Dan Snow's History Hit - The World According to Obama Official Ben Rhodes

Episode Date: June 23, 2021

Ben Rhodes has served at the very pinnacle of politics in his role as deputy national security adviser in Barack Obama's Whitehouse and seen what it takes to run a democracy and take the tough decisions that are needed. But since leaving the Oval Office the world has seen a slide towards populism, nationalism and even authoritarianism. But how can this descent into dangerous political waters be stopped? After leaving politics Ben spent three years travelling the world speaking to leaders, activists and dissidents across dozens of countries. His new book After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made documents those journeys and he speaks to Dan about what he discovered, the truths we have to face about our societies and how the United States can set an example for the world.

Hello everyone, welcome. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It gives me great pleasure to welcome back onto History Hit a former Deputy National Security Advisor who served in the White House under President Barack Obama. He is Ben Rhodes. He's been on before with his excellent memoir of his years in the White House. Since you've last heard him on History Hit, he's enjoyed meteoric success with Crooked Media over in the USA. He's now a co-host of Pod Save the World. He's had his own series of podcasts, and he's written a book in which he travels the world after leaving the White House. He travels the world. He didn't go and work for a big corporation, paying him lots of money. He traveled the world. He met with politicians. He met with activists. He tried to

make sense of this mad ride roller the thing we're all talking about the moment the fact that democracy liberalism is under threat in all these different countries around the world from europe asia to the usa itself this book is called after the fall being american in the world we made so we had a general chat about what he's learned over the process of making these podcast series, writing this book, visiting, meeting all these people like Alexei Navalny around the world, as well as all the experience he gained

from his time inside the White House. Can Ben Rhodes help us make sense of what is going on? I hope so. It was great to have him back on the pod. If you want to head over to historyhit.tv, we're producing a lot of new content over there at the moment. Lots of new documentaries coming up. The big one we've got coming out is very exciting moment. It's just days away. It's out time to coincide with the 80th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. The single largest,

the most devastating, the most destructive campaign to that point in the history of warfare. It's a mind-blowing tale. We've paired up with our brilliant history hit friend and partner Rob Schaefer, German military historian. He's identified a previously unpublished diary of a German panzer commander, tens of thousands of words long, that takes you on his journey from a youthful enthusiast excited about what they had to a jaded traumatized broken man after months and months of appalling conflict that documentary is coming out any day now so go to historyhit.tv and go and check it out so if you want to watch that documentary on barbara rossa if you watch our medieval history series if you watch our D-Day series we've had out. It's all happening over at historyhit.tv. It's like Netflix, but just for history. A digital history channel. You can also, by the way, hit all these podcasts without

any ads at all as well, if you want to have those nice and clean. So head over to historyhit.tv, sign up, a tiny subscription gets you the world's best history channel. In the meantime, it's been great to have Ben Rhodes back on the pod. Enjoy. Hey, man. Thanks for coming back on the pod. It's really good to be with you, Dan. Last time we were talking about your time serving in the White House. This time, man, you've gone on a bender all around the world. You're asking the biggest questions, right? You went on a bit of a journey here. I did. I mean, the book is really a personal journey that's also about what's happening in the world. Because when I was spit out of my experience eight years in the Obama White House, you look around the world and it seemed like the

same thing was happening everywhere with democracy and retreat and with this kind of rise of nationalism with a lot of eerie echoes from history, Dan, which we can talk about. And I thought that I could better understand what was happening in America if I looked at how this is playing in other places. So I went to Hungary, kind of immersed myself in the opposition to Viktor Orban there. I talked to Russians like Alexei Navalny about their experience. I went to Hong Kong, spent a good amount of time there, kind of abetted with the protesters, and then took that all back to America and really wanted to make sense of how there's a connection between these trends that we're seeing everywhere.

Yeah, I want to talk about that connection because I'm sort of fascinated whether it starts in America or it finishes in America or which way around we need to think about it. When did this journey start for you? Did it start on election night? Obviously Obviously reading your initial book, it feels like there was a kind of dark period at the end of the second Obama administration when you could feel this coming crisis. Yeah, I could feel it at the end of the Obama administration. The last couple of years when Putin was getting more aggressive, annexing Crimea, and going on offense against the Western world. At the same time that you have the rise of ISIS, which is not entirely dissimilar in terms of people just trying to tear things down. And then you have Brexit, and then you have Trump.

