Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 544: Hardcore Historians - An Interview with Dan Carlin

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

This week worlds collide as the boys join forces for the first time ever with podcast luminary and mastermind behind "Hardcore History" - the legendary Dan Carlin.

There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. Yes! On the left. Ha ha ha! Why are you fucking all the way? That's when the cannonball some started. What was that?

Oh yeah! Yeah! Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to the last podcast of the left bed hanging out with Marcus and Henry. Hi. Yeah. Totally normal guys. No way you're nervous. Today's episode we are honored to have a true legend in podcasting. He's a genius, a wonderful podcast or just a wonderful man. Dan Carlin from hardcore history. Dan,

thank you so much for being on the show. You guys, thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here. You look great. You look good. Well, same to you guys. Everybody looks good. And the lies continue. The beauty of radio.

That's right. All right, so Dan, I'm going to jump right into it with the questions, because I got a million questions. I've been wanting to ask you for forever. So I've been listening recently to, you know, some of the classic episodes and some of the newer episodes. And you said in one of your recent episodes that you've been told that you are addicted to context when it comes to telling a story. And I've also been told that I'm addicted to context by both our listeners and by my co-hosts. So my question is, I'm addicted to Michelobultra.

That's the doctor's opinion. Yes. So my question, Dan, why are all of them wrong? And we are not addicted to context. And that is absolutely necessary. No, I think we're addicted to context. I think the problem is is that more other people should be addicted to context because so much of what goes on in our world right now is stuff taken out of context. And that's, and without that context, it's easy to misapply facts and all sorts

of things. I mean, reading any news story today, I keep thinking, okay, the first thing I need to do to understand this news story is go do more research on, you know, everything connected to the news story so that the facts given to me and the impressions and everything makes sense. It's like why history is important. I had a professor say once that it's like watching a soap opera and without knowing what happened earlier in the soap opera, there's no way to understand the episode that you're currently viewing. And that's context, right? So being addicted to context is just means trying to figure out what happened to get you to the point where you're, you know, currently at. So wait, I do want to ask, so when does the context begin?

Yes, that's the one. Because eventually it becomes like turtles and turtles all the way down. And we tried to do it because of, with less podcasts and left, we tried it now. We stole it from you. We tried to put it, land the subject in a context so that people can understand, but again, how far back do you got? I know. That's a good question.

And because you're back in the Jurassic at a certain point. Yeah. I was just reading something for the show I'm working on right now. And it's one of those chronicles written in the middle ages. And it's supposed to talk about the time period it's written about, but it starts with the biblical flood with Noah. We're kind straight out. So they were addicted to context back then too.

That's awesome. And so you got your diploma from Prager you, right? Yeah. No, no, I didn't. So no, no Prager diploma. Thank God. Well, I mean, I guess to that point, what you're working on now, like to what extent, like because you've done, you know, a huge series on like ancient Rome

and jingas Khan, I'm going with your pronunciation. Nice. Right. Pronunciation. One in a row for me. Same here. But to what extent when you're studying this ancient stuff, you know, or like medieval stuff, like how do you suss out what to trust and what not to trust? Usually, usually I trust other people. So, uh, uh, when you are, and like I always say, I'm a fan of history, not a historian. And so that requires you to trust other people. The problem with trusting historians is that they often disagree with each other. And that was something that we got into early on in the podcast where we inadvertently

got someone's chocolate in my peanut butter and try and figured out that the audience actually likes hearing the different opinions that the different historians have. And so that's kind of what we do. And that's the way we provide context also is that we'll say, well, on this issue, this particular guy feels this way, this other lady who's an expert on the subject feels this way. And you start to try to help the audience

understand the controversy, even if we don't always pick sides. So a lot of our shows, you'll hear me give multiple potential interpretations or give a disclaimer and say, this might be true. I'm just warning you to take it with a grain of salt, though, because some people disagree. And sometimes I'll use their names. And sometimes I won't. It just depends. Can I ask a dumb question? When you use, like not reading history, what do you read? Like, what is this stuff that you're into that's not work? Because I'm looking for ideas. Well, first of all, it's more than I turn my, my private

enjoyment into work because this stuff I read anyway. I do read some stuff for fun But it's almost all nonfiction and like an idiot the fiction that I do read It's like three or four books and then I just reread them all the time In that terrible like you could be discovering a brand new fictional work, but do I know? I just reread the same one. I just all I do. I just reread the dark tower again. I've been trying to get I love a new book. Anything else, buddy. If you if you love it, stick with it.

So that's interesting when it comes to historians, how do you decide who to trust and who not to them? Because obviously even in modern era, you can talk with some economists who are like, Reagan was great. Others say accurately trickled on economics, didn't fucking work. And that's why we have no middle class. So how do you trust that these historians aren't spinning in their own right? Well, usually there's a major consensus on certain things. So you'll say 80% of historians will

say this and then sometimes we'll like to throw the some member of the 20% in there just to to give an alternative view. But there are some historians that are completely off the map. I mean, there's one Russian guy, and I should really look up his name, because this is like the third time this month I mentioned him without looking up the name. But he intends that the entire dating system that everyone else adheres to is completely wrong. These are my favorite. What's the, who cares?

Can't we just agree that it doesn't really matter? Well, actually, it's fascinating. His theory, whether it's true or not, it's fascinating because it shows how thin the reads are that certain potential moments that that dating rests upon might be. So even if he's wrong, it's fascinating to look and go, oh, I didn't realize that this date here is crucial for 900 other dates to be right. Right? Right. They sort of use it as a marker that then, you know, a lot of other things hinge on.

