The Daily Stoic - Dan Jones on Why History Is Our Greatest Teacher And Henry V’s Legacy

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

We’ve all heard of Marcus Aurelius, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, but what about Henry V? British historian Dan Jones joins Ryan today to talk about why Henry V was one of the most unique Kings throughout history, how we can understand the current state of the world by looking at historical patterns, and unbelievable stories of discovering historical evidence. Dan Jones is a British historian, TV presenter, journalist, and author of Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England's Greatest Warrior King.  Dan has also written the bestselling books Powers and Thrones, The Templars, Essex Dogs, and more. Check out Dan's Netflix Series which he wrote and starred in - Secrets of Great British Castles! You can follow Dan on Instagram @d_a_n_jones, check out his newsletter danjones.substack.com, and listen to his podcast This is History: A Dynasty to Die For. 🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcast. I've been traveling a bunch for the tour that I'm on and I brought my kids and my wife with me when I went to Australia. When I'm going to Europe in November, I'm bringing my in-laws also. So, we're not staying in a hotel. We're staying in an Airbnb. The first Airbnb I stayed in would have been in 2010, I think. I've always loved Airbnb, that flexibility, size, location. You can find something awesome. You want to stay somewhere that other guests have had a positive experience. I love the guest favorites feature that helps you narrow down your search to the most popular, coolest houses. I've been using Airbnb forever. I like it better than hotels. So I'm excited that they're a sponsor of the show.

And if you haven't used Airbnb yet, I don't know what you're doing, but you should definitely check it out for your next family trip. We've got a bit of a commute now with the kids and their new school. And so one of the things we've been doing as a family is listening to audio books in the car.

Instead of having that be dead time, we wanna use it to have a live time. We really wanna help their imagination soar and And listening to Audible helps you do precisely that. Whether you listen to short stories, self-development, fantasy, expert advice, really any genre that you love, maybe you're into stoicism. And there's some books there that I might recommend by this one guy named Ryan. Audible has the best selection of audiobooks without exception and exclusive Audible originals all in one easy app. And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing Right Now on Audible.

You can sign up right now for a free 30-day Audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You can get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits

that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. Never a dull moment over here. I was out for a long bike ride on this dirt road that I live on. I was about an hour and change into it and I'm sort of zoning out, I'm locked in. And then I see this movement kind of out of the corner

of my eye here, this crash and this horse that's wearing like one of those hoods is like blinders just barrels into a fence, like knocks it down. This is like five, 10 feet in front of me, creens through the fence, lands on the ground all akimbo, then pops up and then just takes off down the road in the direction that I was about to go riding, like right past my house.

So I had to stop and knock on the door and be like, I don't know what happened, but I think our horse just lost its mind and is freaking out. And then I had to go calm down because I almost just got blindsided by a horse. It reminded me, you ever see that movie, The Horse Whisperer?

There's that like crazy scene at the beginning of the movie. It was like a slow motion, much less dangerous version of that. So anyways, that's what's going on over here. That really has nothing to do with today's guest. I just can't really believe that it happened. Life's just weird. Which is actually something I was talking about

in the 10 year anniversary edition of Vopsco. I wrote this sort of intro about like what's transpired in my life in the last 10 years. I was joking about this actually when I was in Australia doing the talks. It was literally right as I was about to go on stage, the fire alarms went off, then we all had to evacuate and then the whole thing started 40 minutes late.

And I was saying like, I'm not saying I've been through, you know, horrendous adversity or extreme hardships in the last 10 years, but I would say it's been a lot of weird stuff like that. Just one weird thing after another. And there's that Chinese curse, may live in interesting times. The times have been interesting, life has been interesting.

It's always weird. But I just had this really great guy out to the studio. He was doing a talk at Book People in Austin. He's this huge historical author in the UK. He has this new book out about Henry V, who I know literally nothing about. It's Henry V, the astonishing triumph of England's greatest warrior king. So I was really excited to have him out and just, I love books. I love people. I love things that tell me about something that I knew nothing about,

like that I'd vaguely heard of and then I go, oh, this is why this person has been famous for hundreds of years. This is why there's Shakespearean plays about this person. This is why there's the paintings and the myths and the legends. This is why. So I was excited to have him out.

I thought it was awesome. And one of the things I think we talked about a lot in the show that I was really interested in is this fine line between popularizing history and then how some people are using, I think this podcast medium to pervert history. How do you get people interested? How do you bring them in?

Especially something that maybe they think they're not interested in, but also how do you stay true to it? How do I, on the one hand, bring people into the tent of stoicism while also remaining true to stoicism? How do I stay a good steward of it? That's what I think a lot about.

And anyways, I love this. It's always awesome to get to know someone you didn't know anything about their work, and then you leave a fan. I think you'll feel the same way. You can check out his new book, Henry V the astonishing triumph of England's greatest warrior king. He's written a bunch of other awesome books the best-selling powers and thrones which I know Marks Reeless is featured in. Then he wrote a book called the Templars, Essex Dogs and many more.

And he also wrote and starred in the Netflix series Secrets of Great British Castles, I'll link to that. You can follow him on Instagram, it's at D underscore A underscore N underscore Jones. But anyways, I'll link to that. You can check it out, it's easier to find. You can follow his newsletter, danjones.substack.com, and listen to his podcast, This is History, a Dynasty to Die For. I really enjoyed this conversation,

and I'm grateful to be here talking to you not having been killed by a horse, which I had to come in and tell my wife, like you're never gonna believe what just happened. But I just narrowly avoided being trampled to death by a horse, totally unprovoked. Or maybe I scared it with my bike. I don't know.

I don't know where it came from, but it's quite an experience Let me tell you anyways, here's me talking to Dan Jones in the Daily Stoke studio What drew you to history because usually most history people are don't have tattoos, you know, I mean you like usually If I was talking to a guy that went to some Latin school or whatever those British, you know I'd be thinking more of like a Richard Dawkins. Of course. Yeah.

And now look, and sometimes it still happens. Like I was at a festival, in fact, just two weeks ago, and it was a big prestigious, quite posh British literary festival. Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwen were in conversation here. They're flowing people all over the world and it's in this sort of, in Clifton, beautiful country house. I've been there. Right.

You know, Clifton. Yes. Clifton, beautiful country house. I've been there. Right, you know Clifton. Yes. Clifton Literary Festival. And I like, I shot, I'd driven like eight hours from Edinburgh to go talk at the festival. But because Salman was there, there's a special branch everywhere. Yeah. Because of course, personal security.

And they just kept stopping me. I couldn't get around backstage. Like, sorry sir, you can't be here. I'm like, no, no, I know I, and I wasn't mad. I said, I know this doesn't appear plausible, perhaps even possible, but I'm actually a speaker. Do you want to know my weird Cleveland story? So I gave a talk for, Google did some conference. This is right when the obstacles away came out and my British publisher got me an invite. And it was this crazy audience. Like I'm forgetting all the people there. They're

busy and insane. And so it was me and my wife, you know who Casey Neistat is? He's like a very famous YouTuber. Anyways, the younger speakers, they allowed us just to stay in the house after, so we stayed. And one of the people there was this sort of, so Cleveland for people who don't know,

Cleveland is famous, it's obviously a famous country house, but it's also where the Profumo scandal in part happens. Right? So I talk about him in one of my books, but anyways, for people who don't know, there's like a famous British Russian spy scandal that happens at this English country house. Okay.

