The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 247: The Other Side of the Fourth Wall

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

Master podcaster and chronicler of Hardcore History, Dan Carlin joins the conversation to discuss his process, the war in Ukraine, and the pitfalls of judging yesterday's events with today's values.

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American Giant, American Made. American Made. Hello, friends. It's me again. It's episode 247 of the way I heard it. What are you laughing at, Chuck? Why are you laughing? Because seconds before you said this,

you said we could also do it on Friday when I get back because you're so busy. Well, listen, Chuck and I are both full disclosure. Just a little stunned right now because we just went through maybe the most fascinating conversation either of us have participated in in a long, long time with today's guest, the one and only Dan Carlin of hardcore history. Dan Carlin. We're fans. We fanboid out a little bit there, having him on the show. So great to pick his brain. We got to talking and we did something.

Fans of the podcast will recall the old catchphrase, right? Quick stories for the curious mind with a short attention span. Well, this podcast is over. over two and a half hours. And I don't say that to frighten you. I say it so you can strap in because the conversation is really, really good. Dan is, I think, the greatest fan of history ever and more informed than most history experts that I've met. His podcast is enjoyed by many, many millions of people.

He's widely credited with changing the podcast industry and making history accessible for people who otherwise don't care much about it. This conversation, Chuck, we can put it in two parts if you want, but I say we just let the whole thing play. I think you're right. I mean, it's enough content for two episodes, but why let people wait? No, we're not going to make you wait.

We're going to give you the whole thing. You've got to pause button on your device. If you get tired, you've got to go take a pee break, that's okay. Nobody's going to hold it against you. But I'm telling you, this conversation is one of the best we've had. Our guest, Dan Carlin, is on the short list of people that I really really. really, really admire in this space. He's awesome. He was super generous with his time. I appreciate you being generous with yours. The other side of the fourth wall is what we're calling this for

reasons that I believe will soon be made evident. Chuck, final thoughts? Let's just get to it, man. It's two and a half hours. Here we go, folks. It's a good one. The other side of the fourth wall. This is Chuck, my old buddy from high school. I've known him forever. That's fantastic. He's impersonating the producer. Actually, he's doing a pretty great job. Isn't it weird, man? Has this happened to you where people you've known for your whole life

suddenly become like exponentially important as time goes on? Like the people you've known the longest, all of a sudden? I think it's the opposite for me, actually. I have a sister who's never lost a contact in her life, right? And I know nobody from the old days. I mean, I feel like I move through friend groups. No, the answer's no. I don't.

I'm just thinking, as a guy who doesn't have time, do you actually listen to your own podcasts? You mean after they're done? Yeah. No. No. As a matter of fact, I would pull my hair out what's left of it if I did. I would just hear all the things I would want to fix or change or revise or.

And as you probably know, I mean, you listen to it over and over and over again, not just before it's done. But in all the various itinerations, you know, there's a lot of cutting room floor stuff that in my mind is in that episode, but I just have confused the stuff that actually made it into the final version with all the crap that we cut out. Yeah. I remember walking into a bookstore not long after my book came out and taking it off the shelf and literally making changes in the book. I love that. My wife said to me once, I did the same thing. I was in a bookstore and I was surprised to find my book there. And she said, you know, you ought to just sign it and write a bunch of things in the margins and all that. That would be pretty funny if you made some changes, put your

little initials and signed it and said, I hope this is okay with you, whoever buys this book. That's funny. Do it all the time. Wouldn't it be great if history were that simple, right? You could pull the book off the shelf, get your yellow pen out, circle some stuff, and say, yeah, upon further review, it was only one gunman. I feel like people have done that in history, you know? I mean, I feel like people come in and just change the past and we're going to revise everything. And I mean, if Hitler won the Second World War, it would be a very different history book entry than it is now, right? Hey, man, you're here because we wouldn't be here without you. We Forrest Gumped their way into the podcast space about six, maybe seven years ago.

