind of don't know what's next and some of the proposals are pretty damn scary
01:02:17
Speaker
is crazy. Well, I really want to thank you for coming to sit down and talk about these kind of things as a special little thing at the end. And do you have a question for me, Tristan? Is there anything you'd like to ask me? Oh, damn.
01:02:33
Speaker
I need a good chemistry question. No, I'm happy with archaeology. That's really my kind of like specialty. Chemistry is kind of sidelined at the moment, unless I pick up another chemistry book. Go on. What archaeology? Go on. All right. I've always been curious about what the real grown up archaeological description of the Antikythera mechanism is.
Antikythera Mechanism Discussion
01:03:02
Speaker
Oh, the weird, spinny, jingly thing that nobody knows how it works? Yeah, I wonder what the grown-ups have been saying about it and not the people with weird haircuts on the History Channel. No, it's a weird, spindly, jingly thing that we don't actually know how it works. It's still a mystery, in a sense, and that's one of the more interesting things about it.
01:03:27
Speaker
The Antifika mechanism is something that we don't have very many, I think we've only really got one example of it and a couple of cogs elsewhere, you know? And what makes it really special is that usually in history, we usually have comparative samples, we usually have ways of kind of discovering
01:03:49
Speaker
through comparison or of other incomplete things we can kind of piece together a bigger picture but with that mechanism we've only really found one almost complete part of it and everything else is really in pieces so I think nobody's really too sure and I think that's quite a nice place to be because
01:04:16
Speaker
the more stretching you do with these kind of unknowns, the closer to the history channel you get. Your hair becomes wilder and suddenly it's like, well, it seems that this should be an example of
01:04:33
Speaker
extraterrestrial connections. And you're like, yeah, it's just a really smart piece of hardware. You know, like, I think I think there's a mistake in history that people treat people in the past as stupid. And I legitimately think
01:04:49
Speaker
that people think that we've become more and more intelligent as the years have gone past. I really don't think that's true. You try to live five minutes in the middle of nowhere in a loincloth.
01:05:09
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, sorry. Go on. So then I guess like – because like the two takes that I would think about with that Antikytherin mechanism was like either it shows that the Greeks were – the technology levels of that period might have been bordering on something much more interesting if their society had kept functioning or the other one is that some is singular, extremely smart individual made a cool thing.
01:05:36
Speaker
Yeah. And I see this is the thing is that like, individual I try and stay away from individuals because of this great man theory of history, this idea that there are these special individuals that throughout history have pushed humanity further and further. I think that's a really problematic way of looking at history. And I feel like
01:06:02
Speaker
it's very much in the vein of how history has been written. You know, history has very much been written about, oh, well, then we, you know, like, oh, Newton, and then Einstein, and then, and you know, these people did make amazing contributions. And in some cases, they did push our understanding of certain things forward. But I think we need to be really careful about assigning an individual to like a jump in
01:06:29
Speaker
I don't even know if you can capture technology, you know? It's a difficult question because to me, technology is not like in civilization five or six, you know, where you have a technology tree that's a predefined path that you kind of, well, you level up this and then you get this and then you level up this, you know? It's much more murky than that, you know?
01:06:54
Speaker
So it probably wasn't some wizard or something. I'm leaning away from wizard, but as any good archaeologist, I'm not discounting it. We could have wizards. I don't have any evidence against that. But it's definitely not aliens, but it could be wizards. Oh, of course not.
Closing and Farewell
01:07:30
Speaker
Do you know, it's actually, Romeo's not the first cat to be on the podcast. I've had a number of cats chime in on the podcast. So Romeo, he'll get a credit as well. And I will make sure to include the credit this time. I was told off because I didn't properly credit the cat last time. So don't worry, Romeo will get his moment.
01:07:39
Speaker
I just thought it could have been just some Da Vinci type person who's none of his work survived or something.
01:07:53
Speaker
Alright. Thank you. No worries. Well, thank you very much for talking to us. Can you just let us let people know where they can find your work? Sure. Yeah. If you want to find my YouTube channel where I do my YouTube-ing primarily, it is at stepbackhistory.com. And if you want to see me do a bunch of 2020 malarkey posting on Twitter, you can go to some pj on Twitter. Excellent. Thank you very much. Thank you. This was fun.
01:08:23
Speaker
Can't you see that the truth will set you free? Expose this water bill for me!
01:08:53
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.