So I'm there and one of the guys there is this sort of citizen journalist from the US named Tim Pool. Do you know who that is? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm like, oh, whatever. You seem like a nice guy. We hung out, we talked.

And then flash forward, I'm reading the New York Times a couple of months ago. He turns out to be an unwitting Russian agent who I've met at Clevedon. There you go. It's the place for it. It rhymes. It does.

It does. And yeah, I just found, obviously what he did is not funny, but the idea that I met him there is hilarious. Where else would he meet him? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, look, thanks for doing this. This is great. What do you think of history podcasts, by the way?

Cause that was the other thing I was gonna talk to you about. Like, I love, I think what you do, what I try to do is you try to take things that previously were academic and you make them accessible to people and you make them interesting to people, and you make them interesting to people. And so on the one hand, like history podcasts are awesome. And then there was this other recent scandal. What's that guy who was on Tucker Carlson? Oh, I don't even know what his

no one had ever heard of this guy before he goes on Tucker and just spouting some absolute bullshit about the second world war, which is like insane internet sort of comment garbage. Yeah. And Tucker's like out there legitimizing. They're the greatest living historian or some nonsense. And you know what? And then like all the respectable second world wars, Andrew Roberts, Neil Ferguson, serious historians are pulling this to bits. And on the one hand, you're like, well, this is, you know, history, you're debunking.

But we've been through this before with the second world war with David Irving back in the 90s. And that went, you know, the Lipstadt trial, that went to court, Richard Evans, you know, the British Libel courts had to pull that to bits. And it was so damaging to the sort of, not just to the historical profession, but to important popular ideas about what the Holocaust was or was not. And like the idea we're back there again, and it's now being legitimized by serious broadcasters is seriously worrying. Or even just this medium that we were so optimistic about just a few years, like podcasts like, you know,

Hardcore History and Dan Carlin and who's the other guy who I like, I'm forgetting his name. He wrote The Storm Before the Storm, which is one of my favorite books. Anyways, they introduced ideas that, unless you like to read thousand page books, you would have no idea about to so many people. And then it's like, this is why we can't have nice things.

Now, like people are seeing that medium as a way to introduce toxic or untrue ideas, you know? It's about more than just history, isn't it? I mean, the medium is neutral. to introduce toxic or untrue ideas, you know? It's about more than just history, isn't it? I mean, the medium is neutral. The medium doesn't care. And I think in the main, like history podcasting has taken the ground that television has either abandoned

or just sort of forgotten about, which is that there is a huge audience out there who wants to consume history, have complex history explained in an accessible way. Television, certainly in the UK, was really good at that, even 10 years ago. Well, we had a thing here called the History Channel that used to not do reality shows

and had documentaries about history, and then that's gone. For the life of me, I don't understand why this has happened in television. I mean, it's sort of connected with budgets, but it's not really, there's more. But what doesn't really matter, because podcasts have just shot into that space.

But unfortunately, and I think this is more about the media in general, isn't it? Because there is no gatekeeping, no sort of patriarchal kind of decision-making by a small number of people about what gets broadcast, great for experimentation, great for access to market for intelligent producers who might not get a break otherwise, but unpoliced and unregulated. And that's the story of the entire internet really, isn't

it? And this is a fundamental question about how we operate operate now as in the in the West, certainly in the 21st century. What do we want out of information? How do we want to regulate it? Like, Yeah, it's like, it's like there's this kind of misinformation, disinformation energy that's always there, like people who want to believe things that are not true, and then people who have an agenda in getting people to believe that untrue information. And it's sort of like, whenever there is an opening, it goes to, it's not always, sometimes it's cutting edge, but usually it's kind of a delay and it's like, oh, people are here, how do we find our way to worm,

how do we find a way to worm our way into it? And so it was interesting to see, yeah, like you felt like there was this kind of generation of podcast historians that really took it seriously and were doing this awesome, like you felt like there was this kind of generation of podcast historians that really took it seriously and were doing this awesome, like really important work. Yeah, Colin being like the great model of it, just such a brilliant guy and a trailblazer as well. Yeah, my son is obsessed with this podcast

that Nat Geo does called, The Greeking Out and it's just like Greek myths. People listen to like hundreds of hours together as a family and you're like, they're really, like they're taking it not just seriously, but they're taking it seriously that it's for kids. And then like, how do we make this accessible? Like that responsibility.

And then when you read or watch those guys' comments, you're like, oh, you don't give a shit about any of this. You're just like, what's a contrarian, sort of different for the sake of difference. And then probably also, some other toxic energy in there. But you're just like, how can I differentiate myself? And the way you're differentiating yourself is by telling an utterly untrue version of history

that some people want to be true. And I mean, some of the gatekeeping is with the distribution networks, by which we really mean social media. People talk about the algorithm as though it's some completely disembodied, independent, abstract thing that decides that. But no, come on. These hate, negativity obviously gets a human response. It's rewarded both by the machines and humans in those systems. And then everybody sort of, we talk about Elon really, aren't we? When via Twitter, in large part, a completely specious and probably evil interpretation of the Second World War,

it's there. It could be popular for commercial reasons, right? It's allowed to circulate. And then the defense is to throw one's hands up and say, well, free speech. I mean, that's like mendacious, like low stuff. And, but that, like I say, you know, it's not just history. This is just one example of the big problems, like the big conceptual problems we've got as a species

to do with information in the 21st century. I was reading this, Finland or some other country, they have to spend a lot, their proximity to Russia has forced them to always spend a lot of time on cultural literacy and media literacy. And I think the West is just beginning to struggle or come to terms with how fundamentally bad huge swaths of the population are at these basic skills, you know? And if you don't, if you're hearing about the Second World

War for the first time, there's a level of logic to what that guy's saying. Yeah, I totally agree. So part of it comes from, I suppose, like quite a poor, as you say, a poor level of cultural historical knowledge just within the educational system in the West. That's certainly true where I live in the UK. I sense it's probably true here in the US as well. But it's sort of overlaid with from within the professional, quote unquote, historical community, the embrace for several generations of what was originally postmodernism, which says there is no objective truth. It's found its way culturally into my truth, which is a stupid contradiction in terms. My truth

is an oxymoron. But this idea that well, all perspectives are valid and originally with good intentions opens the door for, well, I've got a completely poisonous interpretation of X thing, but my truth is just as valid as yours. And so that then kind of intersects with a general inability among large swathes of the population to judge themselves and go, you know what, I know a little bit about this. Yes. And I know that the idea that Churchill is more culpable in Europe for the massive genocide committed by the Nazis than Adolf Hitler probably isn't true. No, you're right.

There was a process that needed to happen, which was this sort of questioning of certain myths and lies. Obviously, in the US, we have the lost cause. But there is this sort of cultural baggage that every society has and all cultures have. And so the process of kind of poking holes, looking at how non-inclusive our version of history and all that stuff, you start to poke around at the founders and you go, oh, there's

some real problems here and you need to do that. It's like, you can, you can chip away at everything and what's left is kind of an nihilism where you get your after truth. But then, yeah, it ends up in this kind of, well, here's my truth. Like you end up chipping away so much that there's nothing left. And then, and then real bad actors step in and go, let me tell you like an equally untrue but mendacious version of history. It's very interesting.

