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It's Hardcore History, with Dan Carlin
3.6k Plays1 year ago
Who was the most influential person in history? Why do empires fall? What is the biggest misconception about WWI? Napoleon or Alexander the Great? And why are men so obsessed with the Roman Empire?
All these questions (and more) are answered by the host of Hardcore History, Dan Carlin. Hardcore History is widely recognised as one of the greatest podcasts of all-time. It reimagined the telling of history for the modern media age.
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Transcript
History Education's Decline
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston. The study of history is on the decline in most Western education systems. It's a tragedy, but perhaps a predictable one. From my experience at least, schools focus on primary and secondary sources, on fragments of pottery, on tedious historiography. In other words, on the discipline of history.
00:00:40
Speaker
What educators have forgotten is that the enduring appeal of history is that it is a collection of wonderful stories. Stories that can inspire, that can terrify, that can entertain, and that can make us reflect on the world today.
Dan Carlin's Storytelling Success
00:00:54
Speaker
Without a shred of hyperbole, there is no one better in the world at telling history stories than my guest today, Dan Carlin. Dan is the host of Hardcore History, which is widely acclaimed as one of the best podcasts of all time. It has reimagined the telling of history in the modern media age. Dan, welcome to Australia. Well, thank you for that wonderful introduction. We can only go down from there, it seems like.
00:01:21
Speaker
No, I have very high hopes indeed. We have 10 questions for you. The only thread that binds them together is my own curiosity. So they will bounce around from theme to theme, which is very in keeping with a hardcore history conversation.
Pandemics and Historical Hubris
00:01:38
Speaker
Question one, there's a poignant snippet in your book, The End Is Always Near. It was published in 2019 and that's relevant here. So I quote, one of the things I kept noticing when burrowing into the archives was a recurring, unanswerable, either or historical question. Will things keep happening as they always have or won't they? Will we ever have the type of pandemic that rapidly killed large percentages of the population?
00:02:06
Speaker
This was a feature of normal human existence until relatively recently. It seems almost like science fiction to imagine today. I must admit that I had a wry smile reading which I imagine was written mere or months before COVID. My question is, what lessons from history did Western society ignore during the pandemic?
00:02:27
Speaker
Well, I think just what you just mentioned, right? And I like that choice that, you know, obviously I like it, I wouldn't have used it otherwise, but I mean, the idea that there are two things that can happen, and I find both of them equally fascinating. When you talk about the past and the present and the future, one is that things will continue to happen as they always had, which is both fascinating and terrifying, because as you mentioned, you look at past pandemics and you read about them and it's terrifying,
00:02:52
Speaker
or they won't happen as they've always happened before. In other words, we will enter into a period where the future is unlike the past in terms of everything that's always... In other words, we're going to have pandemics or we're not going to have pandemics, and either one of those is fascinating to me. When I wrote that, the book came out about three or four months before the pandemic hit. We'd probably written that about eight or nine months before it hit.
00:03:16
Speaker
and i gotta tell you even though we wrote it that way i was just as shocked as everybody else and i was talking and i won't mention any names but i was talking to some very intelligent people the first week of the pandemic really smart people who were telling me this was going to be no big deal i mean one week into it so i think that's a wonderful example of
00:03:36
Speaker
maybe we could call it human hubris. To me, that is one of the consistent aspects of history, is that we human beings tend to get a little full of ourselves, assume we know more than we do, and oftentimes, and you'll see this over and over again. I always think about it when the Germans invade Russia in the Second World War, the Soviet Union, and when somebody says, you shouldn't invade the Soviet Union in winter, look at history.
00:04:02
Speaker
The attitude is always the same. You say because of things that have changed, whether it's armor or air power or modern logistics, those past lessons of Charles the 12th or Napoleon, all of those things are null and void now, and then you go and invade Russia in winter, and look what happens. I feel like that level of human hubris is one of those constants in history, and I think we saw it demonstrated again with the recent pandemic. The ongoing pandemic might be a good way to put it.
00:04:32
Speaker
That is obviously something which is deeply ingrained in our psyche, which is why I think you've said it's a constant. But do you think we are more willfully ignorant of history today than perhaps we once were? Or do you think that this is the way that it has always been?
00:04:48
Speaker
I don't know the answer to that question. I think certainly, because I remember interviewing the great science historian James Burke from the Connections series, The Day the Universe Changed, and he had this wonderful line that has stayed with me ever since. He said, you have to remember that when we talk about people who were thinking about these deep topics and these questions long ago, it is a really small
00:05:11
Speaker
little crust of the 1% in society because most people were too busy making a living farming whatever they were going to do these people that had free time to sit there and ruminate about the social sciences or the humanities or whatever it might have been was such a small subset of people and so I don't know I would say that
00:05:28
Speaker
Within that small subset of people, they were very interested in history. It's where the discipline really sort of found its legs and was very important and was seen to be important for the reasons that I would say it's still important, providing context and helping us understand how we got to where we are now. But I think the great mass of people are just trying to stay alive through most of history, and maybe you could make a comparison between those people and the people that are just trying to get home from
00:05:52
Speaker
you know working twelve hour days on the job and just don't want to think about anything to intellectually taxing because they've worked all day and they just want to forget about you know life for a while watch a little tv watch a little sports you know go out to the park with the kids whatever it might be so.
Fascination with Roman History
00:06:06
Speaker
So maybe there's a constant in that there's a group of people that have the time and the inclination to think about this stuff in a great mass of people who are busy doing other things understandably.
00:06:16
Speaker
Yeah, the rise of the laptop class as well as the internet and social media has potentially made history more accessible, which has widened the scope of history study. And that leads me to my second question, which is.