Then, of course, you know, you get these historians. There are ones who deny the Holocaust. I mean, this and they are. Some of these guys are legit historians. They're just so far out and left. You'll know one else believes them. So sometimes you have to make a determination whether or not someone so far off the map, that bringing them into the discussion is just confusing and wrong. Or whether or not what

they're bringing to the table adds some sort of interesting angle that the audience would find useful. And that's a judgment call. And I'm sure I get it wrong sometimes. No, but that's that's why you're the curator. I know I've been trying to do an episode of Man villain. What does he do? He organizes your bookshelves. That's right. I take yours. Halens tonight. Turn them into mine. That's right. It's like bookworm on the old Batman remember? I keep trying to get us to do an episode that is about like the fact that like what if it's like 300 years later than they think it is or 300 years earlier than they think it is, you know, like the idea of this, the dating maybe off. And then you know, we put together all this research and then eventually we're like,

so what? Like we get to the very then eventually we're like, so what? Like, we get to the very end and we're like, well, it's okay, so it's 23, 23. Congrats. Well, I mean, one of the missing time arguments that I've heard, I mean, it does actually, it speaks towards a larger history. You know, it speaks towards like the history

of the Christian church, because Dan, I don't know if you're talking about the same theory that I've heard about, that, you know, that this entire chunk of time was like moved forward or moved backwards in order to make the Christian church more powerful in order to kind of take these pagan rituals and turn them into Christian rituals by saying, Oh, that was that happened so long ago. Or that happened just, you know, a couple hundred years ago that they've been screwing around with time just to further their own interests.

I think the Russian guy I'm thinking of actually thinks that certain events that we think happened a long time apart from each other actually happened at the same time and are sort of like double counted by historians. But let's remember that dating itself is relatively arbitrary, right? In other words, you know, if you look at the Hebrew dating system, it's a completely different dating system, right? I mean, in other words, if you look at the medieval stuff, a lot of times, it won't even try to have dates. What they'll do is they'll say, okay, this king reigned here and then 23 years later, he dies in the next. So they'll date it based on other data

points, rather than saying this many years since ground zero, you know, where we're calling. And that's why the what you're talking about is like the ADBC system, right? That's just one sort of system, right? The Hebrew one. I mean, we're in multi thousand years somewhere. So, so it's all sort of relative and all that matters is once you sort of a fix things that happen to your timeline. So whatever year you call this doesn't matter, but you could say, oh, this is when the emperor Augustus, you know, died and then you date things based on that and then everything has to sort of fit on the timeline in place. But the year you sort of decide, well, that seems a little bit like, okay, you sort of make that part up and then everything sort of fits on the timeline based on, well, 23 years

after Augustus died, this happened. And so you start flacing things on the linear timeline. If that makes sense. Nice thing about me, I'm not tethered to history. So Augustus died eating a bunch of cake. Whenever you wanted him to, that's how you care. So is that my YouTube videos I was watching saying, but the, the, the mysterious happenings of 9 11 across history, is it real?

I can't comment intelligently on that because that sounds like fiction. And I just told you, I don't even pay an attention to fiction very much. I did. That was kind of my, one of my base questions here is you said, you're a fan of history. Why? You know, my mother's theory on this and she's not, she's not grounded in reality on every part of the subject. She thinks it's past life stuff. She thinks I'm, you know, I have all this stuff from past lives. And that's

why I at three years old reading. Well, if you lived all the life that's not history, that's just a bio. That's a real. I think that's fiction too for the record. But I mean, she was trying to explain how this four year old kids reading rise and fall of the third right. And how do you and how do you explain that to friends at cocktail party? Exactly. Well, he's either going to be super smart or we have a problem. That's right. I think that we have a problem thing was was pretty much the standard answer until I graduated college. So well, I mean, Dan, when it comes to being like a curator, you know, when you have these massive stories, like, you know, supernova in the East, blueprint for Armageddon, you

know, ghosts of the Ossfron, like when you're setting out and you're planning out these stories, like, are you trying to make a point with these stories? Are you just kind of giving a point of view of what happened throughout these, you know, massive global events. Well, I don't for us anyway, we weren't trying to simply just recount a bunch of facts. We know, we like to have, we like to think that there's an artistic element to this. And for that to be the case, there's got to be something that we're adding. Otherwise, why wouldn't you just go get the books that we're using for our research,

right? And then we put on our website because those are by reputable historians and you can trust them much better than you can. So what are we bringing to the table? We have in house names that we use for a lot of the stuff. And you guys probably do too. You develop terms to refer to things that you use in your work. And we call it the spine, right? So every show kind of has usually a major spine and maybe a couple minor spines that are sort of a throughput idea that if you think about, you know, there's an old line that history is philosophy taught by example. And we try to keep a sort of a philosophical throughput. So like in the show that we did on nuclear weapons, the throughput question was sort of whether or not human

kind is ever going to, if we haven't already, develop a weapon system that is so powerful, we ourselves can't figure out how to exist with it, right? Well, mankind ever become unable to handle the power of its own weapons systems. And the throughput idea was kind of that mixed with sort of the question about whether or not if you had a gun, I think we said we phrased it this way. If you had a gun pointed at your head throughout your entire life, meaning nuclear weapons, right? There was a generation that did that grew up without nuclear weapons and then had nuclear weapons. And they were acutely aware of the nuclear threat. But people born when nuclear weapons already existed are like people

born with a gun put to their head. Do you, do you even notice it anymore? So those were, those, that was part of an intertwining spine, questioning whether or not, if mankind hasn't gotten to the point yet, will we ever get to the point because you assume technology is always going to advance and we're going to invent more and better powerful weapons. Can we handle the power of our weapon system? And this is where we included stuff like the, the think tanks that were created after nuclear weapons came to the fore where you got the smartest people in the world on the subject, put them in a room together and then had them try to figure out how mankind exists with these weapons that can destroy mankind.

And so it's part of a fascinating tale that's a subtext of the nuclear question. And that's that's something that I just saw up in Heimer the other night. And when I saw the movie, all I was thinking of is, man, I felt like they really missed an opportunity to get into that side of the question. Because here are these people taking us into a brand new era of weapon power. And you have to ask the question then about, you know, how do you then, you know, what's the old line? There was a line, I think it's Bertrand Russell or one of those philosophers was talking about, you know, he said, it's, you can expect mankind to walk on a tightrope, you know, for, you know, an hour or two or a day or a week, but we're committed to walking on this tight

rope of not blowing ourselves up forever more for every right. And so, and so those are the kind of questions that we woven to the, the story about the early years of nuclear war and nuclear, nuclear war, but nuclear development. And that's an example of one of the spines, major and minor that we try to throw into these shows that makes it interesting for us. And that adds something that we hope makes it worth listening to instead of just picking up the history books. Does that make sense? Of course. Any insight on the snacks in these think tanks because I figured this would be a cracker

and cheese club. Unbelievable. I think it's I think it's sardines and cigars. My. It smells like it. Yeah. It smells like the world. I'm North Laid. Do you think that we'll have the same come up