And so now you just choose what you believe. And this is what you see in history, but elsewhere, particularly in politics. Well, I choose to believe this and no one listens to each other. And so the foundation of the discipline of history when I was studying it, and I would hope this still holds true

in some sense somewhere, but maybe that's hope rather than reality, is history is about discourse, debate, analysis, careful reasoning between individuals or even within your own study and coming to a reasoned conclusion which ought to be, we think to the best of our ability that this is what's happened, not, I believe X, you believe Y, well, either we're going to agree to disagree or just hate each other and double down. That's fundamentally a huge diversion from Aristotle, the foundation of Western thought. So we've got some problems. Well, I thought it was interesting what you were just saying about you have to have this kind of, I know a little bit about this, I have a basis.

It's always interesting to me when I read certain British historians, because it feels like we're on the same page. And then you read something, oh, you just learn nothing about Henry V in America. Like I know almost nothing about him as a person. Okay, but let me tell you this, in the UK, I would say the majority of people don't know the difference between the American Revolution and Civil War. There's an astonishing degree of cultural miscommunication, misapprehension, ignorance that's masked by the common English language. Yes. Well, I was fascinated by this when I read, I've talked about this before, when I read

Andrew Roberts' book on King George. And I was like, oh yeah, you guys think, we don't have a common opinion, not just on this person, but on the American Revolution. It's not like you're like, yeah, we were wrong. Like, obviously you accept that it happened, but the moral legitimacy of it, we're not quite on the same page about it. And so like reading Andrew Roberts, sort of go through the Declaration of Independence,

and he's like, obviously all this part about, you know, human rights and stuff is great. And then he breaks down like the specific arguments of Jefferson like towards the bottom, like the list of grievances. And he's like, I don't buy any of this. You know, and I was like, I'd never heard someone, I never heard someone who wasn't like a fascist.

Like, you know, I bet if you asked Stalin what he thought he would agree, but like, it was like, oh, this is a good faith argument against the Declaration of Independence that is originating from you're on the other side of it. And it like just culturally grew up on the other side, hearing other things about it. It was just so fascinating. Like, yeah, I wonder, I was thinking,

why don't we think about Henry V? Because we think about Alexander the Great, or we learn about Julius Caesar, but we think about Alexander the Great or we learn about Julius Caesar, but then there's that just sort of whole period of middle British royalty that I think America just instinctively decided like we're opposed to because of our history with kings. Kings. In early 1607, three ships carrying over 100 English settlers landed on the shores of present-day Virginia, where they established a colony they named Jamestown. But from the start, factions and infighting threatened to tear the colony apart.

Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondry's podcast American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times, and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. In our latest series, after their arrival, English colonists in Jamestown quickly established a fort, but their pursuit of gold and glory soon put them on a collision course with Virginia's native inhabitants and the powerful Chief of Chiefs Powhatan. Before long, violence, disease, and starvation would leave the colony teetering on the brink of disaster. Follow American history tellers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery

Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of Sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing the Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boy about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with and the bolderous takers who brought them to life.

Like did you know that Super Mario, the best-selling video game character of all time, only exists because Nintendo couldn't get the rights to Popeye? Or Jack, that the idea for the McDonald's Happy Meal first came from a mom in Guatemala from Pez dispensers to Levi's 501s to Air Jordans. Discover the surprising stories of the most viral products. Plus we guarantee that after listening you're gonna dominate your next dinner party. So follow the best idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to the best idea yet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondander E+. It's just the best idea yet. What I've found over the years, and I'm coming on for 20 years of having been working, doing

mostly medieval history and with success in the States. These books are getting on the New York Times bestseller list. I mean, I'm not saying that to brag. That's just a fact. We've got medieval history, European, British medieval history into the sort of American historical book buying kind of world. Great. There are several roots, I think, that people have into it. And it's definitely not like this is our shared history that's common to us all that's not the way in often it's like. This is my family see a lot of people get into medieval history because they've done family tree research genealogy and it's like oh i'm related to john of gauntle usually john of gaunt and so you have like a bazillion kids yeah three marriages and lots of kids and it will spread out in different directions or i'm'm related to some of the more glamorous seeming women of the medieval period, Elizabeth Woodville or whatever. So people find their way in through family research to a degree among a particularly

kind of literate English literature section of the Moorish ship with Henry V. They might come in through Shakespeare. It's quite a well, It's quite a regularly performed part of the Shakespeare canon. Game of Thrones has definitely helped. There was this moment when I was just getting started really, where Thrones began and became the biggest show in the world. And it was part of the pitch that this derived from English medieval history, specifically the Wars of the Roses. There was a bit with Richard III being dug up from under the car park. So you find your way into the kind of cultural conversation, or the Middle Ages found their way into the cultural

conversation somewhat at a good time for me. But yes, the challenge with writing medieval history, particularly pitching to like the US, is what have people even vaguely heard of? So I wrote a book about the Templars seven years ago. Did great here, because I think lots of people had heard of the Templars. Indeed, there are some Americans who are members of revived Templar organizations. Henry V seems to be having the same effect. I mean, there's a little bit of, wait, is that the guy with the six wives? And you go, oh no, this is the guy with the pudding bowl haircut who won in the battle of Agincourt. Right, right. Yeah, I get it. But at least there's a like, huh, yeah, a King called Henry with a number. I'm kind of ballpark here and I'm interested

if I think it's going to be a good story. But then sometimes the pitch has to be with history generally different to that. And it's like, okay, I'm going to tell you a great story. If you buy into the story, you're going to really enjoy it. It's going to be exciting. You're going to be gripped. It's going to have novelistic characteristics in my telling. But there's also like, well, what what else is it saying about the world? So in the case of Henry V, I would say this is a story, yes, about England's greatest ever warrior king. If you like my books, it fills a gap between Plantagenet's and Wars of the Roses, but it's actually a case study in leadership in a time of crisis. And I'm not saying it's

a parable about the current election. But it's like, here's a world where you have polarized politics, where you have like the after effects of a pandemic, where you have a period of sort of climate change, you know, Little Ice Age in this case, where you have seemingly irreconcilable differences and sort of just this festering hatred between polarized camps. And yet, along comes a leader who seems able to triangulate between the best of two camps to combine them. And through competence, diligence, probity, upright sort of character and being good at

the job, charisma, drags this realm out of the doldrums. That speaks to a kind of current fantasy, well maybe fantasy is the wrong word, a current like hope, deep hope in the hearts of people on both sides of the political divide at the moment. And so I think that's sometimes how you pitch history. And that's certainly what I'm thinking about and talking about a lot with regard to Henry V, not only the story itself, but the sort of broader themes in general that it elucidates.

There's a letter that Churchill writes, sort of right as the blitz is starting, and he was still a writer. He hadn't been called back yet exactly. And there's something about, he was like, I had to put a thousand years of history between me and this moment. He was writing, I think,

the history of the English speaking peoples. And there is something very soothing about like, this world sucks, let me go study a different world. I love that. And then I have found also though, that it's terrifying when you study history, cause you're like, oh, it could get so much worse than you think.

Like you find some, okay, it's always been like this. And then it's like, oh, like it gets so much worse than this. Man, last time I was on a big full US book tour was when I did the Templars book. And I still cringe when I have this memory. It was the last day of the tour where I was in like a little town called Harbor Springs, Michigan, right up on the lake, lovely town.

But you know, once you're in, you're in, there's like two planes in and out. So everyone goes to the festival of the, I think it's called the festival of the book or something similar to that. And I'm on in the theater. So it's like everyone goes from the bar in town to the theater in town. I got a whole town, right? And I'm talking about the Templars.