And you were the first example that I can remember that I listened to and I thought, okay, if that's possible, that length, that level of thought, that level of engagement. If that's possible, then sure. And so we're such fans of everything you've built and we're such fans of history as well. And I know I'm not telling you anything you haven't heard before from other people. You've just left a huge impact on this industry. But I want to tell you about a guy you haven't heard of named Clark Bunting, who was one of my many bosses at the Discovery Channel. And after the second season of Dirty Jobs, when I had two broken fingers, a cracked rib, I'd singed off my eyelashes, and I was pretty sure I wasn't going to make it through some long extended run. I said, Clark, what can I do here that doesn't involve me enduring

this level of weekly pain? And he said, Mike, if you can figure out a way to make history interesting for people who don't give a damn about history, then you'll have a show for as long as you want. We've tried to do that recently with some success, but you're the guy who's done it to acclaim. So I promise not to suck up much more, but I just wanted to get that off my chest. You did what Clark Bunting challenged everyone to do in the nonfiction space, and no one, with the possible exception of James Burke succeeded. Yeah. Mike, I wanted to get in on the suck uppery as well.

I need a minute or two to fanboy out just a little bit because it was Joey Sierra. Shout out to Joey Sierra who used to work with us who said, hey, you should check out hardcore history. It was a blueprint for Armageddon. And I'd never heard a podcast before in my life. And I took the first episode and I looked at the time and it said four hours and somebody. minutes. And I said, are you effing kidding me? No way. I said, oh, I'll listen to maybe 10 minutes and get a feel for it. And I listened to it on the way home from Santa Monica that day from work. And I got to my

house and I had my earphones in. I got to my house. I walked in and I sat on my couch and listened to the very end of the first episode, all four hours. And the amazing thing for our listeners is that all there is is your voice. You know, it's just you. And it's more than enough. So, So I'm a big fan. I really dig what you do. And that rocked our world. It totally did. You guys, first of all, you don't know what that means to me.

And you guys will understand this. But for any of your listeners that find themselves in the same situation that I find myself in 2005, six, seven, any of those eras, where you don't know if what you're doing is going to work, all of the advisors, you know, that you have, you know, my financial advisor, I swear to God, every time I left a meeting with him, I know that they were rolling their eyes and having conversations about me afterwards like this poor deluded fool. And truthfully, they had a pretty good chance of being right. My wife said to me once, she said, do you feel triumphant? Or whenever we decided that this was working, I said, no, I just this sense of relief,

you know, that you weren't completely wrong and you weren't destroying your family's future. And so, I mean, for all of you out there listening that are in that same boat, I can't promise you what's ever going to get better. But the only way you ever get from here to there is going through that period where you're just like, am I even doing the right thing? So to hear you guys say that, it's such a kick in the pants, just to be honest, and such a motivating thing. And I hope everybody listening understands that I get all this credit from people like you. But there's so much of this that is timing and luck. And I mean, I look back at it. I feel like I understand better how other people where they say, oh, you're a pioneer in this or that. No, maybe you were just at the

right place, at the right time and just the right skill set with nothing better to do. I mean, how often do we make decisions based on, I got nothing better going than this, right? So thank you. It's a huge relief to hear you guys say that. And the relief never wears off. You know, the history channel, low bar, I've heard you say, and I think I know what you mean by that. Had they lived up to their tagline, and you'll remember it, where the past comes alive. Right. You say it really well, too. Or if I were doing my best, Dan Carlin, would be talking like this, and then I would quote it. And I would say, where the past comes alive. There be some VU meters in the red for sure. Yeah. I love the way you do that. We'll talk about that,

too, but that's really the thing. I mean, today, the history channel is down to an H. That's their logo. It's an H. And it might even be a lowercase H at this point. I don't know. But you've brought the past alive, and you've done it as a fan, not as an expert. And if you and I have, have anything in common aside from excellent taste and headwear. It's that. Dirty Jobs was a study in managing expectations, right? I'm not an expert. I'm going to try it. I'm going to go. I'm going to do my best. You brought that to history. And wow, I think, I mean, tell me if I'm wrong, but has positioning yourself as a fan of the past enabled your brand to grow to the extent that it has as opposed to saying, take it from me, Dan Carlin. I read a lot of books and I know. Well, it wasn't my idea