and since some point about, because our generation was the first ones to really, like, you know, we came up in an age, we were the last ones to come up in an age with no digital footprint, right? Like, we're all about, we're 40 across the line. We went through things. We saw both worlds and now we're all about we're 40 across the line. We went through things. We saw both worlds and now we're kind of like the generations after us are deeply in sconce in the internet. I actually wonder if we're going to be having these same conversations

about stuff like this, like what and how it's affecting our society later on down the line after like, because I don't know what it's doing. More brains like it seems like it's kind of tearing a support. Right. From the inside, not like how nuclear weapons would do it in a fancy expensive explosion. No, I think about it all the time. The analog generation, right? The people that I always describe it to my kids who don't want to hear it. It's like me listening to my parents talk about, you know, when they had radio instead

of television. But the analog generation and the generation that eventually had to decide someday, we're going to learn how to operate that weird, complicated tool known as a computer. I remember looking forward to it going, God, I don't really want to have to learn, you know, MS DOS and how to deal with this computer and everything, but I'm going to have to for work. So in other words, the generation that grew up in a in a pre digital world and that has to then, you know, sort of bridge the gap. And then these other kids, it's a little

like what we just talked about being born with a gun to your head. We were, I think so. Yeah, we were born without the gun to our head and we're acutely aware of the digital world. Whereas my, my oldest daughter was born the year the iPhone was invented, I think. And I try to explain to her that this whole texting reality that is, is this like concrete to you is about as old as you are. Now try to imagine how different the world was before that. And she can't, she can't get a reminder about it. And I think that's how human beings are hardwired.

But because we existed in that world, we're acutely aware of how different our childhood was, for example, than the way childhood will ever be again. And what's interesting is our childhood was more like the way children experience life from our time to caveman time. Yeah. That's the reason we can't. Yeah, that will ever be again.

Right. Well, I mean, to the point of being like, you know, adapting to technology, I mean, you will ever begin. Right. Well, I mean, to the point, I mean, to the point of being like, you know, adapting to technology, I mean, you were one of the first people to use podcasts as a medium. Like you've been doing podcasting since what, 2005? Yeah. Yeah. And so why did you make the jump from terrestrial radio to podcasting? And did you ever think that podcasting would ultimately become like

the top medium when it comes to broadcasting? It's so funny. I'm having dinner with the guy tomorrow night who first proposed that idea to me in 1994. Wow. Yeah. So it wasn't my idea at all. I was on the radio one day and I had a very contentious relationship with my audience. I always said I was the Martian in the day part because I was saddled between two right-wing talkers on commercial radio. And I was a Martian, I still am a Martian. And so I inherited the audience of the guy before me and the people after me. And so they didn't like me very much and the feeling was mutual.

And so I would yell at them during the program. And I was screaming one day about what are you willing to do to create positive change? And I got off the radio and I'm punching walls and I'm over caffeinated, like I always am. And the secretary from downstairs comes up and says she has a message from me. And one of the listeners wants to have dinner with me, which is always a red flag in real anyway, right? Especially when you're the Martian in the day part, right? Yeah. It's an invitation for a shooting.

But, but so I called the guy up and he says, if you want to know what I'm prepared to do for positive change, let's go out to dinner. So for some reason, it's funny how these little things can change your life. These decisions that you make that you almost didn't make that in your whole life takes a left hand term when you do. So I show up to dinner, the guy's about my age. He looks like Dilbert, but he has hair down to his waist, John Leninglass's, and all I can tell you about this guy to sum him up in a nutshell is this is one of the most forward

thinkers I've ever met in my life. And it's sort of the curse and bane of his entire existence because he sees so far around the curve that he's always in the wrong place to score off of off seeing the future. This is a guy who saw apps, right? As the future of of computer programming, he was writing apps, but he was writing them for the Newton. Remember, right?

So by the time apps are a big thing for like the iPhone, he's already passed that. He did it with the Newton. Now he's on the next, but he didn't score with the Newton. So this is a guy who sees so far in the future that he can't even benefit from it. And in 1994, he said, I wanna put your show on the internet. And I said, what?

You know, we're just basically getting used to what the heck the internet is. And it's mostly text because I'm gonna put your show on the internet. Yeah, I said. I remember him talking to how emails were gonna destroy the workplace. Yeah, I'm like,

what do you even mean? I said, how would you even do that? He goes, well, that's where I come in. I'm going to invent how to do it. And you're going to show people how it's done. Okay, so long story short, everything grew out of that. And once again, he was too far ahead of the curve. I went back to commercial radio.

But then down the line, when the opportunity started to be obvious even to idiots like yours truly, I'd already been exposed to the idea. So I got involved as a founder and a tech company with a bunch of other people. And one of the things we were going to do was push what at the time was called amateur content. Now we call it YouTube. We got everything you can think of is amateur, but back then I'm out there trying to sell this idea to venture capitalists who think it's the dumbest thing they've ever heard. And the excuse I always got was if anybody was ever any good at anything like this, they'd be paid for it. So nobody invested. The thing went nowhere, but I put a show together to show people what amateur content would

look like. And it was our very earliest few shows of the podcast, not the history one, the one we did before that, the, the political one, which was just a variation in my radio show. And when that company went belly up, I took that show and continued to do it myself. And that was what the 2005 podcast was, but it all grew out of the idea this guy I'm having dinner with again tomorrow when he said, we'll put the show on the internet. And I said, how do you put a show on the internet? So I got in a head start on that idea because this guy was so forward thinking. That's the short

answer. What were some of the things that gave you hope that this was going to be the future of 2005. I mean, I didn't know about podcast. I didn't have hope in 2005. Yeah, that was before I had. Yeah. What was, where there's little things along the way we're like, you know what? This is going to work out. Well, I tell you, I was worried about stupid things looking back on it now.

Like, I remember, um, I think it was like show five, six, seven in there. Um, and I, which is amazing that you had shows five and six and seven. Yeah. So long time ago, we all started somewhere. Yeah. And they all sucked. So five, six, seven, we're not very good. Um, but I remember, you know, in radio, you have a cough button. As you guys probably know, right? So you're going to cough or clear your throat, you push the button, you're off air for a second. So we're doing this podcast and there's no cough button. So I used to just go. I mean, there's nothing written.