It's a bit of a, this is 2017. So it's early in the first Trump presidency and he's been beefing with Kim Jong-un about some stupid bullshit, right? But it's like in the first Trump presidency and he's been beefing with Kim Jong-un about some stupid bullshit, right? But it's like tense, right? Because you see maps in the New York Times are like, how far can these missiles get? Could they hit Denver? Anyway, so I'm on stage and I give my talk about the Templars and it's kind of like an hour's talk and then there's some questions at the end and there's a dude in the front

row and he's got his hand up and the moderator just keeps not picking up the question. I feel bad for the dude. So it's the end of the show and they're like, okay, that's the end. I'm like, no, no, no, this is guys had his hand up, please. And I see the moderators like they just shoulder sink their eyes roll. This is like maybe the crank. And he stands up and he goes, I'm not going to do the accent because hey, you just told us this great story from history, but I've got a question. What's going to happen in the future? Oh,. Right, well I give it my best shot. And to talk to what you've just said, I'm like, well, you can look at the story of the temple as one of two ways. On the,

on one hand, you can say this is just, you know, sort of miserable example of how humanity constantly makes the same errors. It's just cruelty. It's, it's hideousness, it's awfulness. It's people just abusing one another, and we never change. Humans are just destined to do this over and over again. Or, and I'm listening to myself doing this, thinking this is great material, or you can say, look, 1312, 1314, this order was destroyed, and yet here we are. We endure as a species. No matter how bad things get, we seem to find a way to come through, and you can be hopeful

about the future. And I thought this is just a great end. And then I sort of heard myself go, unless Trump starts a nuclear war. And the whole theater is just like silent. Yeah. And I'm like, that's the end of the show. There's nothing else. And just walk off to like a silent stage that, oh man, it was going so well. But you know, I tell you that because that's that's what you know, there is the escapism of history. And then sometimes you get into it and you go down that wormhole of, oh wow, sheer variety

of badness within this, given that our discipline is the sum total of all human deed and achievement. You've got almost an infinite landscape to survey for either good stuff or bad stuff. And, and a lot of how you react to it, I suppose, sometimes depends on your, your sort of constitution, your character, you know. Well, that's why I thought was interesting. You did this book in the present tense, right? I actually wonder if more history should be done that way. David McCullough was saying that the the one thing that a historian can never forget

is that it could have been otherwise, like that it could go in a different direction. And so there is something about putting history in the past tense that makes it seem like this was the way it had to be. It was always going, as opposed to a thing that was happening and a series of choices. Do you know what I mean?

I do know what you mean. And deciding to write a full book in present tense was, like, I had to give it careful thought. Now, when I narrate my podcast, This is History, it's in the present tense. They do this, they do that. Because that's the kind of vibe of that medium. When I've done television, you know, almost every one of the dozens and dozens of hours of documentaries I've made, you narrate in the every one of the dozens and dozens of hours of documentaries I've made, you narrate in the present tense, because it's like you, that's the feel of the medium.

But we almost never do it in books, or rather, some history books will start with like a prologue that's in the present tense to drop you in the moment, but then they'll retreat to the sort of authoritative past. Let me get boring. Yeah, let me be sober now. Well, I thought with a medieval biography, it's a bit of a contradiction in terms, because if we're thinking in like a modern biography as a sort of psychological portrait of someone's development over life, you usually have to hang that in the modern sense on thousands of documents.

With a biography of someone like Henry V, you don't have those thousands of documents that pertain to his psychological state. You have lots of administrative documents and chronicles and such, but very little that tells you what he's thinking, how he's feeling. So how do you create, was my question to myself, this sense of proximity to your main character and, as you say, this sense of jeopardy. Because everyone, if they know anything about Henry V, knows who won the Battle of Agincourt, and you know the guy dies. If he dies at 35. So the jeopardy is not inherent in the story, you've got to add it.

And I started like, when I was talking to myself, when I was sort of drafting in my mind the first chapter, I was doing it in the present tense. I thought, well, let's try writing it. I thought it wouldn't work. I thought this is probably gonna come across like a gimmick and it'll break one of my cardinal rules for historical writing, which is I believe that as a historical writer, you should try and disappear. You should vanish from the

page and leave the material and your reader to commune with each other. And you should verbal tricks and great writing have no place in my history books. I'm like the invisible kind of conduit of this material so that the reader feels deeply immersed. I thought present tense is going to kill that because it's going to feel like, oh, look, he's doing this trick. But actually, as I started writing the chapters, and my brilliant, brilliant editor, Teresa, we worked really hard, particularly on the early chapters with this. I was like, no, this is, this is like, total invisibility, because now you are there with Henry, it's happening in real time. And you're just next

to him as a reader. So I don't know, I don't know if I'll ever use this technique again. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. But it's been it's been a fascinating, fascinating sort of project. I read this great biography of Gandhi. And there was this line in the intro that really stopped me where he said, he basically, I forget in the exact writing, but it was like, you know, now Gandhi, whatever he's been reincarnated as, you know, thinks X, Y, or Z. And I was like, oh, right.

So instead of being like, this is a, and this is why representation and stuff matters so much. It was like, oh, because this is an Indian writer with the same set of beliefs, or at least a greater sympathy to it, it's not a Western writer sort of condescendingly, or even not condescendingly, attempting to understand the worldview of the person who lives there, is like taking it for granted. And the idea of like reading, you just so naturally default into your worldview.

And the greatest bias of our worldview has nothing to do with culture. It has just to do with we live now. Like we forget that they didn't live in medieval Europe. They lived in what they thought was an advanced wonderful society. Like no one woke up and said, this is the dark ages. Yes, and even more important,

that their worldview was the norm. Just as in the 21st century, I mean, we, you know, we cleaved to this idea that what does the Obama said, that the, you know, the arc of history, you know, bends towards the light, whatever. We believe in progress. We have this instinct, you know, and we think that, you know, it's a progress towards

now and if things are going wrong, then it might be like not enough progress or progress going backwards, but that's our view of history. Yeah, the Indians thought it was cyclical. Yeah, but by our understanding of linear progress, we are almost by definition like the better society. And I try and sometimes stop and think, you know, let's go back in the Middle Ages as the present and you somehow manage to show somebody a portrait of 21st century England, let's say, they would be appalled. I mean, this would be like a vision of hell. Hell with inventions of tyrannous machinery and barbarous ideas and absolute heresy and unbelief everywhere.

It would be the worst and most awful imagining of human society possible because their norm would be their norm. So I think it's helpful to have those things in mind. I often say to when I talk to school kids and try and get them to think about history more generally, I try and make the pitch, you know, we're living in the weirdest time in all of human history right now. And almost every other generation that's ever lived in the history of humanity would have more in common with each other than they do with us. Because of even the basic just go outside and look at a car, Contemplate a car, how mind-blowingly impossible that would seem to almost everybody who's ever lived more than four generations before us.

Then you'll start to get into your head what history is about, which is in some part is an empathy discipline. You've got to put yourself into other people's worldviews, ideally without initial judgment, and try and understand their world on their terms. Otherwise, you're not really doing history. You're doing a sort of weird kind of time travel policeman job where you just go around like waving your angry stick or baton. Here's all the things you were wrong about. You were wrong about this. You were prejudiced about this. You're disgusting. You're bat like, okay, so.