00:06:30
Speaker
The social media fad of the moment, which I'm sure you're aware of, is videos of wives asking their husbands how often they think of the Roman Empire and being shocked at how regularly, in fact, it does enter their husband or their partner's mind. So my question down is number two is, why are men so obsessed with the Roman Empire?
00:06:49
Speaker
Well, I'm not sure we're gonna talk about a subset of men here too. You mentioned wives asking their husbands I don't know if you can find that two different age brackets if it would have the same if you asked 18 to 20 year old guys if they're thinking about the Roman Empire that much
00:07:04
Speaker
I don't know. You talk to dads out there, and it's the Roman Empire and the Second World War. I say to my wife all the time, you can see that people are still interested in those subjects. I don't know what it's like in Australia, but in the United States, bookstores are a vanishing breed. You go into them now and they're selling toys
00:07:22
Speaker
and journals and coffee and the book section is shrinking more and more but there is always a healthy section on the second world war and rome and all those things in other words showing that there's sort of an internal interest among at least a subset of males in the society for those specific topics
00:07:40
Speaker
For me, my interest is less about the Roman Empire and more about the Roman Republic because I feel like I see certain similarities between what that republic went through and what we're going through now in the United States. That may be because all republics
00:07:55
Speaker
share certain similar dynamics. The Roman Empire doesn't mean as much to me because it seems like a very different system than what we have now, unless one wanted to make the case that what we have now transmits and transmutes into that later. But I think that there's a healthy feeling amongst people that it's just so freaking fascinating to look at something 2000 years old and realize how sophisticated without all of our modern tools, right? No computers,
00:08:22
Speaker
No space elements, no drones, no satellites, and yet look at what they were able to do. Yeah, I've listened to you describe naval battles, I think during the civil wars and just thinking through the logistics of how they coordinate naval battles, for example, without mobile phones or without any form of technology, it absolutely boggles your mind.
00:08:44
Speaker
I keep wondering if we could do it today. I mean, if you said, you think of some of the Persian armies during the Greek and Persian wars, obviously the size were exaggerated, but let's pretend they're 50,000 men, not the millions that Herodotus said, but let's just say 50,000 men. Try doing that today without iPads and laptops and computers. I mean, it's almost like throughout different eras in history, human beings managed to do the same things, but differently. I'll tell a story.
00:09:13
Speaker
news business. It was 1989 and I walked into a newsroom and they had three weeks before converted to computers. They had been writing things on whiteboards three weeks before I got there and they were just learning how to do it with computers when I walked in the door.
00:09:29
Speaker
They had told me then that if the whole system went down three weeks after we'd transmitted from the old system, they already couldn't go back and do it the old way. I wonder about whether it's the building of the pyramids or like you say, the creation of these massive fleets in the ancient world.
00:09:47
Speaker
They could do it their way, but if we were forced to jettison all of our modern tools where we would use those tools to do the same thing, could we do what they did? Could we build a pyramid without
From Journalism to Podcasting
00:09:57
Speaker
all of the modern architectural tools we would use to do that today? It's almost like lost knowledge and lost capabilities when you think about it, because you don't need them anymore. We didn't need those whiteboards in the newsroom once we transferred everything to the computers.
00:10:10
Speaker
You know you never know it like we said in the book about pandemics there may come a time when you're forced to go back to the way we used to do things and it's almost a lost sort of magic in the fact that you know i'm not sure we could even remember how. I don't think we could how did you go from a current journalism to your current incarnation as historical podcaster.
00:10:32
Speaker
You know, I have to think about that a minute because even journalism, it was one of those things where you graduate with a history degree from college and you go, well, what do I do with this? And I ended up getting into the television news business. And then you find out that a lot of the reporters and the journalists that you most admire were also history majors. And, you know, they used to use that line that journalism is the first draft of history. So in a weird way, having the first draft of history being done by people with history backgrounds makes a little sense.
00:11:00
Speaker
So I got into news, I was doing journalism, I was doing news reporting. Then I was offered the chance, and this happens more often than you might think, to do talk radio from that and talk about current events and things going on in the world. And history made so much sense in trying to sort of, and I'm a history guy anyway, so that's how I make sense of the world. But I mean, it made so much sense when you're talking about current events to contextualize them by talking about how we got to where we are today.
00:11:27
Speaker
I remember a news guy that I really admired telling me, I'm not so sure he really liked my analysis of current events, but he said, the thing you do best is the contextualization and the bringing history into it. When podcasting came around, we got into it really early, like 2005. The first show we did was essentially the same radio show that I was doing.
00:11:49
Speaker
I could already tell that the new medium was going to provide us an opportunity maybe to do a show that was just about the contextualization part and not about just using that as a tool of analysis, but really going into those events and playing around with them a little bit. Now, obviously it's developed in ways that I never foresaw when we first started the Hardcore History Show, but I mean, that's sort of how you transmute yourself from a guy working in a newsroom in Los Angeles to a guy podcasting out of a studio in his house.
00:12:17
Speaker
It's interesting you use that word context because one of the funny things that's a joy for hardcore history listeners is you never really know where to start a story. And so you always seem to start earlier and
The Art of Storytelling in Podcasts
00:12:27
Speaker
earlier. And that's one reason why these podcasts get longer and longer. It's interesting. It basically, I guess, is a reflection that history is continuously links in a chain and it's very hard to see where a chain may start.