It's the, I do it the same way today. It's like, it's completely improvised. I get up there and I just start talking. So I mean, I was like 15 minutes into some long rant and it was going really well. And then I had to cough. And I remember turning to the producer and go, oh, man, I said, we got to start over. He goes, what do you mean start over? We're not starting over.

You're not going to do 15 good minutes again. And I said, well, what are you proposing? We do. He said, well, you just pick up where you left off. And we're scrunched together. I said, you can't scrunch it together. I said, you ruined my chops. I'll never be able to go back to radio again.

He said, oh, you think it about going back to radio? And that's when I sat down and went, you know, radio kind of sucked. It's not for me anyway. I mean, I was the wrong guy for radio, right? So I was kind of going, yeah, what am I preserving those chops for? And that's when you started to realize, okay, we got some tools in this podcasting that you can't do in live radio, right?

Right. So it was all up as it is for all of us, right? A growth process learning what you can do, what the tools are. And in 2005, we don't exactly have, you can't go like research, what other people are doing. So we're, you know, you find out later that other people were learning these same lessons, we were all learning them sort of at the same time independently.

Um, but yeah, to that, you know, it's the funny thing is, is if you go listen to the shows in 2005, they sound so horrible now. And yet at the time, you grade all this stuff on a curve, right? I mean, it's only as good as what the technological expectations at the time were. But God, you know, I sell those old shows. And it seems like it shouldn't sell those old shows now, right? But I mean, but for me, though, like I first heard hardcore history for the first time in 2007. Like I've been that's early times. Yeah, I've been hardcore history for the first time in 2007. Like I've been-

And that's early times. Yeah, I've been listening to that. You've been doing podcasting for 18 years and your family's still alive. That's incredible. That is amazing. But when I listen to him back then, I also come from Terrestrial Radio, from FM Radio,

and I was working as a janitor at the time as many FM Radio guys were doing in 2007. I was gonna say, it sounds like a natural code. Perfect. But, you know, I, but I, you know, found your, you know, your podcast and started listening to it just constantly. And, you know, it really did for me. It, it changed the way that I thought like what was possible,

of what, what you could do with this podcast medium. But in those early days, like your first episode is 16 minutes long. Yeah, I'm just sounding, huh? Yeah, it's 16 minutes long. But then now, your series on World War I was what, 22 hours, something like that. Well, it's funny you say that though,

because this is something I think we also all sort of independently discovered. When we did the political show, the current event show that we started out for that was simply a repurposed radio show, right? Yeah. Something that we did on radio. But when we decided to do a history show, that was something we designed specifically for podcasting. And I remember thinking it was like this giant whiteboard we had to work with. There are no time limits, there are no mandatory breaks, there's no skeleton at all. You can do anything you want.

And I was intoxicated by the creative space we had to work with because as you know in radio, you have little creative windows that you can operate within plus management will also constrain those spaces even farther. The first time we designed a podcast as a podcast, it was an exhilarating experience. And that's what I knew I was never going back to radio. Once I was able to sit there and go, why would you ever give this up? Right? Especially when you've done radio, any sort of romance or any of the, any of the cash

share involved. It's not what I did television as a news reporter. Once you do television, you don't need to go back and do, it's satisfied whatever, it de-romanticized it, you know, there's nothing cool about that. What's cool is the creative white space. And that's when I knew I was,

you know, that's when you had like the, the tire don't back up here with the spikes. I was never going back to the old media once I got a taste of the creative freedom of this. Did TV people ever try to get you? Did TV people ever come up or no? They still do, but, but, well, first of all, I have a face made for radio now,

which makes it easy to say no. You're talking three of them. Yeah, it makes it easy to say no. But at the same time, I mean, you know, I was a bad TV guy, and you know, when I knew I was a bad TV guy, I was in news. And you know, you start off at the low wrong and then you know, you kind of made it when they start using you to shoot the promos, right? So they, you're going

to shoot a promo. Now you're one of the guys that they want to advertise. And so all these other colleagues of mine would go shoot the promo. We would take them like five takes. And I remember the promo because it was so painful. All you had to do was you started with a side shot and you turned and you faced the camera and you smiled. You didn't like that. I was like, yeah, so I was on take like 49. Before the camera man who was a friend of mine said, this is not gonna work, is it?

And they said, it's not, it's just not. And you're like not, you know, like when I was in the field as a reporter, I was a pretty good reporter on like the, the merits of reporting. But when it came to like looking good, I always look like Colombo, you know, out in the field right. My secret. Yeah.

He was a low key sex. Oh, yeah. I was not a low key sex symbol. I was just, I looked rumpled. I looked like I'd been literally in the field, as they say. And so I was, I, but so in that sense, I was not, I was not the TV guy and it was uncomfortable for me, right? What was, what was, what were my hands doing? I did a couple of sizzle reels for some TV companies that wanted to do things. And I had the exact same problem. It was like a bad flashback to my, to my TV, like, what am I

going to do with my hands? And they were, they would sit there and focus inordinately on, you know, how my pants looked and the crease. And I just, I can't deal with that. I'm a content person. I'm not a, not a visible person. Yeah. And there's a superficiality to television that obviously podcasts can erode, right? We actually get to tell long stories. You can do long form. You don't have to worry about the next ad break coming up. There's something about it that's very refreshing and very earnest. And I think that's one of the reasons people love your podcast and love podcasts in general because it was just what's the tomorrow hamlin when he got hurt with the bills. So this guy almost dodged the

football field red. So everyone's crying in the stadium, right? And then buck is like, all right, let's go to break. And everyone is dead serious. And then all of a sudden, it's wapper, wapper, let's go to break. And everyone's dead serious. And then all of a sudden it's Wapper, Wapper, Wapper. Wapper. It brings you out of it. And you're like, oh, and nothing, that means about to die on national television. And the ads just roll on.

Yeah. And the things about you, Dan, as you were the one that showed everybody else, I think the, you know, the whiteboard that we could all use, you know, that we could do whatever we want with us medium. I know you definitely showed us. Yeah, what the hell to do with that?

That's a great problem. I hope that's true. I'd like to think that's true. It is true. It is true for us at least. We say come a lot. I think we 200% more than you do. Yeah, but that's our uvra.