to do this. And it wasn't my idea to do this because as a person with a simple BA in history, there's one thing a person like yours truly knows, and that's that I'm not a history and I'm not uncovering new information. I'm a secondary source guy, basically. My mother-in-law, I was having a conversation at dinner, and we were already doing the current events podcast, which is just a variation of things I did on the radio. And she said, you know, it was one of those bloody stories over dinner, and I've always theorized that this was a way to change the subject. But she said, have you ever thought about doing a podcast about history? And I said, I'm not qualified. And just quick as lightning, she said, I didn't know you had to be qualified or have specific degrees

to tell stories. And that's when the light bulb went over on over my head. And I thought, okay, it's about how you do it. And you understand this better than anyone, right? It's the framing, right? And it allowed us to figure out along the way, because, you know, if you listen to the old shows, you can hear, like with most TV series, you know, the development. We get better at what we're doing. We discard elements that weren't working. So what ended up happening was we had to figure out how a person who is not an expert does this, you know, without claiming too many things. But you had to invent things. So one of the things we invented is something we call audio footnotes.

You know, you'd said, why would you trust Dan Carlin, which is a very good point. So we started to quote people who you could trust. And then I realized, well, people disagree about this event. So you have to quote multiple people. And the audience was absolutely not that I can suggest that there's of one mind, a hive mind kind of thing. But a lot of them didn't realize that it wasn't like math, 2 plus 2 equals 4, that you could have an MSNBC and a Fox News version of history, right? I mean, the truth is, they used to tell us when I was a history student is how boring and terrible

and historiography was going to be, right? the process of how you do history. But that's what that is. And the audience loves that. And most undergraduates are never exposed to that because that's usually a graduate level element of history. So to answer your question, though, it wasn't my idea. My mother-in-law thought of it.

And then you have to unravel what it means to try to do a show like that. And what I loved about podcasting was it's a completely white space from a creative standpoint. You come from a very structured medium. And I did too. In talk radio, top of the hour news, then you have a 15-minute window. and then you have, you know, commercials. And so your creative space, and, you know, usually you have to reset where you were.

Your creative space is small. The first podcast we were doing common sense, as I said, was just a rebranding of the radio thing. So we figured out a way to turn the radio show into a podcast. But hardcore history was the first thing we did with the full understanding of what a podcast was and that we had this white space and that we could do anything and that listener feedback influenced how it developed over time. And so I can only take a minor amount of credit for this. It's a group effort.

Started with my mother-in-law and the audience has been helping us through the process the whole way. I mean, Chuck, you must be biting your tongue because my whole career started with a phone call from my mother right across the bay there at CBS. That's what I was thinking. That's how funny. Because my granddad's, you know, 90 and he was my idol, my whole life. And she calls to say, you know, wouldn't it be great if before he died he could turn the TV on and see you doing something that looked like work. That's it. It's a phone call from mom.

And your life changes. Like that. Except it's not like that. It's only when you look back and identify that moment. It probably, I mean, I know you said the light bulb went off, but it wasn't a supernova, right? It wasn't a son. It was a, oh, wait a second. If I think about myself as a teller of stories instead of an arbiter of the truth,

now I've got more latitude than I thought before. It's the same thing with me. If I think of myself as a guest instead of a host or an apprentice instead of an expert, that's what I meant before and when I said suddenly the expectations are managed in a completely different way. And, you know, when I got into Blueprint, because Chuck called after he got home, he's like, dude, you have to listen to it. This guy's doing everything you're doing except he's smarter than you and a little better, which is deeply, deeply painful. but that's the relationship I have. Probably quite wrong, but I'm going to go with that.

Okay. It's that. It's starting with the idea of defining yourself accurately. Are you a host or a guest? Are you an expert or are you a fan? And once I realized that you were truly a fan of history, my next call was to my dad. He taught history in high school.

And I'm like, you know, I think we found a guy who's doing the same thing that Clark Bunting told me originally, find a way in. And so I guess my question is, were you looking to do a thing that you really believed would appeal to the fat part of the bat? Or, be honest, or were you just trying to amuse yourself? Because if you came out of talk radio, then you came out of a hot mess of rigor and a very skinny lane.