00:12:40
Speaker
It's also why the shows get longer and longer in terms of the time between shows, I think. But you're absolutely right. And I always tell the story about when we did the show, and I don't remember if it was five or six parts, we did a whole show on the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, but originally that was supposed to be a show about Cleopatra. And I couldn't figure out where to start it, and it kept going farther and farther back because what you want to do is set up all of the threads.
00:13:06
Speaker
that form that rope that exists by the time you get to the later Roman Republic. But boy, it's a connect the dots kind of thing and you can take it back to Romulus and Remus if you're not careful. But I do think that that's a wonderful example. And when you study historiography, the writing of history, one of the things that they point out to you is that one of the major
00:13:27
Speaker
deformations for lack of a better word that simply trying to do history creates is a historian having to try to figure out. Where do you start the story at what point do you decide you know here's the natural cutoff point it's you know we have these artificial things when you look at history and think about it like if you had a giant book that started at the beginning of human history and ended yesterday.
00:13:48
Speaker
you have to divide that into sort of chapters and sections and people figure out what one might consider a natural break, right? A world war or the fall of an empire. But all of those are artificial constructs that sort of impose a sense that there's an organization and an opening and a closing of periods and doors when in reality it's all one unbroken chain, isn't it? And so there's a deformation there that gives a false sense of structure to history
00:14:18
Speaker
Whereas we all know history is just sort of time flowing in an unbroken stream of events. And so I think that that's a problem when you sit there and go, I'm going to talk about the Mongols. Well, where do you start that story? Bit of a judgment call, right? So all you have to do is decide in which particular ways you feel comfortable deforming the story.
00:14:37
Speaker
Question three. In 2019, you developed a virtual reality experience designed to put the viewer deeply into the feeling of what it is like to be in trench warfare along the Western Front in World War One. What do most people today not understand about trench warfare?
WWI Trench Warfare Immersion
00:14:57
Speaker
That's a good question because I'm not exactly sure what most people understand. This is something we tried to portray in the first World War Show. It's a very different circumstance than the way human beings have been involved in warfare throughout most of their history. Warfare was, and I think I first read this in Gwen Dyer's series, War, where he talked about the difference between a really bad day
00:15:20
Speaker
in the ancient world right the day of the battle where it's going to be this horrible day but before that day and after that day it was not so terrible right i mean you're you you might be looking forward to the horribleness but the day before you're with your mates you're you're eating and drinking and and drilling or whatever you might do but in the first world war uh i think dire referred to it as the continuous front you're on station
00:15:44
Speaker
in these trenches for days on end. Under fire, under threat, in danger, it creates a sort of extended version of what most of human history's warfare looked like. The really bad day goes on for days and days and days, and it's a different kind of stress. And I've asked myself many times, would you rather be the Roman Republic soldier in the Punic Wars, going to have to face the Battle of Kene?
00:16:09
Speaker
which is going to be a really really really bad day or would you rather be in a trench for two weeks at a time and under fire and snipers and the shell fire of course for days on end hours on end you reach i think a different kind of a breaking point and a different kind of challenge and then of course you know we just mentioned shell fire that's the other thing the shell fire is unimaginable and i think in our first world war series and i think it's something we really tried to bring out in the immersive experience is trying to understand
00:16:38
Speaker
That kind of shellfire because we're never gonna have that kind of shellfire again and this was an interesting conversation I had with someone once cuz you don't think about it, but
00:16:46
Speaker
If you look at artillery, look at how it's used, for example, in the conflict right now between Russia and Ukraine. If you want to take out a target, it doesn't take too many shots fired from a single weapon to do that, right? If you don't hit it the first time, you'll zoom in on it the second or third time at the most and you'll take it out. But in the First World War, when you're looking at a very rudimentary form of modern artillery without the guidance systems, without the modern techniques for hitting targets, the way you hit them was saturating them.
00:17:16
Speaker
You'd take 500 guns and you'd shoot them for a week to saturate a target in the hopes to take out something we would take out in the first three shots with one gun today. So in other words, that kind of, and the word they used was drum fire. The kind of drum fire where it's going so fast, so loud, and so continuous that you can't even hear the individual shells hitting. We're never going to do that again.
00:17:38
Speaker
because you never have to do that again. So it becomes a unique human experience that's connected to that time, that war in that place. And that's something we tried to bring out in the immersive experience because I ask my, you know, this is what we sort of use to guide the immersive experience. I would ask myself, I would really like to know what that's like. And then we would try to see if there was a use in modern technology where we could replicate it enough so you'd get a sense of it. And the problem is you run into this barrier
00:18:06
Speaker
which is you're trying to create an experience that people would wanna try for themselves, but if you create too much fidelity, if you make it too much like the real thing, you won't wanna do it. So we had to try to figure out, I mean, I was asking, you know, I was always pushing for more realism, and at one point I kept saying, make the guns louder, make the explosions louder, and finally the guys at Skywalker Sound that we worked on this with,
00:18:28
Speaker
They said, Dan, we totally understand the desire for fidelity, but we're reaching the area where you will start to damage people's hearing if we do this. And I said, but that really happened. And they said, yes, but we're going to face lawsuits if it really happens during this experience. So, I mean, that's the funny thing is if you actually create a situation more like the real event, no one's going to want to do it, right? If I said, I'm going to put you in the real trench in the First World War so you can feel what it's like, you're probably going to bag out of that for completely understandable reasons.
00:18:57
Speaker
The feeling and the thought that I always think about when I think about the First World War is the moment climbing on the ladders over the trench and running into machine gun fire, the men at that time would have known that there is a very, very strong probability that they were going to die.