Meanwhile, they were actually incredibly progressive in forward thinking for that time. For that time. Yeah, some people were and some people weren't. Yeah, well, you're beating up on this person and that person, they're walking around the world thinking, just like we go, hey, like I'm such a nicer, softer, more generous parent than my parents. That's how that person was walking around thinking about how they treated poor people,

how they treated people who look differently. Like they thought of themselves as almost certainly not as harsh as the people who lived a generation too, they were, they were, they found the past as inexplicable as we find them. Absolutely. But it's very hard to do, it's very hard to transport yourself.

A book that really stuck in my mind when I read it, and this is historical fiction rather than history, but you read Mary Renaud, The King Must Die. No. I'll say Mary Renaud, she wrote a whole bunch of, I mean, this is a vogue publishing genre again now, but of retelling of Greek myths and legends. Mary Renaud did a series of retellings of Greek legends, and The King Must Die is about the Minotaur. And her vision of what Bronze Age Greece was like is really powerful because she, better

than almost anyone I can think of, manages to drop you into the world where the value system is completely different, utterly different to our own. But the story, there's never a sort of direct contrast drawn or judgment made on the value systems. You're just in these value systems. Like sci-fi or something. Yeah, and they just get you to understand the world. Right, and so the characters operate accordingly

and you judge them as the reader of fiction, as good or bad characters, morally, ethically, you know, are you on their side or not on their side, heroic or unheroic, according to the value system of the world which she creates. And it's an incredible book for that reason, because she just manages such a difficult task. You manage to just, you blow away all your modern kind of thinking and you're just in the Bronze Age and it's wild. Yeah, I don't know why it took me so long to realize it, but obviously I talk a lot about the Stoics

and I was thinking, it occurred to me one day that Stoicism was ancient philosophy to Marcus Aurelius. So if Zeno founds the philosophy in the fourth century BC, by the time Marcus Aurelius gets to it, it's like 500 years old. So it's like Shakespeare is to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, like, I think of that as this period

that all shared a set of values and ideas and beliefs. And in fact, they were separated by hundreds and hundreds of years. And so they must have looked at that as classical antiquity in the way that I look at all of them as one large piece of classical antiquity, but they're not. And so it creates an empathy because you go, oh, you're thinking about the philosophy

the same way that I'm thinking about it. What's the meme you sometimes see that Cleopatra was born closer to the iPhone than the pyramids being built, right? And that's often a good way of thinking. Yeah, because she's like, look at these beautiful old things. We don't know how they made them. You know, like that she has the same bafflement.

The English medieval version of that is Stonehenge. So like, oh, Stonehenge is kind of old and castles are made of stone and they're kind of old. So maybe the Middle Ages and Stonehenge are quite close. No, in sort of Henry V's time, Henry II's time, other end of the Plantagenet dynasty, they were looking at Stonehenge the same way we're looking at Stonehenge going, what the hell is that thing and who put it up and how? And their answer was like, well, maybe Merlin, Arthur's kind of magician transported the stones from Ireland and other people going, come on, give me a break. That didn't happen.

But it's like a real head scratcher. Only a couple of years ago, there's still debate about how do they do this. There was just some research two months ago that said some of the stones in Stonehenge didn't come from Wales, they came from Scotland. That's the great question of Stonehenge. You'll never be able to attack the question of why, I think. But you can get pretty close to how. There was a great book called How to Build Stonehenge, which came out two years ago, can get pretty close to how. And there was a great book called How to Build Stonehenge, which came out two years ago, which really got close to, okay, I think this is how.

We can get quite close to how. Sort of a bit of experimental archeology, a bit of sort of theory, but the why is the thing that's lost. Yeah, when Jefferson, when they started to discover some like mammoth tusks and stuff in America, Jefferson doesn't necessarily know for sure that they're extinct. Like they just could be on the other side of the mountains that no one's been on the other side of. Like there's still this

ongoing fucking mystery of it. Well, and here we are like back again with, you know, we're such a weird, there's such a weird time to be alive and that we've mapped the whole world. Well, and here we are like back again with, you know, we're such a weird, it's such a weird time to be alive in that we've mapped the whole world. Oh, we haven't mapped the deep seas, but like the landmass of the world is fully mapped. And that again, separates us from almost everyone that's ever lived before. And just those sort of simple, basic assumptions of like, well, I know what the earth looks like and it's not that other people, they thought it was flat. They just didn't know what was in most of it.

Like a large parts of it. There was still this incredible mystery about the geography of the world, which is so different to our, you know, we have great anxieties about the state of the world evidently at the moment, but one of them is not. I wonder what lies beyond that mountain range. It's like, I'll just look at Google Maps Yeah, like the they say the seminal moment in America is the closing of the frontier and and really that's a global thing Yeah, there isn't that vague sense of well, I wonder if it's over here. I want we don't there's not that Pervasive mystery I guess even though there's so much stuff. We don't understand

Yeah, but it's not part of the psyche, right? But it's so interesting and then then sometimes you'll kind of go too far in the other direction and go, well, this medieval world, this world of Henry V was incredibly parochial and people never went beyond their own village and international travel was unheard of. Then you'll, there's a lot of global history, historians now would say, well, Valerie Hansen was the most popular book recently. Well, no, actually a product, you know, around the time of the Vikings could theoretically travel from the Americas all

the way around, you know, the entire world. It's not impossible. There is a sort of thin, thin, gossamer, thin skein of globalization, which is totally the wrong word to use. How weird must have that have been? So it was a parochial world, just as it is now. There are people now. I remember one time I was writing about Vicksburg. So my wife and I went to Natchez, Mississippi, and we were staying there for a night, and then we're going to Vicksburg. These are Civil War battlefields.

And we're talking to the waitress, and we're like, we're going to Vicksburg tomorrow. You know anything about it? And she's like, I've never been. It was like 45 minutes away. Right, right. She's just never been. And so, meanwhile, we could have been talking to the person at the next table, and they've been everywhere

you could imagine in the world. And so it must have been so surreal, though, in the ancient world where you did, people would live and die within a five-mile radius or something. And then there were people that had been to different, that had just recently discovered new continents. Yeah.

Well, Henry V, because it's what I'm thinking about at the moment, great example, you know, he's the guy who leads, you know, these armies, predominantly made up of English and some Welsh longbowmen, many of whom, because they're sort of, you know, peasant stock, are village guys, they haven't probably traveled in a wide radius away from the village, it'll be sort of in the in the dozens of miles maximum. And then suddenly they're traveling to France. Wow, across the sea. To see the sea for some people would just be wild if you lived in the middle of England. And yet you've got Henry himself, his father, Henry Bolingbroke, was a sort of great chivalrous knight of the late 14th, early 15th century. Well, that guy had been on, you know, he'd been to Jousted in France

with Boussicaud.'d traveled to Prussia on Crusade of the Teutonic Knights. He'd been to Jerusalem. He'd actually been to Christ's Sepulcher and seen the tomb and come back with exotic animals and kind of in great stories and memories and Jerusalem stuck in his mind all his life. On his deathbed, he was in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey. Henry V on his deathbeds talking about Jerusalem as well. So these ideas are like fixed in their minds of these faraway places, just as you're kind of rubbing shoulders with people who've never been

any. Yes. Yeah, people who believe in preposterous myths or monsters or whatever, and then, yeah, you're bumping into someone who's not quite this, but within a century, you're like, oh, I'm just back from the New World. Yeah. What? But there's also, because in this sort of Christian, the particular sort of Christian mentality, Catholic mentality of the 14th, 15th century, because travel is not the norm, but there's a deep awareness of places that are important

that are far away, and this is like the Holy Land really. You have these interesting phenomena, which is like, a good example is the Temple Church in London, which is built to mirror, to model the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. So going into it is a form of going into Christ Sepulcher. And you have it also, I mean, Henry V goes to, after he's seriously injured at the Battle of Shrewsbury, he goes on pilgrimage to Canterbury to see Thomas Becket's shrine. But then he goes to Walsingham to the little house of Our Lady where there's a shrine to the Virgin Mary. But the house has been built to represent Jesus' family home in Nazareth and going into it is in a sense going to Nazareth. And so the worldview of what does travel actually mean is in some sense is less literal than today.