You know what I mean? That's our life. Yeah. Okay, back to history. I want to ask you a couple of history questions, just your opinions on certain things. So like, we talk on this show a lot when we talk about like cultural history, like we talk about like the secret authors of the 20th century. And usually when we talk about them, we talk about them in terms of like occult

figures like Aleister Crowley or Elron Hubbard Parsons. Like, people who truly did like, they, that shaped the century as we know it, but nobody really knows it. Like, do you have any like historical figure that you feel is like a secret author that shaped the world that no one really gives credit to? You know, I'm sure given enough time and thought I could come up with one, but on the top, off the top of my head, hmm. Well, you know, it's funny, because you say, and I devolve toward the mean

on a lot of these questions, and I apologize in advance, but one of the nonfiction books I read every year, and it horrifies people when I tell them this. But I think it's actually behind me in the bookshelf right there, probably, is Mind Comf, right? Mm-hmm. And people say, well, why would you read mind comp? And I said,

well, you know, in the same way that you get a chance to really, when you're reading nonfiction, as opposed to fiction, you get a chance to know the author a little bit, right? I said, how interesting is it to get a chance to get into the mind of this person who, you know, you don't want to make it sound positive. He made such a difference in the 20th century because it sounds like he made a positive difference. But he made an impact, would be a better way to put it. And his wild, evil ideas continue to live on and are on the upswing today.

So to get an idea into the mind, I mean, the one thing you get when you read mind confus, you see what a conspiracy nut this guy was, right? I mean, there's things like that. We, and you turn around. So, I mean, when I think about secret authors, most people don't think about Hitler as an author, but he was an author before he was the Chancellor of Germany, right? And he wrote a book besides mine, Comfort, second book, which I have not read, but, but apparently it's also very instructive into the minds of this guy. So, to me, that's getting a little bit closer to understanding one of these people who continues. I mean, you know, one of the things we mentioned in the first World War Show that you brought up is how it's an inflection point in the modern world, right. How the world before the first world war is a different world and

the world after the second world, a first world war is a completely different world. And the second world war is an offshoot of the first world war. Hitler is one of those figures that when you read mine, comp, you can see how he's a different figure because of the first world war. And so when you say secret authors, I mean, you know, I don't think of Alistair Crowley as having a huge impact, but Elrond Hubbard did, but the kind of impact Elrond Hubbard had, even though I'm not comparing it to Naziism at all, is more like the kind that Hitler had in the sense that he comes up with this book. The book itself has an enduring impact. Some movement springs from it. I mean, there's no,

I'm trying to think if you could say that Alistair Crowley started a movement, he has fans. We can write. Well, L.R. H stole the structure of Scientology from the OTO. And he, he said, if you go deep into like the lore of Elrond Harberg, he was, he was like a pen pal of Alistair Crowley's when Alistair Crowley was deposed, like once he was like in his waning years, Alistair Crowley's writings also, which is interesting because the out of biography of Alistair Crowley is fascinating as well, because you see how much more is a lark, how much more of it was like he was a entirely aware of the what he was creating and what he was doing. And he's like a cervix sense of humor, but LRH is like all of that stuff is ritual magic and ritual ideas that have been stolen from Esoteria from across the board. So it's weird that Elrond Hubbard can be like drawn back to like John D like that character

where he's like, they keep stealing from the same source. Yeah. It's the same problem that we have that we were talking about earlier. How far back do you go? How much context do you give is that because you could just keep going back and back and back with these guys? I think that ability though to go back and pull from the past like you just mentioned. I think that's like a superpower, you know? I mean, I think that's one of those things where if you can do that well, that's one of those things that you would trade a number of other, you know, it's almost like a D and

D character and you roll the various things that you have the ability to do that. If you score an 18, you're three six sided dice on that quality. It's going to help you, you know, in the dungeon class, right? Yeah, it helps me in this context and everywhere else it hurts. Well, look at that. Everywhere else, it makes me a social pride. We went from talking about dates to talking about people who never get dates. That's fantastic.

So do you have like, do you have a favorite like sort of, you mentioned this word earlier, hinge, like do you have like a moment in history that you see as like just this extraordinarily important hinge moment that just everything after it just kind of depends on? Oh, I, you know, my problem is narrowing it down. I mean, the first world war is a great one because that we live in that world now, right? So the door that swung open there is the room in which we live now. But there's hinge points all over the place. I love Alexander the great. I mean, if you don't have Alexander with those crazy conquests of his, it's hard to imagine what happens without it. You know, there's a lot of, because you can play history two ways. One way is if Alexander

doesn't do it, someone else does, right? The other one is without Alexander, it never happens. And, you know, the thing, you know, it's, it's the old historical argument about the great man theory of history versus the trends and forces one, right? So the argument is sometimes that you have these unusual figures that push the envelope and then all of us sort of follow in their wake or you have the circumstances in place that create the conditions that somebody just exploits, right? So you create the room in the door and someone walks through it versus nobody could have walked through that door except that particular person. Or as we always say on the podcast, it's probably an interplay between the two. You might, Alexander's a very unique figure, but had he existed 200 years before

his time. Maybe he's not able to do what he did, right? Yeah. Right. It was sort of like the doctor, John approach. If I don't do it, someone else will. So do you think it's more on the person of the parameters that that person was raised in? Cause I think it's the interplay. I think it's just both. I think I think I think it's, it's, it's a magic moment where, uh, if, you know, it's same thing with Hitler. I mean, if you have Hitler a hundred years before, whatever, think of Hitler, I think of magic moment. Magic. That's right. But I mean, think about this. If Hitler is

Hitler a hundred years before the time period he exists in, he's not doing anything because he's not a nobleman. Yeah, he's an asshole. He's an asshole. He's some peasant that none of the blue bloods are going to listen to it all in an era where you have to be a blue blood for someone to listen to you, right? So, I mean, that's what we mean by the confluence of time and place versus the individual. And it's hard to imagine anybody doing what Hitler did other than Hitler because he's

this weird mix of, I mean, he's such a crazy mixed up, screwy, weird character that it's hard to imagine there being a bunch of those dudes walking around, you know, in the 1930s. Yeah. Well, one of the, I guess time and person, that, you know, one of those like points that we got stuck on recently, we did a serial killer. We get an episode on a serial killer named G DeRae, who was active during Joan of Arc's time. He was active during the Hundred Years War. Oh, okay. And somewhere to hide what's going on, huh? Yeah. Yeah. But he also, because G-D-Ray was like her main dude. That was like her like army captain.