00:19:15
Speaker
No virtual experience game can possibly get you into that mindset, but my question is probably more how men and they are overwhelmingly men, how men approach death in warfare and how they think about it. Have you noticed in your study how that has changed over time or the mentality facing up to death? Have you noticed any themes around how that has either stayed the same or changed?
Culture's Role in Warfare Attitudes
00:19:37
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's, you know, and this is above my pay grade to try to figure out how this actually interconnects, but it's connected to culture, isn't it? I mean, when you look at the First World War and you look exactly what you looked at, the moment the whistle blows and you're going to go over the top, as they say, right over the top of the trench into the gunfire.
00:19:55
Speaker
I understand people doing that in the first couple of months of the war in 1914, because they don't know what to expect. What becomes hard for a modern person to understand is when they fully know what to expect and they continue to do it anyway, or when you watch the first, you go to like the Battle of the Somme, for example, and you watch the first two waves go over the top and not make it 50 yards, right? And the remnants come running back to the trench horribly mutilated
00:20:24
Speaker
and then it's your turn and you guys get up and do it too. Now, I don't want to minimize the fact that in that war, if you did not do it, they would often shoot you. I mean, they would line you up and shoot you. I have a book that I read. I can't remember. There's something like Shot at Dawn or I can't remember the name of it, but the whole book is about the process of shooting these people to make examples of them for others so that when others had second thoughts about going over the top, the choice
00:20:53
Speaker
inherently known was either I can take my chances going over the top and maybe dying or I will surely die afterwards if I refuse. I think that the people doing that then also were a product of their time period, right? A product of warfare when bright uniforms and a certain level of honor and a certain idea of what was expected and what was societally okay
00:21:19
Speaker
made it much tougher to turn around and go, to heck with that. I'm not going to do that because I don't think we do it today. I think a lot of people would turn around and look at everybody else in the face and go, listen, I'm not going to go. You won't go. What are they going to do? Shoot us all? I don't think that's the kind of thing that easily happened to people back then. And I think it took years of warfare before you started to see troops mutinying in the way I think we'd mutiny in the first few months.
00:21:45
Speaker
And I think that's probably tied to a combination of the culture and the punitive methods that happened to people, because I also don't think we would shoot our soldiers the way that they shot soldiers back then. But I absolutely don't think we'd do it today. Yes, well, I agree. And as an aside on the impact of culture on those sorts of decisions, I am aware that Australian soldiers held two accolades in the First World War.
00:22:08
Speaker
Number one, they had the highest rate of desertion of any country. And number two, they had the highest rate of sexually transmitted diseases of any country. So I'm not quite sure what that says about Australians, but I do know as a fact that those two things are correct.
00:22:21
Speaker
I will tell you something. I don't know what the sexually transmitted diseases thing signifies, but I do think the desertion might be, I think there's a certain level of independent thought that just says, I'm not doing that, right? I mean, there's a sort of a group thing that says, well, this is expected of me. This is what my society expects. My father was a soldier too. This is what, whereas I think, and I think it's the very American thing too, to turn around and go, not me, I'm out of here.
00:22:47
Speaker
One can suggest it's a very more modern way of thinking, and maybe these people who were parts of very old empires, which Britain and France and Russia and the Austro-Hungarians, these are all the Ottomans, these are all old empires with old imperial thinking and attitudes towards those sorts of affairs, whereas maybe newer countries like the United States and Australia and places like that were able to conjure up enough
00:23:13
Speaker
different outlooks that allowed them to say, I don't have to play that game. I mean, because again, I would suggest a generation later in the Second World War, a lot more people would have denied their officers orders to go over the top and just says, you can shoot me, but I'm not doing that.
00:23:29
Speaker
Yes, I agree. I think there's a lot in that. And it's it's also an interesting insight into not only how war reflects culture, how war can then help shape and develop culture by the myths that we tell and the myths around the irreverent anti-establishment Aussie soldier basically saying up yours to the English colonel. Yes, exactly.
00:23:52
Speaker
it both, I think, reflected, I think, emerging views at the time, but then also helped to accelerate that feeling as well. So there's, I guess, there's two elements to it. I've got a small trivial question for you for question four.
Decline of Empires: Past and Present
00:24:06
Speaker
Why do empires fall?
00:24:08
Speaker
Oh, there's a lot of good books on that and they disagree with each other. I think that's a case by case basis. I think we mentioned earlier about how I'm interested in the Roman Republic because you can see certain elements in it that seem to resonate with the United States today. And I can't decide whether that's just a convenient mirror that happens to be shining
00:24:31
Speaker
in that particular duality, or if that's an example of something like you just mentioned, maybe this is how republics or empires always fall. And so when you see another historical example of a republic or an empire, you see the same sorts of diseases cropping up. I think an inability often to continue to function
00:24:51
Speaker
Efficiently is part of the problem so i like it when i look at the us government right now forget about politics and ideology and all that there is an inability to simply solve problems.
00:25:03
Speaker
And if you can't solve problems long enough, that's going to lead to some level of ramifications. And if you have a lot of room for error, right? I mean, when the United States is a young country and there's lots of land and there's lots of resources, maybe if you don't make the best decisions, it's not fatal.
00:25:25
Speaker
Will you fast forward to another time where the margins of error are much tighter and now all of a sudden to go a decade without solving important problems that just fester and get worse. Well that's going to cause a much higher level of payoff to be.