And it's like, you can't ignore the trend lines are moving in the wrong direction. My first book that I talked to you about, I was just digesting my Obama experience. And for me, the starting point for this book was I was in Berlin. I was in the old headquarters of the GDR, the East German communist regime, which is now a business school, which is kind of a perfect emblem of transition. I was talking to a Hungarian activist and I said, what's happened in your country? How did you go from being a democracy to basically a single party autocracy? And he said, well, it's simple. Orban came to power, tapping into the right wing backlash to the financial crisis. He redrew parliamentary districts, packed the courts with right wing judges, enriched a bunch of cronies who bought up the media, turned it into

kind of a right wing propaganda machinery, made it easier for his supporters to vote, harder for others, and kind of wrapped this whole enterprise up in an old line, blood and soil nationalism that you featured on your podcast, Plenty, us versus them, the real Hungarians versus the immigrants, the Muslims, the liberal elites, George Soros. And the guy's talking and I'm thinking, well, this is really interesting because he's basically describing what's happened in America the last decade. And it made me want to go in search of why is that? Why is the same thing happening everywhere?

Well, should we start with 08? Sure. Is 08 pretty important? Yeah, I think it is. Yeah, yeah. So I think, and again, this is why I'm so excited to talk to you besides the fact that your podcast got me through lockdown. You have to look at history, especially recent history sometimes to kind of figure out how we got here and where we're going. And what I found, particularly in

looking at a place like Hungary, is that the financial crisis of 08 was a really cataclysmic event in a way that we didn't fully appreciate at the time, or at least I didn't, in the sense that it made people think that the whole bargain of kind of post-Cold War globalization had failed, that it was rigged. If you're a Hungarian, it seemed just as rigged as communism did in the sense that a bunch of people were getting rich and powerful and everybody else seemed like they were getting screwed. And that created a whole void that the nationalists could take advantage of. If life is disorienting, if you feel like you're losing your sense of traditional identity, and then the bottom falls out of your economic circumstance, what I heard in Hungary and

what I experienced in the US, suddenly you're ripe for the more traditional appeals, the blood and soil nationalism. Things may be tough out there, but I'm going to offer you the oldest play in the book, which is you're on this team. You are the true Hungarian. In America, it was the Tea Party movement. We're going to take our country back. In Brexit, it was take back control, one of the most effective political slogans of my life, all of which spoke to the idea that we may not be able to solve all

these economic problems, but what we can do is give you an identity that makes you feel empowered. And we can also give you some villains, the bad guys, the political establishment, the immigrants, whoever it is. And so to me, that 08 moment, I mean, the other thing is I had a Hong Kong official who I met with who wanted to be anonymous. And I met with him and I said, I'm working on this book about how did nationalism and authoritarianism take over? And he said, oh, that's easy. With you guys, it was the 08 crisis. That made people think that the narrative of liberalism and democracy has collapsed. And that started the nationalist wave in the West. And here in China, it made the Chinese think, well, wait a second, we don't necessarily have to sit around and bide our time. Maybe we're ready to replace these guys. And so I think 08 was a transitional moment.

Orban himself said that it was on par with the three great regime changes of the 20th century, World War I, World War II, and the end of the Cold War. What he said, interestingly, is that when those things happened, everybody knew when they woke up the next morning that everything was different. After the await crisis, the people who figured out it was different were the people like Orban and Putin and Xi Jinping, and they've been running this play ever since. And then let's come on to this media point. So fascinating because in your podcast series and your book, you talk a lot about social media.

The similarities, because we all sit around the UK following you and your podcast and your podcast buddies. And we're blown away by the similarities between Trump and Johnson. I don't want to offend people listening to this podcast, but there was a key similarity, which is that bullets that would have ended the career, figuratively, of previous generations of politicians,

you know, scandals, outrageous things that they said. Trump was like rude about service people who'd fallen for their country and their families. Yeah. Those bullets glanced off. Those bullets are glancing off Boris Johnson and his cabinet here in the UK. What is that? Because that feels substantially different from what has gone before.