Well, that's sort of my question is that there are some historians who specialize in Joan of Arc, do not mention G-D-Ray at all, or at least they, he might get a small mentions like a minor general in her army. But historians who focus specifically on this character of G. Durey, who is actually an absolutely real person who held a high ranking position during the third phase of the Hundred Years War. They portray him as basically Joan of Arc's best friend. That during Joan ofarks first battles, he saved her life time and time

again and that he's been basically erased from history since. So do you think that like when historians write about subjects like Jonavarks, do they do you think that people sort of erase embarrassing connections, embarrassing events in order to sort of feed the narrative that they want. Well, I mean, this is the ancient idea about historians and the problems that they face right at the very beginning, right? Because you can't have a 15,000 page history book. So simply deciding what to include and what not to include begins the process of pruning and trimming. And simply by leaving things out, you change the way things are viewed. And it's not necessarily intentional, although it can be,

but even if you're trying to not have it be something that gives a false impression, simply by having to trim and prune, you're already changing the narrative. You know, because of the constraints, I mean, you can't have it. The aliens may have a history book somewhere that has every word of everything that's ever happened, but the rest of us have to prune, right? So you introduce the deformities in reality right there. And then you get to the point where you're at, which is, do you do it deliberately? Now, we should point out that a lot of historians, because they have to sit there in prune, we will say, well, I'm just going to narrow the focus, which makes sense.

Right. I'm going to tell you everything we're going to know about Joan of Arc personally without getting into every friend she ever had. But then this is, and this is what history of Horses of Vacuum even in history writing. That's when it opens up the door to saying we've had 5,000 books on Joan of Arc and nobody's mentioned the serial killer best friend. So I'm going to write the book on the serial killer best friend. And then if you're a Joan of Arc fan, you read all the books on Joan of Arc and that gives you more of the various pieces of the tiles that

put together create a mosaic that gives you a better view of the, but no one work. I mean, and if you're the work that focuses on Joan of Arc's serial killer best friend, you're missing other things because it's not a 15,000 page work. So I mean, that's sort of how by the very nature of the limitations in the number of trees out there to make paper pages out of, you get these deformities. Live from North Wave.

It's kind of crazy, these kind of like actual just practical things. Yeah. Change the face of the, like our entire like, history. Our reality. Our reality. It's no wild to me. Like, that's why I like history now. He got me.

I was never into this stuff. And then as the years went, he really got me deep into medieval history. And that whole area fascinates me because there's gaps. There's like all these things. I don't know what we're missing when you're reading about the end. It's interesting the way that even just saying that, like of course, yeah, they have to cut shit out. They have to print the books.

They got to ship the books. The books can't be, the book can't be 25 packs. Well, that's a great point. And when it comes to getting people interested in history, what do you, like, what's the string, what was the string for you? Because you can look at history through sports lens, through music lens, through politics, lens. There's so many different ways that you can look through history and see, you know, you can look at racism through the history of sports, so on and so forth. What is a string for you that got you excited about the past?

And maybe something to help our audience, maybe wants to get into history, like just a place to start, because it's history, it's pretty big. You know, I go through phases. So people will ask me sometimes, why don't you do a show on 17th century India or something? And I'll say because I don't know anything about 17th century India.

And all the shows that we do were things that I already had some pre-existing knowledge about. And the reason I had pre-existing knowledge about them is because at one time in my life, I was really into that subject. And even though I moved on from it, you know, you retain a certain amount of foundational knowledge that you can then read new books on and sort of build off of. I don't have to start from no knowledge about 17th century, I can work with things that I was into. So all of the shows that we've done are at one time or another were subjects that obsessed

me. And if you look at the throughput, I'm ashamed to say almost that a lot of it's military. And this again gets back to my mom's theory that I was, you know, how does a three or four year old get it so interested in military affairs when he's a basically nonviolent child? I mean, I wasn't the only kid playing with GI Joe's who's just working on diplomacy between that's right. No, we're not fighting guys.

No, but I mean, I mean, but whatever I was into, like I was into Native Americans for a while, but, but the Native Americans I was into were warrior Native Americans. I wasn't into the ones who were, you know, putting things together with shell fish and, you know, nice little pottery things. I was interested in warriors, you know, and so I mean, that's the kind of stuff where you end up learning about the pottery and the basket weaving and all that stuff as a consequence of being drawn into the subject from the warrior side of it. And so if you think about that as being ground zero of an explosion, then you learn about

the other things because of being taken in by the subject matter connected to a military thing. And then like we've talked about, like the rest of the story, you have to flesh out for the context and everything else where you want to understand the world that these warriors live in. You want to understand their reality, their values, what they were losing when their culture was being destroyed. So for me, the ground zero thing, I think was the military stuff. And Dan, I'm sorry you did trigger why we know so much about shovels. Because when he was watching the Donner party, Marcus really got into the shovels that they use.

And then Hillary, thankfully, he really needed about five pages. He truly loves wagon manifests. You know, you guys make me think at the University of Colorado, and I don't know if it's the same as it used to be, but, but the grill in the student union is named the Alfred Packer Grill. It was a cannibal against, you know, one of those Donner past type guys. It was a game. Well, but on the other hand, you know, that was the Donner party was kind of what, that

is what got you into history. It was when we did our series on the, I don't know if you read this book called The Indifferent Stars Above, which is a, but remember the Donner party, those people were forced to that. I think Alfred Packer was, I think he developed a taste. He was a very different game. He was a very different person. He was a different person. He was a chef.

I mean, they had to do it to survive. But I did learn something important on that, uh, episode like doing that series because I really did get really heavily into what they took on their wagons. Yeah. Like what they took with them out west because I thought that said so much about the people themselves and what they expected once they got there and what they didn't expect to happen. Well, that was the first story I remember really reading and then getting more into like older history,

medieval history of understanding all this, like, oh, people had been just like us for a long time. Forever. We've been the same idiots walking around for the same time dealing with the same stuff. Like all of this other happened with the Donner party was literally just hubris, a guy just wanting to get a shortcut. Like, you know, like that thing where it's the very human idea of like we're just going

to try to make, we're going to try to cut this in half, guys. It's a American dream. We're going to cut this in half. You know what I mean? And then, everybody dies. Yeah. I'll take it even farther than that. You know what I've been into for the last couple of years is primates, like looking at, uh, at, at, at, hey, the shit. Yeah. And it's because it's, it's the, it's the exact thing you mentioned, but going even to the more base level, right? Watching chimpanzees deal

with each other is like watching human beings deal with each other at a much more, you know, when you, you know, you do the factoring in math, you get to like the comment, lowest common denominator. It's like watching human society at the lowest common denominator. And I've become fascinated in that. And I feel like I actually learned

about human societies now studying the lowest common denominator on some of these higher rape groups. And when it all comes together, that really, that really focuses when you get the music. Also, you totally changed my idea when it comes to the meetings, sardines and cigars, that changes everything. Oh, man, that really changes the temperature of the room. So once you mix it all together, it's just such a beautiful thing.