00:25:40
Speaker
Enacted down the road and so I think maybe not being able to make and this goes back by this is like an a toin be I mean, this is like history from when I was a kid I mean an inability to solve problems that crop up is a is a pretty classic old-fashioned historian view of why empires fail, but there are others I mean
00:26:01
Speaker
in the Roman sense, you sort of reach a, that might be a leadership thing too. I mean, and this goes, I'm talking a lot about like the Churchillian era of history and what I'm doing right now. And they're so focused on leadership, right? So they'll discount things like geography and environment and trends and forces and just focus on, you know, how well did these kings or these rulers or these presidents or these prime ministers handle the challenges that
00:26:28
Speaker
went their way and you rise and fall based on how well they handled the challenge, that's very simplistic. But I look at the reasons why they might not handle a challenge well, and that might have to do with environment, trends and forces and all these things. In other words, if you ask yourself why a country like the United States isn't doing a better job of solving problems, it might come down to those other questions, right? And some of this
00:26:50
Speaker
Truthfully, when we talk about why empires fall or why republics maybe decline, there are new things that weren't a part of the old experience. When we talk about history as context, what do you do when you have things that have never existed before? Can you use the Roman Republic as an example of why the United States might be having problems if part of the reason the United States might be having problems is because of the 21st century rise in things like social media and communications and all these sorts of things that didn't exist back then to the degree they exist now?
00:27:20
Speaker
So how much is it an apples and apples versus an apples and oranges comparison? So here's my short answer. I think empires fall for different reasons at different times, but a guy like Toynbee would have said it's an inability to deal with the challenges that they are confronted with. And that seems as good of an answer to me as anything, because if you can deal with the challenges you're confronted with, it seems like you won't fall.
00:27:44
Speaker
You've suggested a couple of times now that you think that the US may be in some form of decline or at the very least it's having challenges. I've got to ask you then to perhaps look forward. What do you think comes after that decline? Well, I always like to zoom out. You mentioned this with a contextual thing, right? Try to zoom out and see things in a bigger picture sense.
00:28:07
Speaker
that when we're looking at the United States in the early decades of the 21st century, we're grading it a little bit on a curve here because the country is still coming off, again, zoom out to a 500-year perspective. The United States is still coming off its immense
00:28:26
Speaker
power that it had at the end of the Second World War, where it's the lone first world, not broken economy. It's actually sitting astride the world like a colossus as the old saying goes. So once you look at where the US was in 1946, 1947, 1950, it's all downhill from there almost no matter what. So if we're talking about decline, a decline from those kinds of highs might also seem, again, with a broad 500-year window, like a return to normalcy.
00:28:56
Speaker
right when people talk about a multi polar world in the us government like that some sort of tragedy like we've done something wrong and we're gonna revert from alone superpower or dual superpower status in the air with the soviet union to something where you're sharing power with multiple countries well that's much more than normal.
00:29:13
Speaker
A return to something that more resembles the non-unusual situation that was the post-Second World War moment in history. Well, that looks like a decline if you're looking at it in the short term. In the long term, it might actually be something that's more sustainable.
00:29:32
Speaker
I mean, if you try to maintain an unusual situation, you could trap yourself in a whole lot of decisions made for all sorts of the wrong reasons, trying to create a permanent situation in a circumstance that's untenable. And that's setting yourself up for failure also. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. You also mentioned in your previous answer that you were thinking a lot about that Chachilian view of history, and it leads me to my
00:30:00
Speaker
Fifth question, I guess another way of phrasing that would be the great man view of history, the idea that individuals with a particular power personality can shape history and bend it to their will. A lot of historians poo-poo that view now to an extent. It's been discarded in some respects for a more thematic, wider forces view of how historical events happen.
00:30:23
Speaker
At the same time, I look at the world today, you look at particular people, you look at the Putin's, you look at the Trump's, and you see these personalities. I'm not saying great in a moral sense, I'm saying great in a sense of incredible influence. They do seem to be individuals who are shaping the world around us. My question is, have we been too quick to discard the great man view
Is the Great Man Theory Relevant?
00:30:45
Speaker
of history? Do you think it still has currency?
00:30:47
Speaker
I think it's funny how these things happen. I think that the standard way that these sorts of theories come into and out of vogue, where you go from the great man theory of history to something more of a trends and forces theory of history. I think eventually you realize that in some ways, all of those approaches have their merits and it's a synthesis of them that makes the most sense. For example, I can say that had Alexander the Great not lived,
00:31:12
Speaker
The great man, one of the great, great men. Had he not lived, it's possible that the Macedonians continue to do what they did under Alexander the Great simply because of the fantastic military he inherited, a lot of ambitions. In other words, it all could have happened anyway.
00:31:29
Speaker
Whereas I don't think without Napoleon, you have the French revolutionary, the post French revolutionary French empire situation. But one might make the case and they'd be correct that without the trends and forces that emerged because of the French revolution,
00:31:45
Speaker
There's no place for a Napoleonic figure to emerge, right? And until you get the democratization of a nation in arms that comes from the French Revolution, there's no massive population to put into an army to use as a Napoleonic figure in war. So, I mean, there's an interplay here that reminds me of the many strands of a rope.
00:32:04
Speaker
And one strand of the rope might be the great human figure, right? Let's not make it sexist, the great human figure, but the times that that great human figure emerges in, I mean, if Napoleon happens 200 years before or several hundred years afterwards, he's not going to be able to do what he did anyway, right? I mean, if Charles XII arises in Sweden today, it doesn't matter, right?
00:32:27
Speaker
So so I mean there's there's a confluence of things that have to occur Alexander the Great can't be Alexander the Great 200 years beforehand because macadone is nothing right so so I think and I think that's Partly something that demonstrates the complexity involved in history and when you read earlier history sometimes they make it seem so simple and
00:32:47
Speaker
and so understandable and so categorically accessible, right? Where you can sit there and just sort of, you know, from a God-like position say, well, then this happened and this explains it. Whereas I think we realize if you see the past as just an earlier version of the reality that we live in now, look at how complex our reality is now, right? Well, if it's every bit as complex in every era that's ever happened, try divining that down to some sort of root cause.