If I say I'm going to Jerusalem and I say, right, I'm off to Jerusalem now, you know pretty well, I mean, you probably say that's not a great idea on this day, but put that aside, you know that I'm probably going to fly to Tel Aviv and then get a car across the Judean hills and then I'll be in Jerusalem. Not that I might go to some sort of shrine that's built in a model of Jerusalem and that will be a sort of proxy way of doing it. Or in the same way that you would have a deep familiarity with a place that you've never been but because you've watched movies about it and heard songs. They still had visual representations and they had a culture that talked. Today you might hear

someone, oh yeah, I've read the book. Their relationship even with the biblical text was so deep because they didn't have a thousand other books they would read that they knew the places and the names. There was a cultural resonance to ideas and places and names and descriptions that would have been very inconceivable for us. And the same applies with human relationships. So in the Middle Ages, you have this sense that you can really be in communion with the dead. And this is the basis for a lot of the wealth, but also the structure of the church in Europe is that you have things like chantry chapels which become, and colleges of priests which are the basis for the universities of Oxford

and Cambridge now where the benefactors paid money to have these things built so that their relatives could pray for their souls to move through purgatory. And this is a sort of intersection between the living and the dead. And we find it sort of mad and fantastical. You could, I suppose that you could think, but I can kind of talk to the dead, but flip it around to continue a theme of what we've been talking about so far.

And imagine telling some, well, imagine even telling, how old are you? 37. Okay, I'm 43. You're probably just still of the right age. Imagine telling yourself as a child about a FaceTime video calling or Zoom. What? I'll be able to talk to somebody 6,000 miles away just like they're sitting in the room? Come on, that's for the birds. Well, the interesting thought experiment is how unimaginable is that to someone in the middle ages if they

put aside the sort of what the technological leaps you have to make to get to FaceTime, is it totally weird to them that you could talk to somebody so far away when they're so used to this idea that you can commune with the dead in a different realm? Or just they clearly saw it as less crazy than we do to have visions or encounters or ghosts or sorcerers or encounters or ghosts or sorcerers or witches or witches. So there was a sort of a tacit acceptance of kind of other worldliness that now we,

it's like we disabused ourselves of it and then recreated it with technology. Yeah, and there's a permeability to the different realms. But I suppose again, you know, what is our version of that, you know, if in the middle ages, there's a permeability to the different realms. But I suppose, again, you know, what is our version of that? You know, if in the Middle Ages there's a permeable boundary between life and afterlife, and there's just an, like, effectively a community-wide acceptance that this is true, what is our version of that? It's probably, maybe it's something like quantum physics where, you know, or even, you know, anything sub microscopic, you know, the belief in germs, or it could be medical, it could be physics, it could be chemical, you know, we are post enlightenment

people, still just about, and we believe in science that's been done with scientific methodology, even if there's no way for you or I to see it, prove it, experience it, we just sort of, what I know about physics. I believe there's such a thing as an electron, don't you? Yeah, and I believe that because some guys told me about it when I was 11 or 15 or whatever, like I heard about it and I was like, oh, that seems okay.

And then everyone else seems to believe it. And so I'm like, that's how it is. Right. Yeah. And then, of course you have heretics in every society. You say, I don't believe the thing that you will believe. And you know, okay. All right. Yeah, it's very surreal when you think about

what they must have thought about. It can kind of blow your mind when you try to put yourself, well, as they say, the past is a foreign country. And like there's something about just trying, the thought exercise of, yeah, what must it have been like to be a medieval peasant? We think, oh, it must have been great to be Henry V, but also his life would have been unimaginably inconvenient

and difficult to us. The example I heard, some historian goes, think about how difficult it would have been for a Roman emperor to read at night. He's like, I want to read these books. And then the procession of torch light torchbearers and just how many people had to be involved to do that. And so you think we think of like, on the one hand

the king probably had the easiest life of anyone and had unimaginable luxuries and access to technologies and ease of life. And at the same time, just like when it was called out, it must've been awful. Yeah. Again, you know, we like to sort of imagine sometimes, well, if I had a time, classic question,

if you had a time machine, where would you go and who would you talk to? And if it's Henry V, I might go, oh, I'll take a time machine back to 1415 and talk to Henry on the eve of Agincourt, whatever the answer might be. And then I heard something played the other day. There's been an attempt, a sort of scholarly attempt 1415 and talk to Henry on the eve of Agincourt, whatever the answer might be. And then I heard something played the other day, there's been an attempt, a scholarly

attempt to recreate the English spoken in the 15th century. And of course, Henry was a great sort of proponent of English as the language of politics, you know, a generation after Chaucer had made it the language of poetry. And he writes his letters back from campaign in English and we're like, okay, well, I can sort of read this English now. It's not Beowulf-era English. It's not even Chaucer-era English. It's recognisably modern in its English forms. There's been an attempt to recreate the sound of it. It actually pertains to Richard III, 80 years on, 70 years on from Henry. And if you hear someone speaking English of the 1470s, 1480s, as would have been

spoken by someone like Richard who had a sort of Midlands Northern background, all the vowel sounds are different, the cadence of speech is different, and it just is impossible to hear. So you wouldn't have been able to have a conversation even though you were normally speaking the same language. So maybe it's Faulkner that passes a foreign country, isn't it? But maybe it's actually Wittgenstein, which is even if a lion could speak, we wouldn't understand it. You know, that all of the components of the worldview plus the difference even in the language would add up to mutual incomprehensibility between us and them. But now I'm sort of talking us out of a job because this is effectively to say that history

is a futile pursuit. We strive, we try, and it's like yoga. You practice, you can never complete the task. There's one historian that was looking, we think of these epic battles speeches, Alexander the Great or whatever, and he was looking at specifically the Greek ones, and then he just sort of noticed the helmets don't have ear holes.