Is that to do with the information, the media environment, or does this new kind of nationalism identity just trump everything else and make you blind to the failings or certainly the legitimate criticism to your own side? Well, I think it's a few things that all have to do with the fracturing of the media landscape. I mean, it used to be that in the UK or the US, there were kind of a handful of media that were like the arbiters of fact and what's not true of what are the guardrails of kind of political behavior. Those have all collapsed in the last 10 or 20 years and been replaced by a mix of social media and then much more opinion-driven media. So whether you're Donald Trump or Boris Johnson or whomever you are, number one,

you can usually count on a highly partisan media that's going to get your back no matter what. Number two, you're going to count on the fact that social media has sorted people into kind of these tribes where the algorithm for Facebook is written in a way in which if you identify in any way as on the right end of the spectrum, or on the left for that matter, you're just going to be fed a steady diet of information that reinforces your existing worldview. And if your side is attacked, that information is going to make you want to deflect the attack and focusing on the other side. But the other thing that I think is really important here, Dan, that's probably less understood is the strategy of some of these people. Alexei Navalny, who made his name as an anti-corruption activist, described this to me for the book in which he said, look, Putin doesn't need to convince everybody that he's not corrupt. He has to convince everybody

that everybody's corrupt. So you might as well side with the guy who gives voice to your grievances, who seems like he's on your team. He's your strong man. He may be flawed and corrupt, but his point is, so is the United States. And this came back to 08 too. Navalny said to me, when bankers got bailed out in the US after 08, Putin was saying, see, look, they're no different than us. It's just the rich guys at the top who get taken care of. So I think, again, that creates a unique kind of armor for politicians to both keep their own people mobilized, but also kind of wink at their audience and say, yeah, I may have all these flaws. I may be flawed, but so are these guys. Everybody's kind of the same. And I don't believe that to be true, but it's a constant theme in authoritarianism throughout history that you deflect and create a narrative where it's not worth being in politics anyway,

because everybody's corrupt here anyway. So why not just support the politician who's on your side in terms of the grievances they espouse and the national identity that they're upholding? Okay, man. I feel like I've sent you a few late night panicked DMs and I need you to tell me it's okay. And I'm doing it now in public. Of these people that you met as you travel the world, the people that you're reading

about, talking to, we all know now what these problems are. Who inspired you that there might be solutions out there? How did we get back on a good path? Well, I got inspired in different ways in different parts of the world by the fact that people are, number one, they're seeing this for what it is in a way that was not the case at the end of the Obama years. There's a pretty broad awareness of what's happening and people are mobilizing. And so you'll hear that while the Chinese kind of authoritarian model is ultimately more popular because it delivers more prosperity, well, the people of Hong Kong had the opportunity to

literally opt into that model, and they did the opposite. And even though that movement failed for the time being, there's something very hopeful in people standing up and saying, no, you're not going to be able to buy us off with capitalism that delivers some prosperity. We want to be free. And that movement was like a cry of warning, pay attention before it happens to you. Or an Alexei Navalny, who despite all the risks, and he told me, look,

I know the risks. I've been thrown in prison. I've been poisoned. It's not pleasant. But he intuitively believes like Russians don't want to live with this kind of corruption and autocracy. There's this kind of sense that if the dam breaks, there's a flood of people, a flood of movements that have been building to have the pendulum swing back in the other direction. And I think if those people can learn from one another, and if those people can show solidarity with one another, and if we can persevere in a place like the United States, where we were able to oust an autocrat, you can do that. History, as you explore in your podcast, is not inevitable.

Back in 1990, kind of where I start my story, everybody thought history was moving in one inevitable direction towards democracy and freedom. Now everybody thinks the opposite. No, people have a say in this. And to me, the hope is if you look out there, the energy increasingly is beginning to be on the other side, particularly with young people who have the most at stake. I think that maybe brings us to the US, because as someone who's been in the Oval Office, I think that maybe brings us to the US, because as someone who's been in the Oval Office,