00:33:17
Speaker
It would defy anyone's ability to do that with our current situation. And I would suggest that our current situation is not that different from the way it used to be. So I think it's got to be a ton of these different forces acting upon each other and pinging off one another that makes reality possible, even in an earlier reality. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. And you've raised Alexander and Napoleon and the history nerds who are listening wouldn't forgive me if I asked you for a quick
00:33:45
Speaker
who was the greater military general, Alexander or Napoleon? They're very different guys. I would throw in a guy like Caesar in that mix because to me, Caesar is the better of the three. I think he was one of those people. Once upon a time, a very long time ago, we asked the question, what if Alexander the Great had a podcast?
00:34:07
Speaker
And because somewhere a thousand years from now, if humankind continues, they're going to be able to look at a thousand years in their past and see the kind of thing you and I are doing right now. Think of how crazy that is and how much more they will know about us because of that.
00:34:27
Speaker
So I think if we could do that with Julius Caesar, I think we would get a real sense of exactly how amazing a human being he was. I've heard stories. I mean, he was supposed to be able to dictate multiple letters on multiple subjects, all simultaneously the multiple scribes. It's interesting that we do have Caesar's writings. That is the ancient equivalent of a podcast.
00:34:49
Speaker
Yes, and better than almost anything else we have. I mean, imagine how much we'd know about Alexander if we had the equivalent. And here's the thing I always dream about. When you talk about what history nerds dream about, you dream about finding more stuff from the past.
00:35:04
Speaker
You dream about finding the equivalent of a library of Alexandria with all this stuff that's been written down that we don't have from the past that can then flesh out what we don't know. And they find these things occasionally. I mean, somewhere in, I think, Central Asia, some time ago, they've not translated the workship, but they found a ton of these scrolls or tablets that they have yet. I mean, this is the way that we actually get a chance to illuminate the past from the writings of the people who were contemporaries in the time period.
00:35:34
Speaker
So you're absolutely right. It's a little like Caesar having a podcast, I suppose. But to get back to your question, Alexander or Napoleon, Napoleon is a great strategist, but he's not leading troops from the front. And Alexander leading troops from the front is the combination of the old heroic general with the new version that sits there with a map and tries to figure out which countries you attack next.
00:35:59
Speaker
Although one might suggest that both men share a certain flaw and that flaw being the inability to, I mean, they both got sort of full of themselves, didn't they? And they both went a bridge too far. Whereas Caesar didn't do that. I mean, unless you want to say that by prompting his own Senate to kill him because he was in danger of becoming a king, maybe that's the example of, you know, the absolute power corrupting. Absolutely. But one might make the case that that affected all three of those guys.
00:36:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. I think I think it's a lovely, interesting theme of history is that hubris that almost inevitably these great person figures seem to build up. And that's why people like, like a seller who you've spoken about are so fascinating. The ones, the very rare ones who just walk away, you know, or a Diocletian would be another one. These ones, they're very rare people who, who don't end up being overcome by, by hubris.
00:36:55
Speaker
Well, to put a bow tie on what we've been talking about, it's the difference between these individuals and their hubris and the societies and our collective hubris, which leads us to think we're never going to have pandemics again. And then we do. Yeah, that's a very good point. Question six is lifted directly from the first sentence of your book. It was too good not to steal.
Potential Fall of Modern Civilization
00:37:17
Speaker
Do you think that modern civilization will ever fall and our cities will ever lie in ruins? Oh man.
00:37:24
Speaker
Well, here's what I would say about that. I think when once upon a time you could talk about civilizations as sort of data points, right? So you could talk about the Achaemenid Persian Empire and that civilization falling, right? So that they're gone. I think we've managed over the eras to sort of knit all of our individual nodes of civilization together into a global civilization.
00:37:50
Speaker
Our civilization now is the whole world. For our civilization to fall, it would have to mean that our collective global civilization falls. I don't know what that means, but here's what I would say. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, when he was talking about nuclear war,
00:38:08
Speaker
had said once, trying to make the case for how prolonged a challenge it was to avoid blowing ourselves up. He said that it is reasonable to expect a man to be able to walk a tightrope for a small period of time, I'm paraphrasing here, but that to expect that man to be able to walk safely across a tightrope
00:38:29
Speaker
forever afterwards is unrealistic. And that's just utilizing our current level of military technology. But as we all know, we are developing better military technology all the time. I think in the same way that we talked about, you know, if you're a betting person, betting on a pandemic to happen again is a much safer bet than betting on one to not happen again. Betting for us to somehow destroy, this is a wonderfully uplifting point of view, but
00:38:58
Speaker
But betting on ourselves to be able to walk that tightrope forever afterwards seems like a much more long shot of a bet than betting that we're going to fall off the tightrope at some time in the far-flung future because you've got to be able to walk it forever.
00:39:13
Speaker
I'm going to put, and this is going to freak people out because it freaks my wife out every time I bring it up, I'm going to put a little disclaimer there. I think I wrote this on a sub-stack piece we did when I had a little time to write one, but I am so fascinated with some of the recent information
00:39:29
Speaker
about extraterrestrial things that they've been finding, whether it's on better equipment or congressional testimony here in the United States or whatever it might be, that it doesn't sound so science fiction and far flung anymore. And I think to myself that if we're talking about some sort of a celestial gambling card game here, when we talk about humanity continuing to exist without destroying ourselves, there's a wild card in this.