Right. And so just like you're just thinking like, practically, now our thing is like, how do they, how do they have microphones? And then he's like, just imagine there's a hundred thousand dudes holding a bunch of metal armor and metal swords. No one's hearing anything from anyone. Yeah. You can get Colin Farrell or Brad Pitt, whoever it was, you know, charging on his horse, giving these great speeches. But then, look, Henry, again, Henry the fifth is a V is a great example of this in the romanticisation, the dramatisation of our historical imagination. Battle of Agincourt, so famous. And the speeches of Agincourt, so

famous. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers and all of this. Well, you look at the original sources and it does seem that Henry said stuff before the battle. There were five or four or five different accounts. They all differ. Probably he said, you couldn't have addressed the whole army, so probably had to say four or five different things. Some of them bear similarities in content to Shakespeare's great rhetoric, poetry. But my favorite is just he says, fellows, let's go. Because why not? What else is there to say? It's like, we all know what we're doing. Let's get to it. So you're, again, that's, that's the fun of history, isn't it? Particularly with historical eras, you know, you talk about Alexander the Great or Henry the

fifth, whoever it might be Napoleon, where they've been dramatized many times over the years, you're always as a historian, then kind of trying to strip away the history, to take away the lens of drama and try and look into the history beyond it. I mean, it's very hard to do. If we're talking about the Middle Ages, if we're talking about Roman history, can you really talk to anyone about Roman imperial history and have them not think about Russell Crowe? Very difficult. And I'm not being totally facetious there. That is a lot of people's first and maybe only access to the world of high Imperial Rome. And probably all the historians before,

it's funny, we're not uniquely guilty of that. You've got to imagine some historian writing in the 1800s is informed by having seen a really good play of Julius Caesar. We're always being shaped by fiction and art and that forms our understanding of things. Just like somebody before would have seen some Renaissance painting and that's what they thought. You know, we thought Seneca looked one way

because that's the only survivable bust. And then we realized, oh, that's not Seneca. That's just not him. He's actually fat, you know? He looks totally different, changes everything. But sometimes it's done really well. Did you see Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk? Yes. Do you remember there's the scene where they're all trying to line the men up on the beach and get them in an orderly fashion into boats to row them out to the destroyer by the mole? I mean, I've even got goosebumps thinking about that scene because maybe five, six years

before that movie came out, I went to that beach with a guy called Vic Viner, who was there. He was one of the guys rowing the boats and he'd been 15, 16, and he was a naval recruit. I stood next to Vic on a sunny day in Dunkirk, and there were French families who were bicycling and picnicking, and he was in his uniform. He was in his mid-to-late 90s at that time, and he described to me the scene as he recalled it from that day. He said, over there, we were trying to line the army boys, they didn't have much discipline up. And he said, I saw one guy just lose it, walk into the sea with his full pack

on, I'm going home, I'm going home and disappear under the waves. He said the Messerschmitts were up there, strafing us. He said that such and such a ship was over there because I remember that one. My brother was on board it and a German plane put a bomb down the chimney and it exploded and he burned to death. Over there, just like that, it was just like that. It was a very memorable moving day for me. Then I saw Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk and he must have spoken to Vic or seen some of Vic's interviews as well because it was exactly as the guy had described. Sometimes the heart actually does serve the history.

heart actually does serve the history. And you know, that film may well end up being, you know, future generations sort of first access points to the early sort of campaigns in the Second World War. And then whilst they'll have a very accurate picture of what the beach looked like during the evacuations, they'll also be overlaid with all Christopher Nolan's preconceptions about the sort of the variability of memory and the sort of the the meaningless of real linear time. So they'll take away as just as much of the subjective as the objective. Well, you know, like Pat, Patton, the famous general, he had these like visions that he was, he believed in reincarnation, right? He, and it's in the movie, but it's a real thing. He believed that he was this warrior spirit incarnate. So he said, you know, I was here, I was there,

I was with the Roman legions and he could describe it. And so there's this one scene where he's on a military visit between the wars, I think, and they're at a spot that was where part of the battle of the wilderness had been fought, which is one of Grant's great campaigns. And Patton is talking about it to this sort of, I don't know, park ranger or something. And they're kind of arguing about how it goes. And this man overhears him and Patton goes, you know, I know I was here, I was here as a boy,

you know, which he obviously was. It had happened like 30 years before he was even born. And this old man hears them and he walks over and he's like, no, no, no, the gentleman is quite right. Like I was here. Like an actual, and he somehow figured out the essence of it and even though he wasn't there. I mean, so one explanation is you actually do kind of believe in this sort of spiritual thing. The other is like known he'd actually just read enough history that he'd triangulated some version of what actually,

like you can kind of get to the essence of what, you can't get exactly there, but you can get close. Well, there's, I mean, the great example from my specialty, which is medieval history, is Richard III, King in the Car Park, right? I mean, that whole story is, and it's been documented and like, it's almost been mythologized already

and slightly bent out of shape by Stephen Frears, which I thought was quite a brilliant film, The King in the Car Park. That starts with Philippa Langley who sort of coordinated the different, the university, the council, the people, the money, the Richard III Society to getting the dig started in Leicester that eventually turned up Richard III. She walks through this parking lot and as she walks over, supposedly, the R of parking written on the ground, she feels the tingling, he's there, he's there, he's beneath my feet. Well, gee whiz, he really is, does turn out to be there. Now, what do we make of this? Is this like the one in the billion crank who accidentally was right and now that

retro justifies all other crank behavior? Yes, to an extent. But you can't argue with the fact that she was right. Why was she right? Is she telling the truth? And I don't mean that in a libelous way, but is this just sort of memory coalescing around reality? A story she believes, but... Yeah, and the story's kind of massaged it and turned into that. Is it that she was really deeply immersed in this history and just instinctively had a sense, having there'd been a lot of desk-based research done by a scholar at I think Aleste University who'd overlaid old maps and was like, well, if the Greyfriars was here, it

was here and the altar would have been there and X. And I mean, she must have pored over that research, and just known, whether she consciously knew or subconsciously knew, yeah, it's about here. And then that mingles with her deep emotional attachment with Richard III, and there you have this moment. If she hadn't found it, they just conveniently ignored all this and kept looking.

Listen, I mean, back in the day, I was young at this point, I got called into a production meeting, a sort of a casting meeting really, with the channel, with Darlow-Smithson was the company, part of Endermol, who made that King in the Car Park documentary. And I remember going into meet them because they were casting for a presenter, if it ever got away. And they hadn't been able to get this show away with anybody, television network in the UK channel for eventually commissioned it is given my think three days month shooting money with my bump it up to nine. If anything interesting comes up but i mean forget like fun we're not gonna find a king obviously that's that's ridiculous and they're always weird cranky kind of characters around this. ridiculous. And there were all these weird cranky characters around this. So they chucked them a small amount of money to go filming. So I saw all this research and I was like, this is the wildest thing I've ever seen. And then they didn't hire me to present the

show. They got a guy called Simon Farnaby, brilliant presenter, but had much more of a background in comedy because this was going to be a comedy documentary or sort of, you know, quirky British kind of quixotic adventure of people going on a sort of weird... You have to compensate for the fact that there's obviously not going to be the pan. Yeah. So what's the thing? Well, it's going to be a story about British eccentrics in search of the past. And then literally day one of digging, like, oh, well, we found him. Oh my God, it is a history documentary after all.

We're sort of, I mean, slightly circling back here to why, how we can get ordinary people interested in medieval history, but that was a huge, huge part of it. Do you know who Heinrich Schleiman is? He's the archaeologist who discovered Troy. Yeah, yeah. I read his memoir many years ago. It's a surreal book because I mean, he's insane. Like he just believes that he knows where Troy is because he read the Odyssey and the Iliad really well, you know, which is nuts. And then he fucking found it right where he said it would be. So it's another one of those things where like he did find it.