as someone who has been there, witnessed American hard and soft power, the exercise of it, you're very interested in the role that America has played both in this kind of corruption, in this collapse into autocracy and populism and nationalism, but also in the role that it could play to help drag us out of it. You're inspired by these individuals, but presumably you also need people in charge of the world's superpower that recognize this and can make good decisions. You do. And what I had a lot of time to reflect on when I was cast out, I described it like being exiled in my own country because Trump is not just an opponent of Obama, he's kind of the opposite. And I realized that if you think about it, America's always had two stories throughout our history. And in a way, Trump reflects one story perfectly and Obama reflects the other story perfectly. We were a country that was founded

on the proposition that all men are created equal, but the guy who wrote those words owned slaves. And ever since then, there's been a kind of progressive story of the extension of more rights to more people, using democracy to fix things that are wrong in the society, to overcome differences, and to kind of stitch together this national identity of big multiracial, multiethnic society. And then there's always been a reactionary story. After the Civil War, we got Reconstruction and Jim Crow, right? After the Civil Rights Movement, there was a backlash to that. I would argue after the election of a black president, there was a backlash that without a black president, weirdly, Donald Trump is not possible. And so America is pretty unique in that it's a country of two different stories that have been in constant competition. and people are right to say, you've never really lived up to that best story you tell. You've never lived up to a story you tell about equality and dignity in your domestic or foreign policies. That's true. But where I land in the book is that the work of pursuing that better story

is what matters to people around the world. And I was struck that even as America's credibility was in tatters under Trump, people still cared about what happened in America because if we can figure it out, if we can figure out how to be our better story, and that's something, by the way, that leaders have to do, presidents, but that has to infuse civil society and a sense of mobilization in the society. If we can do that, then other people can. And so that's why I think the most important thing America has to do in the world is not our foreign policy. It's getting this right at home. And by the way, I would say the same thing. Britain is another country that has a place in the world's imagination. What happens there matters in other places, not just because of

British foreign policy, but because of the role that Britain has played in people's lives for hundreds of years. And for a foreign policy guy, I found it interesting that my diagnosis leads to the idea that, hey, we better focus on what's happening at home here. That's the best thing that we can do for people like Alexei Navalny or Hong Kong protesters. Hey everyone, listen to Dan Snow's History. We've got Ben Rhodes on the podcast. More after this. Hi, I'm Susanna Lipscomb and in my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors,

I'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to witches, Belefkes to Shakespeare, Mogul India to the Mayflower. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe to Not Just the Tudors

from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. wherever you get your podcasts. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. I remember a while ago, the Department of Defense, it was like a report that said, actually, we think you're spending too much money on defense. One of America's greatest

weapons is like a very vibrant educational sector, tech, high-tech infrastructure. Dumping a ton of money into weapons systems when the rest of the country is no longer world-beating is actually not great for Team USA. No, it's not. And there's this kind of more essential idea of like, what is our national identity? And one of the things that I reckon with in the book is that when I was growing up, the Cold War was kind of the identity. And I think that was true for British people too. The thing that tied us together as Americans is that we stood for freedom and the other guys stood for the opposite. And that guided everything in the society from our foreign policy, but also our investments in research and innovation, the need to have a good education system, exploration in space. When we lost that after the Cold War, it was kind of destabilizing. We didn't really know who we were.

George Bush and Tony Blair made after 9-11. Understandably, they wanted to defend the country. They kind of made our whole national, or at least Bush did, I'll speak for Bush, was like our whole national identity was about fighting this war on terror. And that did corrosive things because number one, spending trillions of dollars to fight these wars ignores huge other problems in the society that were getting worse. It also kind of securitized America's engagement with the rest of the world. All we're talking to people about is fighting a few thousand terrorists in a few countries, which I think is corrosive. But even more than that, it created this kind of us versus them frame for identity where it started as us were Americans are going to go fight them, the terrorists. Americans are going to go fight them, the terrorists. But that got repurposed over time by people like Trump, where the terrorists could morph into the black president or socialism or the immigrants at the southern border. This kind of fear-driven tribal and xenophobic strain, I think, was destructive. So it's both the kind of misplaced priorities, right? We spent trillions

of dollars fighting terrorism, not a fraction of that preparing for a pandemic, but also that we allowed ourselves to, I think, just go down a dead end in terms of defining who we were. I really enjoyed in this book, you know, you're an American, as I said before, you've served the highest levels of government. And it feels like you're very conditioned to think that what happens to the Oval Office on the hill, on Wall Street, in the valley, sets the tone for the rest of the world. But in this book, you kind of test that and you explore it and talk to yourself about it. At the end of this process, how important is America in today's world?