00:39:51
Speaker
And the wild card is if there's life on other planets that's paying attention to what we do here and they can come in here and just say, okay, okay, we see where you're going. You're going to blow yourself up or you're going to destroy the environment or you're going to do this or that. So we're going to reveal ourselves to you. We're going to fix it. Or we're going to keep you from doing that. Or we're going to save you. So to me, that's the wild card that allows me to sleep at night when otherwise I would think that we're going to fall off Bertram Russell's tight rope.
00:40:35
Speaker
It's not. It's not. Or it's a simulation theory where some alien 14 year old has the equivalent of an ant farm and we're the ant farm and someday he drops a whole bunch of caustic acid or a tarantula into the terrarium and we get just to see what we'll do.
00:40:41
Speaker
at some point in the future.
00:40:53
Speaker
You know, that simulation theory is really interesting. I read a book, and it's one of my favorite books, and I use it in the show all the time, strangely enough. It's called Global Catastrophic Risk. And every chapter is written by a different expert. And each chapter basically lays out a theory on what could destroy us. And it was the first time I ever really read in-depth stuff on artificial intelligence or nanotechnology
00:41:19
Speaker
or, you know, really good stuff. And one of the ideas was that it's, that we live in a simulation. It was the first time I ever read that. And that sometime the reason we could destroy ourselves is they could just turn the simulation off. Yes. Well, fingers crossed that the aliens, at least, you know, let us get through this episode and then the aliens can, can do what they want. Question seven. And this is a toughie and I apologize in advance.
00:41:45
Speaker
Who is the most influential person in human history and to make it even more difficult, they can't be a prophet or a son of God. I have a book that I've had since I was a kid. It was like, and they tried to list the hundred most influential people in order, right? Number one, number two, number, and then they had a criteria that at the end of each, each entry, they had to explain.
00:42:08
Speaker
how that person got chosen. And it's a lot like you said, is a lot of them are religious figures or prophets because of the enduring impact they've had over time. I'm trying to think what the book said was who the first figure in the book that wasn't a religious figure or a prophet was. See, because one of the things that that book used as a criteria was whether or not whatever that person's contribution
00:42:34
Speaker
to humanity or whatever argument you have for their greatness was whether or not whatever they were being celebrated for would have happened anyway. So some of the things, for example, somebody might say the discovery by the old world that there was a new world, right? So you bring the globe together, except that that's something that we would have found anyway. So you can't say, well, you know, Christopher Columbus did that because he, or I'm a jell-in, or the Vikings who came to
00:43:03
Speaker
Because you're gonna figure that out anyway then the books attitude was that the person who really deserves the credit is someone who did something that wouldn't have happened without them that wasn't inevitable.
00:43:14
Speaker
It's interesting because you've said a couple that come to mind for me. There's an argument as to whether if you're thinking about Romans, you're thinking Caesar or Augustus, but the Roman Republic was probably always going to fall because of the wider forces around Caesar and then Caesar basically accelerated that process. Whereas I think of a more modern example and this is for worse, Hitler.
00:43:36
Speaker
There's a good argument said that there are no Nazis without Hitler. It also gets me thinking of whether you look at this as influential in a good way, but in all likelihood, the way that history has progressed is probably going to be someone whose influence maybe was a net negative.
00:43:49
Speaker
Well, okay, so if we go that route, it does open up the door for me to say one of my favorite people. I look at like a Kaiser Wilhelm in Germany before the First World War, because I often think about from the German perspective, if they don't get into the First World War,
00:44:07
Speaker
look at how different german history is because without a first world war there's no hitler in a second world war i mean the destruction of germany and people don't understand this i mean germany was leveled i think heidelberg is the only even middle-sized city that remains standing you think about the loss
00:44:27
Speaker
of civilizational heritage and something like that. And then when you realize the damage that the First World War Germans and more especially the Second World War Germans and their alliances managed to inflict both on their own, but also in the Newtonian for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction reflection on what their adversaries then inflicted on the planet. I think one can make a case that if Kaiser Wilhelm
00:44:56
Speaker
doesn't manage to commit Germany to a First World War, which had been planned a long time in advance, so it wasn't like he developed the idea. But if he keeps the Germans out of the First World War or tampers the Austro-Hungarian's willingness to attack Serbia because they're not going to get the backing of Germany,
00:45:16
Speaker
The entire modern world as we know it is completely different, including probably no communism succeeding in any major country in the world. I mean, so you take out both World Wars, the Holocaust, Hitler, and communism, and if you can say, and I'm not sure you can, but let's say if you can say that only Kaiser Wilhelm actually had that decision in his hand, well, then I'm going to say Kaiser Wilhelm.
00:45:42
Speaker
That's a pretty good answer. I'll take it. It's a separate, but related point. But when I was speaking with Dominic Sandbrooke the other day, his great thesis is that it would have been better for the world if the British didn't enter the First World War for the reasons that you've just articulated, but looking at from a slightly active angle. But if they did, we're going to, then they ended on the wrong side. And it's a real shame that Bristol and Gertchamps really stick it to the Frenchies.
00:46:05
Speaker
Well, but here's what I would say that I wonder if Dominic was considering the German Navy when you talk about that, because here's the thing. A lot of what led to the tensions that led to the First World War was the naval competition between, of course, Britain's fleet and they were the great
00:46:21
Speaker
naval nation of all time and the growing power of the German high seas fleet. The fact that the first world war ended with Germany being disarmed, including their fleet being disarmed and rules being put into place that said you couldn't build another fleet like that meant that the British never had to deal with that fact.