And that's- Can't argue with that. And you know, definitively proved that this thing that everyone thought was fiction was, as the Greeks thought, a real place. And we don't know, obviously, if the events in the play are real, but like, or in the poem are real, but there is a place called Troy, and he found it from the poem about Troy. How does that happen? You know, it's, I mean, obviously, there's been so many

other prophets and predictors and people who were convinced this is where El Dorado is. Right. They're interesting too, it just doesn't pay off, but sometimes it does. Maybe the ancients would find that less crazy than we do. They'd be like, of course, he knew where it was. Or the spirit. Or they'd suddenly have had a different apparatus for explaining. So our explanations that we've just been going through with King in the Car Park, or you know, maybe it's,

no, the guy has just read so much and you know, we would say your subconscious does a vast amount of work, right? And if I get stuck on, I do a lot of crossword puzzles and such, if I get stuck, you know, you come to a point where I can't, I can't do a single other clue. I put it away, come back two hours later, I'm like, I fill in nine clues and my explanation to myself will be, well, I actually, when I'm not thinking about it, my subconscious is doing it. I get the same with when I hit a plot problem in writing historical fiction. I just put it away, go for a walk and come back and, oh, I know the answer. Oh, I do yoga particularly because it's like, that's the right mental frequency for problem solving,

I've found. And so we would have a kind of a chemical psychological explanation for that. There would be a different apparatus for the ancients where they would say, you know, Zeus or Athena or whatever it be, or God intervened and provided the answer. It's just different language at some level to explain really the same phenomenon. All right, so last question, does virtue conquer all? Well, that would certainly be the lesson that I think Henry would have wanted. He was a very unusual king.

Whereas you'd had, you have sort of Plantagenet kings who are sort of sexually incontinent and unable to control their appetites. Henry is, he reminds me in many ways of a sort of, like an alpha bro from, he's like celibate, spare with his, you know, frugal with his eating, absolutely focused, totally disciplined, you know, goal-oriented. And those are pious as well in a religious sense, which probably doesn't fit the analogy. But virtue for him was the route to success. And virtue, as in a life lived in accordance with principles. And it was said by French spy that he was more

like a monk than a king, but that was sort of at the root of his success, incredibly consistent, incredibly sort of, you know, he just believed and he had this rare ability, which he's seen so few people, to set out what he was going to do and then actually do it and to keep himself from distractions and to bring people along with him. Does virtue actually conquer all? I'm afraid that the great lesson of history is that no, that much conquest is done by the unvirtuous and the unrighteous and the devious and those possessed of rat-like cunning and rodent brains. But it's nice to have something to believe in. The Stoics said this thing about how the greatest empires command of yourself. It's certainly rarer than it is common that you get someone in a position of power or influence or what have you

that doesn't see the fruit of that as exemption from all the rules. And they go, no, no, actually, I have to be stricter with myself because of the responsibility and the obligations put upon me. And so, yeah, most kings like almost fundamentally don't take the job seriously. It's like, oh, I just got to be me and do what I want. And then there are these kind of rare philosopher Kings or monk like Kings, as you're saying, that are like, it's almost like they internalize that they are the final check and balance that that sense of virtue or that those rules that they place upon themselves. Yes, and the disjuncture in modern leadership

is that leaders will often talk such a good game. They want everyone else to be virtuous, and then when they're not virtuous, it's the hypocrisy that kills them. And that's why it's always interesting when along come a certain breed of politicians at the moment who have no shame, who are just like, I don't even pretend to be a good guy. And if you throw all these accusations at me

of sort of morally reprehensible behavior, I just go, yeah, all right, whatever. And you can't, pressing that button of hypocrisy doesn't work. Heavy lifting, shame, like shame is the sort of final barrier that keeps us from sort of outright tyranny, you would think, you know, like, just like, oh, well, I wouldn't do that because I I just wouldn't do that. And then someone's like, oh, no, I don't care. And you're like, oh, we don't have anything to stop you. No, no, no, the rules are incredibly sort of containing and powerful until someone just goes, I don't

believe in that at all. On the big sense that the decline of popular religion in the West, I mean, the moral and institutional framework of Western religions just controlled people's behaviour on a collective level and individual level because everyone just obeyed the rules. Now suddenly, religion collapses. Well, what is the moral code that binds us all that replaces that? And that's something we're continuing to struggle with and we'll continue to struggle with for a while. Yeah, if you don't answer to God, who do you answer to? And there are some people there

like I answer to whatever I fucking want to do right now. And that's a dangerous person to give nuclear weapons to or an army to or the economy to. All the framework that replaces it is purely the law. Yeah. And this idea that the law is somehow sort of abstract and pure concept rather than something that's malleable by politicians, well, that's, you know, that's- Yeah, I think we in America are really struggling with,

oh, our system was much more, we thought we were a constitutional system, but we are constitutional with a strong set of voluntary norms that we never really talked about or explained or celebrated enough. We just assumed everyone was on the same page. Well, and it's hidden there, isn't it? We hold these truths to be self-evident

that the mindset of the founders is like, well, I mean, there's some shit we just don't need to explain, right? I mean, come on, guys. Like, there is a sort of binding set of principles here, isn't there? And finally, here we are in a generation that goes, no, not our aim.

Yeah, yeah. Or they just assumed, hey, everyone's read these same classical thinkers, believed in these same examples, had the same heroes. And then, yeah, you flash forward a couple hundred years later, and we've done important work going, hey, well, you know, what about these myths?

And like we've democratized it, but basically what that does is dilute the power that the example of some of these kind of heroes and ideas and honor and virtue, these traits that were such an important complimentary part of the system, they go away. And then someone's like, yeah, I'm just not gonna leave office.

What are you gonna do about it? Well, and there's also, you know, alongside that, there's been a flipping in probably in the last 15 years of the understanding what democracy means. Now, democracy to anyone in the middle ages, to the Greeks would have been a word that we would understand to mean sort of populist tyranny, the rule of the mob. And that was why we didn't really want that. Democracy now has taken on this weird meaning, which is like, democracy is about protecting the rights of minorities. Which is so mad, because that's the opposite of what democracy is.

They set up a system to counteract democracy. The founders set up a system, a constitutional republic, because they explicitly understood that that was the natural extension. And so they put in these checks and balances, so that wouldn't happen. Yeah. And now we're in this funny place because words have detached from meaning. And it's like, well, on the one hand, you have a bunch of people who like,

democracy is the old school democracy, the rule of the mob, the rule of just 51% of the people. My base says this is what we're doing. Yeah, so this is what we're doing, but hold on, that doesn't seem like the right thing to do. Well, it's tough because democracy, that was the story of Brexit in the UK, for example. And then on the other hand, you have this thing that, well, democracy is all about like putting

safeguards around minorities. And so that, I mean, certainly in Europe and the UK, we have the human rights law, which is expanded to sort of stymie governments from acting in any particular way, because it could always be challenged on this expansionist view of human rights law. You've got democracy defined as something completely other, which is about, I mean, protecting anyway. So this is a weird time to be alive, but like a fascinating one and one in which, you know, I mean, this isn't a sort of party political broadcast for the history party, but still, I don't think there's been a better time to, or more important time for people to read good history and try and

like understand contextualize look at other examples of human societies in flux change or perplexity than right now. When I would say you also have an obligation because you're not getting it in school. And the news isn't steep like you have to create a historical basis, or you're going to drown in information, you're going to be a mark for people if you don to create a historical basis or you're going to drown in information. You're going to be a mark for people. If you don't have a historical understanding, a good sense of the sort of arc of human history, the traps we fall into over and over again, the types of people. Like if you're not familiar with the historical idea of a demagogue,

you're much more susceptible to them in many different forms. And like, yeah, that's not something you learn about in school He's you got to figure it out. You want to check out some books. I want to show you for real. Yeah, I'd love to Thanks so much for listening if you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes That would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on

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