I think America is incredibly important for a couple of reasons. First, just we remain the biggest, most powerful economy and military in the world, and that's going to matter to people. And as someone who is quite critical, self-critical in this book about where that power is led, I mean, I basically point to American fingerprints on some of the authoritarianism and nationalism we see around the world, the backlash to the excesses of capitalism that kind of created opening for people like Orban, the way in which the war on terror was grabbed onto by people like Putin to justify what he was doing, and the way that our social media and technology platforms that we thought were going

to connect and empower everybody also became these kind of perfect tools of disinformation and surveillance in places like China. I get it. The problem is that if we exit the field, it's left to Putin and Xi. And there's a bit of, I think Dan is the famous Churchill quote, like, you can always count America to do the right thing after it's exhausted all the other options. We have to kind of get back to being who we're supposed to be. But I think more intangibly, it matters because we are made up of people from everywhere in a way that no other country is. That to me is the most important thing about our national identity is that other than indigenous

peoples, we all came here from somewhere else. And so this basic premise, can there be a multiracial, multiethnic society where democracy allows you to work it out and get along? That is so hugely important to the world. We have to be able to model that. I see Britain wrestling with the same issues today. How do we look at our history? How do we think about who we are? And the reason it's important is, as someone who immerses myself in your podcast, the nationalist thing never leads in a good direction. Like the blood and soil nationalism, if that becomes the

organizing principle instead of multiracial, multiethnic democracy. Well, you guys have been alone on the front lines dealing with that more than once, most acutely in 1940. I think we have to be mindful these things can happen again. I have a great British friend. Brits are always counseling Americans from their wounded experience running the world order. And he said, look, you know, what happened after World War II, he called it an elongated reason cycle. We were shocked by the horror of World War II and the Holocaust into being not

like that for a while, not nationalists, but willing to kind of root our power in international institutions and organizations and cooperation. But maybe as that's wearing off, you have all these amazing veterans of World War I and World War II. As those generations are dying off, have we forgotten the historical memory that this nationalism that feels good ends up leading to dark places? Yeah. I mean, I'm afraid I do totally buy into that critique, as I would, because it implies there isn't enough history being talked about and thought about. It's pretty disturbing that you are prepared to sacrifice this sovereign, you're prepared to give away some of your control if you have a memory of your city's burning, of your kids not having enough to eat because of the convoy system, the attacks by U-boats in the Atlantic. The minute life becomes super easy and kind of post-modern and post-Bukiyama, you think,

well, what's the advantage to us in having to outvote the Portuguese and Spanish within the organisms of the EU? So I do really worry about that, because it's pretty depressing if you need these gigantic shocks like Napoleonic Wars, then the First World War and Second World War, in order to stay away from those harmful modes of organizing ourselves. Yeah. I mean, I tell the story of this guy in my book whose life kind of traces the arc of that post-World War II period. He was a German. His father was a Nazi. His wife's father was a Nazi. He had this incredibly evocative story as a child of seeing his father walking back from the Eastern Front like a ghost, carrying a pair of shoes for him. And this guy ended up

leaving Germany and going to work at the EU. And he dedicated his whole life to the European project. He's just a lawyer, but he loved Europe. He would go sketch Greek ruins on holiday, or he'd go visit the Louvre. He immersed himself in all that he loved about Europe while rejecting what led his father to be part of that movement and so broken at the end of the war. That's what Europe was to him. It wasn't bureaucrats in Brussels or debates over fishing rights and things like that. Look, those things are important to people's livelihoods. I don't want to diminish it, but we lost sight of the bigger purpose. And by the way, that's on everybody for doing that.