And it helps, you know, just understanding how How much does history help you understand the present? It's apps. I don't even understand how other people understand. So, so I have a friend who's a one of these guys who sees the entire world as math, right? I mean, everything is factored through his brain, which is muscle crow. The actor should be. It should be. So, so, so we'll have these discussions. And I'm just fascinated by his thought process and he is by mine because everything in mine is, is through history, but not like history books, but like I mentioned to you earlier, the context, right? Everything is, it's the past episodes of the soap opera. I only understand now based on what happened yesterday, what happened the day before, how we got to here. And I can't

even visualize how other people figure things out without that. Just like he can't figure out how other people figure things out without math. And I feel like there must be like 25, 30, 35 different ways of looking at the world. And all of us fall into one of those various groups. And so I talked to other history fans, and when we first did the history show, I thought I was doing it for other history major types. That's why the early shows sound so different. I don't really give you any history because I thought the audience was gonna be people

who already knew the history. It's just all the twists and funky stuff, right? But those people, I went to school with them. We all saw the world through that lens. Just like I, I imagine a bunch of mathematicians all see it like my friend. So, so in answer your question, it's the only way I make sense of now.

That's the entire way I see the world. Mm hmm. All right. So I want you. All right. Yeah. You're gonna be a little bit longer. It's a little longer.

We're gonna get a little longer. We're gonna get a, all right. We're gonna get a little longer. I want a little longer. We're gonna be a little longer. We're gonna be a little longer. All right, we're gonna, if we're gonna be a little longer, I want you to play a little bit of what if. I want, I want to ask you a couple of what ifs. And this is like, and one of the, and actually I want to ask you one big what if, it was one that we really got into that was sort of inspired by your World War I series,

is the question of Rasputin. It's like how important was Rasputin to World War One? If you take the figure of Rasputin out of history completely, does it change World War One or the history of Russia at all? I'm going to guess, and we'll throw that out there. I'm going to guess not because I think by the time Rasputin is making a real sort of impact on, you know, and his really impact was he had the ear of the czar of Russia and his wife, right?

I think once Russia, see, and this is what the guns of August is about, Barbara Tuckman's famous book, which basically shows how once the gears of the momentum of the first month of the first world war get going, you're stuck, right? I described it once like, like pulling the pin on a hand grenade and then trying to decide you're going to put the pin back in there. Once you pull that pin and then lose it somewhere, you're done. And I think I think I think I think once Russia starts getting, taking the kind of, it's funny because you could make,

and this is why history is important too. You could make certain analogies with Ukraine and Russia today and the war going on there. War creates such a strain on societies that it is a challenge for their political systems not to just collapse. And what was happening in Russia already before the first world war broke out, I mean, they had a big revolution or a revolutionary attempt that collapsed in 1905, right? The war breaks out in 1914. So they, they already were seeing the cracks in the edifice. And so to then put immense

pressure on Russia, the kind of casualties they were taking in the war, the amount of money that was being spent, the dissatisfaction among the public and all that sort of stuff, put in motion an inevitable collapse that was going to happen. And I don't think, unless Rasputin could have convinced the czar to end the war. And I don't think unless Rasputin could have convinced the czar to end the war. And I don't think Russia was in any position to end the war. And I think that the ally powers that he was allied with wouldn't have let him end the war, then I think Russia stuck anywhere and they're on like a crazy train to collapse. Well, mentioning history and how it kind of conflates with modern era, Rasputin or Lyndon

Johnson, bigger debt. Who do you think would be the piece? Here's the thing. I have a specific view on Lyndon Johnson and that's the, I think, you know, and I tried it, I tried to say this about a lot of historical figures. I think he was trying, right? I mean, I think if you, if you, if you, I'm of the same opinion, you're scurrying the question. I need to hear inches. I think I think we're disputing. Oh, I mean, I think you're talking like actual physical proportions. Is that what we're talking about? Are you? Of course he is.

He doesn't know. He's not trying. He's not trying. Well, you've got to try. You can do history. No, no, no, here's my, here's my favorite. Here's my favorite. Here's my favorite.

Here's my favorite. Lyndon Johnson story. You guys will appreciate this. And I read it in a book about Richard Nixon, who was the next president after Lyndon Johnson. So I don't know if it's true or not, but I read that when Richard Nixon, who was a quaker, right? So he was raised a certain way. When Richard Nixon got into the White House, there's the shower that the president uses in the shower, right? His bathroom shower and Lyndon Johnson had had installed in the shower a shower jet in the middle of the shower that shot straight up. And this so upset Nixon.

Oh, that removed. So that's my Lyndon Johnson story. Oh my God, people were mad that Obama put a basketball court in and be living with Nixon. That's the perinium wash. That's my taint spray. I think a couple of bill. Why didn't Bill Clinton put that back in? He's a dirty man. I guess the last thing today, Henry wanted to ask you about aliens. I just, I saw you recently put out an essay about the UAP situation. Cause I know that you've been trying to get into you, follow you a little bit.

First of all, don't, don't come into this. Don't do it. Don't become a uFologist. They're going to take everything away from you. There was a loose everything. Henry's been more upset than ever, even though he's gotten everything he wanted this year. It's just you, but where are you at with it? I saw, and like now that this disclosure movement,

whatever is happening, whatever this David Grush character talking about, like what they have, what they don't have in terms of having an object retrieval program, like they have something, there's always like buzzwords from, like where are you at now with your understanding

of the UFO phenomena? Like your essay was great. It was such a good breakout of like, this I was like, oh, this is the entire history of you follow you, great. He does that in a second. You just shittin' it out, and it's incredible. I don't know how you do it.