00:46:38
Speaker
Had the First World War not happened and Britain not gotten... First of all, Britain doesn't get into the First World War. The Germans almost certainly win whatever you want to call that regional European conflict. In which case, you would still have a German high seas fleet and you would have more resources at their disposal to build it up even larger. And then the British are dealing with a major naval competitor, which they never dealt with in their whole history until the Second World War in the United States, the rise of the US Navy.
00:47:05
Speaker
I think one can make a case that that leads to an alternate reality full of problems of its own for British history in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. If the German fleet is allowed to have all of Europe's major resources and continue to build up a fleet, which if not Britain's equal in 1914, was probably only a decade or 15 years away from being that. And that would have created a completely different kind of reality, I think.
00:47:35
Speaker
Yeah, it's one of the great what-ifs, isn't it? I think it's very in keeping with hardcore history style and nor likelihood we won't get to all of my 10 questions, but I think that's, uh, that's quite authentic. I have two more and that'll get us to nine. First, and I've stolen it again from your book.
Resilience Through Adversity
00:47:50
Speaker
Do tough times make four tougher people? You know, uh, I think.
00:47:56
Speaker
In the interest of answering one way or the other and not equivocating like I normally do, I think the answer is going to be yes. And I leave open the idea that I could be wrong about that. And I also would like to make the distinction that there is a falling off point at the high end of that. So if the times are too tough, that they don't make tough people. At that point, people crawl into a hole and suck their thumb if it's extremely tough. But I think that if you have
00:48:25
Speaker
And I mean, part of me sees it today. It's an old man's point of view. Let's point that out. But I mean, to look at the younger generations and say, well, back in my day, you know, we were latchkey kids and our parents worked and there was a lot of divorce and we had to make our own lunches. And I mean, every generation before mine would have called my generation soft. And so it's only natural to call the next generation soft.
00:48:49
Speaker
You know, it was Tom Brokaw, the US journalist, I think, who coined the term the greatest generation, or the first time I ever heard it was Tom Brokaw coined it. And I remember thinking to myself, the first time I heard it, because I'm a devil's advocate kind of guy, the greatest generation compared to whom? Because that's the generation whose World War I parents would have thought they were soft, right? So, um, I think that there is
00:49:12
Speaker
an attitude that every generation is softer than the one that came before it. And I think maybe, and here's my equivocation, I think maybe we're judging it by our own standards and the ways that the new generation might be superior are things that we're not judging them on. We're judging them on what toughness was in my day, what toughness is in their day might be a different sort of criteria. Does that make sense?
00:49:40
Speaker
It does. And I think it'll be another one of those constants of history that you mentioned earlier. I think, uh, it was different in my day and it was harder in my day for Yorkshireman style of looking. Exactly. That will, that will forever be the case. Final question, Dan. There is a new hardcore history episode on the way, which millions of history fans around the world are thrilled about. It's a, it's part two in your predictably epic saga on the Vikings.
00:50:06
Speaker
My question is, what is the one question more than any other that it has encouraged you to reflect on?
Challenges in Viking Podcast Creation
00:50:15
Speaker
Well, it's not going to be the kind of answer you want because it's not going to be a big picture question. It's going to be a, what sort of topics does Dan choose for his podcast kind of questions?
00:50:26
Speaker
There's a lot of things we do probably wrong in these podcasts, but that are probably important to them turning out the way that they do. We don't do much planning. I don't know what the next topic's going to be after this show, for example. What that means is we're on the clock. Once I finish this show, we're on the clock for picking the next one, and eventually the clock starts to determine
00:50:48
Speaker
What it's going to be whether or not if you decide oh, maybe that's not such a great topic to do So for example with this viking show as you know, and I don't like any of my work. Let's establish that at the get-go So i'm always hypercritical but i'm looking at this viking show and i'm seeing all the things wrong with it every show I do that and in this show i'm going why did I choose A story that that plays out over hundreds of years
00:51:11
Speaker
which doesn't really follow any individuals, which has very little information that we can pull from directly. It makes it tough to tell us. It makes it hard to tease out the stories. You let off this conversation by talking about how much of history is stories and how that's really what compels people to get interested in the subject. The Vikings as a big picture subject has issues with the story question.
00:51:38
Speaker
What I've determined with this show is that I'm going to try to make sure in the future that I pick ones where it's easier to follow the throughput of a storyline with human figures that you can then sort of follow as they do things. Whereas this is a zoom out story where we're talking about what amounts to a multi-century phenomenon.
00:52:00
Speaker
The rise of a piratical sort of era, a people in the process of converting from an ancient pagan belief system to becoming the last major Germanic people to be converted to Christianity and become part of what was then sort of the family of respectable European Christian nations. But it's a lot harder to then follow the drama in anyone's individual story. And so when I look at this story, I feel like I want more of that.
00:52:29
Speaker
And so what I've learned is in the next story, I'm going to make sure I pick something that allows me to more easily find those stories and follow those tales. Well said. And like all great storytellers, you've brilliantly managed to tie the intro and the conclusion neatly together in a bow. Everyone listening will not be surprised how heartily I endorse both Daniel Book, The End Is Always Near, as well as the back catalogue of hardcore history episodes. We've got the links to all that good stuff for listeners in the show notes.
00:52:59
Speaker
Dan, this is this is quite a bucket list conversation for me. Thank you not just for coming on, but but thank you for instilling a love of history and so many people around the world. Oh, you are so gracious. I'm honored to be here. I appreciate you having me on and thank you for all the kind words.
00:53:14
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.