And now I think we have a chance. We can see this kind of going in the wrong direction. We have a chance to say, no, no, wait, these things matter. These values matter. And even a Briton that is left, I mean, Dan, one of the things I say about how do you deal with these challenges where people are like, I want to be British. I don't want to lose my national identity. I understand that. I think the challenge for people who are more progressive, like me, is sometimes we're framing narratives around progress, racial progress, social justice progress. And we're kind of asking people to reject their history and who they are and who they were and what they're proud of. And there has to be a way that as someone who believes it's important to look squarely at some of the darker aspects of our past, to also look at the things we're proud of and not ask people to reject them. the things we're proud of and not ask people to reject them, right? In your podcast, if I listen to it, I can hear so much from thousands of years of British history that people should be proud of

and should see progress as coming out of that. Even if you can have important discussions about the legacy of Cecil Rhodes, or you have Afua Herschon to talk about why we need to reckon with empire, those are not inconsistent things. In fact, they should be incredibly complimentary. We should be able to say, as Barack Obama did in America, this is a great country that has had a lot of problems. And part of what we need to do is the next chapter of our history has to live up to what all those people who went before were trying to do that was good, while acknowledging that some things were bad. And so it's a tricky piece of business, but I think we can do it. I completely agree. You mentioned the next phase. Last question. I

know you're a foreign policy guy, but how are we feeling about US democracy at the moment? I think it is incredibly, incredibly precarious, Dan. I mean, we dodged the biggest bullet with Donald Trump's not getting elected. Then we had an insurrection. I mean, I finished this book right that week when there was an insurrection at the Capitol. And eerily, I felt like everything I'd written in the book kind of led up to that in a way. And now you have a Republican party. Look, I'd rather not be as partisan as I am in American politics, but we have to acknowledge and look squarely that even after there was a violent insurrection on their workplace on January 6th, they've decided to embrace Donald Trump. They're now burrowing into American states and passing

the most restrictive voting laws that we've seen in this country since Jim Crow. They're passing laws that would allow elected officials to overturn the will of the voters. And we've got two more elections coming that feel very uncertain. And by the way, not because of the majority of American opinion. The majority of American opinion is overwhelmingly not for that. The Republican Party hasn't won a popular vote for president since 2004 in this country. They don't win the popular vote for the House or Senate, but they figured out a way to have the minority essentially manipulate the levers of power so that that minority can govern the majority. And I think that if that is the play that has run the next couple of cycles, we could be in an even more unstable situation than we were under Trump because the people on the center and the left are going to start to say, well, wait a second, what's the point of this whole enterprise if we vote and it doesn't matter? And so that's the downside. That's why it's precarious. Again, the upside is I think people are just much more aware of this today and mobilized around it than

they ever were before. And that was what was so inspiring about Joe Biden's victory in a way. And I don't mean this as a negative comment, Joe Biden, but he wasn't some super charismatic Barack Obama type figure coming on a horseback to save us. He was a good, decent man who believed the right things, but it took a Stacey Abrams organizing people in Georgia. It took people standing on lines to vote. It took a national effort to get rid of this guy in Trump. And that's what gives me hope ultimately. Well, you were tweeting about it at the time, but just on that last point, the idea that in the US it's like, yay, celebrating. Look at these people standing in line for hours to save our democracy. The rest of the world is like, dude, they should

not be standing in line. We don't stand in line. That's crazy. One of the points I end on in the book, Dan, is that one thing Americans have to do is much better job of learning from other people around the world. I found I had a lot to learn about Hong Kong protesters. How did they build a movement? How did they mobilize? A lot to learn in the arguments Alexei Navalny was making against corruption. A lot to learn about how the Hungarian opposition kind of recreated itself in response to Orban. And frankly, a lot to learn just in how people vote in other countries. So America matters for the reasons I said, but America will be better at all the things we need to do if we listen a little bit better too.

Well, same true of the UK. I drive one's attention to systems of proportional representation, but that's a whole nother podcast. So good catching up with you, buddy. What's the book called? It is called After the Fall, Being American in the World We Made. And I would love nothing more than for your audience that I am a part of to go on this journey with me. Thanks, Ben. And I'm a big part of your audience as well. So great to see you, man. See you in the flesh next time. Good to see you. Yeah, take care. Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History. As I say all the time, I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally.

I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating review, obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us. I know it's a pain, but we'd really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable, don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors.

That's flying high in the charts. We've got our medieval podcast, Gone Medieval, with the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got The Ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got Warfare as well, dealing with all things military. Please go and check those out. Ready to get your pods.