But then you sat in the best way, Bob. Yes, of course, I can't believe it. But how do you like, where are you at now with aliens? Like is it? That's it. I don't, I don't have an answer because I'm not one of those people who tries to, I feel the same way about the Kennedy assassination. I'm not somebody who has a strong opinion either way because I just don't feel like I have the evidence, right? Yeah. But I appreciate and enjoy examining the potentials. And I am somebody who's, I suspect that the math that has been done, that's, you know, when you, when you start actually paying attention, and I know you guys probably already know

this. So I apologize. But when you start paying attention to how many planets are out there in, in the universe, and this is just assuming one universe, right? Once you start getting into the idea of multiverse and all that, then it starts getting in pod. But once you realize how many planets there are, then it becomes a weird, it almost becomes weirder to start saying that there isn't any more life out there than to say that there is. Now, then you get into things like the great filter,

right? This idea that if there, if there is life in all these places, then what is happening to kill it off before it develops spaceflight? Those are all fascinating ideas. There's a book I have called, um, I think it's called, uh, where are they or something? And it's a book, it's a book basically about the whole question that if they're all out there, where are they? And I love it. Yeah. So you follow just you family has decided to leave them. Where did my wife go? That's right. That's right.

So, but, but so the answer to the question is is that I'm very interested in the subject because I always wonder, and this is how a history mind works also, that if aliens did come to the planet or, or, or major, you, major world governments were made aware that there were aliens. How on earth would they handle it? Right? And here's a better question. What would we, how would we want them to handle it?

And that's something that we did in that article you mentioned, which was start to wonder if the government knew about aliens and we wanted the government to act the way we would want them to act. How would we want them to act? And I read this book on UFOs and that was sort of part of, you know, what we hinged that article that you mentioned on. And the author tried to take a sort of a skeptical approach, but some of the things that she brought up that would happen to us if aliens were real, I had never

thought of. And the one that the one that was the most interesting to me was the religious question. I mean, what if aliens know what happens to us after we die? What if they know about, is there or isn't there a God? And if there is a God, what is the God? I mean, do they instantly invalidate all of our religions? If they instantly invalidate all of our religions, well, anybody who's paid any attention to religious wars or just what happens between two religions when they start fighting. I mean, people die. Oh, yeah.

So you start saying, okay, if the government knows that exposing us to the fact that there are aliens would expose us to all these things that would destroy the structures upon which our world is built, would we want them to not tell us or would want them to ease us into it? And so for me, without being, because I don't have the evidence to say if there are or aren't aliens, but we can have a great amount of fun speculating on if there were, how would that best be released to us? And maybe you guys remember, there was a theory years ago when they started making movies like

Close Encounters of the Third Kinds and all these things that this might be part of the plan, right? That this was all part of easing us so that we became more comfortable with the idea. We didn't view it like 1950s flying saucer type stuff, right? Yeah. No, of course, with the war of the worlds, how that radio play turned out, I think there's reason to be hesitant. There is. If you are in power, I suppose.

I do believe there is some talk about. I do believe that there is some slow rollout that they're trying to get us to understand something. And I don't know what it is. But I think the smart religions are just folding it in. The Vatican has a whole uphological department. Like they, apparently that's one of the people that might have a UFO. They're saying that they might have something in somewhere in the Vatican city, which is the best coolest slash scariest thing I can possibly imagine. You know, me like the Mormons are already holding an alien like a Catholic.

It's just I feel like that's one one of those things where like you just get in there on Hubbard sort of folded into his. Oh, yeah, O T three, man. Yeah. The new reveal gets you hard each time. You know it's coming. Yeah. And then how once it gets you? Wow.

Yeah, they do. Well, Dan, thank you so much for joining us. We can't tell you how much we appreciate it. You guys were very nice to have me on. I hope it lived up to the hype. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I was, I was just thinking about what's the Dan Carlin from 2330?

What's that history podcast going to be? And it'll be interesting that we, as we live this history together, it'll be fascinating to see how it all goes. What's going to happen when the analog generation dies out and nobody remembers what it was like. Oh, God. There will never be a game of hopscotch again. That's right. That's a tragedy. And I also want to say to our listeners, if you enjoyed our series on the Manhattan project, Dan Carlin's episode that was called The Destroyer of Worlds, it's a six hour episode about what happened next.

But like that starts and I enjoyed it immensely. I can't tell you. Like, and Erie, Rainbows and Unicorn unicorns just like our shop. Thank you so much. Thank you all so much for listening. Dan Carlin obviously check out hardcore history. I'm sure many of you have already, but if you have it, it's a must listen and Dan again, from a, you're just podcast legend and you're a hero of our. So it's an honor to be on guys. Thank you. It was an honor to have you. Thank you. Senpai. All right, there it was was our conversation with Dan Marcus.

You held it together. Thank you. You did really good. I did better than I did with Kessel with Blazion. Sugar. You better. You did. You did. We have a damn. So that help.

Thank you all so much for listening. Any good takeaways, Marcus. Any good takeaways. He was wonderful. I mean, he was just he was just so away. He was wonderful. He was just so I'm so he's handsome. That's the thing with radio guys most of them that say I got a face for radio or actually handsome And the ones who are like I'm studly Steve look like potato. Oh, that's the joke from it's the Wayne's world He's handsome damn

Hey, all right, all right everyone working his heart work is hot. Thank you for listening Hell yourself hell say to you again look at installations everyone right everyone. Work is hard. Work is hard. Thank you for listening. Hell sale. Hell sale. Hell sale. Hell sale. Hell sale. Look at installations everyone. Naomi, go to get fucking listen hardcore history.

Hardcore history. Hardcore history. Hardcore history. Hardcore history. Hardcore history. Hardcore history. Hardcore history. Hardcore history.

Hardcore history. Hardcore history. Hardcore history. Hardcore history. Hardcore history. Hardcore history. Hardcore history. Hardcore history. Hardcore history. Hardcore history. website, you can buy them there, they are absolutely worth the money, they are audio books all on their own, and just go to the RSS feed and I think it's something called Glow, it'll give you a little you know copy and paste link where you can put it on your podcast app. So yeah, that was it. I

out goes to the Osferon, start with Countdown, Armageddon, any of them are all incredible. All right everyone, don't get sued, bye! are all incredible. All right, everyone. Don't you see it, bye! Bye! This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support our shows by supporting them.

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