So when you talk about a big white space, man, you're in it. I'm just curious as to why. Well, I was on the radio when the Telecommunications Act in 1996 was passed. And this is insider baseball. But you go from a time when a company can own six or eight broadcast stations to the doors are completely thrown open and they could have a thousand. And it went from six to eight Ma and Pa operation to a thousand overnight. And all of a sudden we were working for giant corporations and we were cogs in a machine.

And, you know, the bane of the industry is consultants, and it's the bane of a lot of industries. And this is not to say that there are not good ones, but the proportion of not good ones to good ones is hard. And especially when, you know, you've been doing something for a while. And I came out of television news and moved into talk radio. And so it came from a journalistic background. And what ends up happening is so you already have this confined area you're working within, right? And I didn't do, I was not a good talk radio show host the way that the station managers would have seen it. I used to say the Martian in the day part.

I didn't fit with the people who came before me. I was tough to sell advertising to you. I argued with the station managers. You didn't pick a side. You didn't pick a side. And I still don't do this. No. We're all Americans.

Somehow we have to make this work. And demonizing your fellow man or woman, you know, anyway. I can't make money off of that and feel good about myself. But the podcasting thing, I mean, I started a company with some buddies. And we were all going to create a company based on something we were calling amateur content at the time. So think 1999, there's no YouTube, there's no iTunes, but you could see

on the horizon that these tools were going to make it so that there was going to be the ability for everybody to make stuff. I mean, we didn't see TikTok specifically, but we knew it. And we were going to venture capital firms, and none of these guys were buying. None of them were buying. And I was supposed to be in

this company, because it was eight founders, I was going to be the example, because people literally needed to see a physical example of what does it look like when some Joe Schmo is doing something on a podcast. And there was no name. Podcast wasn't a name. So I was the example boy. And my dad had a great line once. He said, if you wanted to do a dot to dot and connect your life's progress, he says, you could never do that. Because there's no straight lines. There's all these left turns at Albuquerque that you never could have foreseen. And that's what I try

to tell people all the time because they'll say, I'm on this terrible path. And I say, you'd be surprised how quickly that path can change. Your mother-in-law can have a great idea, right? Or your mom could call you. Events, dear boy, events. Yes, exactly. And so from a creative standpoint, when you were as constrained as I was at the end of my tenure, this looked like an escape hatch creatively. Yeah. Was it? I think so. Well, look, what I did was convert, and everybody should do this if they can. Convert what I was doing in my private life to my public life. I mean, I read this stuff for fun. So now I'm just doing it and it has a greater purpose. Is it weird to love people but despise human resources? If so, well, color me weird. It's not to say

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you're out of vocation, into a vocation. Yes, sir. And now your hobby's out of hand. Yes, my hobby is out of hand. Exactly right. I mean, seriously, dude, people look to you, and part of this is a compliment because you take the research super seriously.

And that's a point worth making. So much of this podcast landia that we inhabit is a couple of dudes talking. And that's kind of what's happening right now. I'm jealous of that, by the way. You have a show at the end of three hours, you know? That's right. I mean, it's a hell of a thing.

Talk to Rogan about that. It's a mosaic. It's a quilt. But when it really comes down to the short strokes, you don't cheat. Like there's actually something really, really truly there with you. You care deeply. And I maybe made it small before when I said,

are you trying to enrich your audience, or are you trying to amuse yourself? Or is there even a difference between the two? When you use this blank space, when you use this medium to scratch what itches and turn your avocation into a vocation, I honestly can't tell sometimes who you're doing it for. And I mean that as a compliment. It's the same thing when I see a great comic. My favorite comics, they're not trying to make me laugh.

They're trying to amuse themselves. And so your curiosity is both inward and outward. I think that's also a part of why everybody kind of looks at you and mutters things and hushed tones. Oh, yeah, that's what Dan Carlin would do. And I'm telling you, man, they do. I appreciate the self-deprecation, but you've got to understand. You occupy a very unique space in the culture right now. Thank you.

I don't always know how to respond to that. But like I said, I'm just relieved. My children don't understand what anybody wants to hear anything from my mouth ever. But let me back up to where you were. because I don't think it's so positive. I might be more of a negative reinforcement than a positive reinforcement person. We had talked earlier about the development of the shows. And so much of the development is based on anger and frustration at not doing a better job

and always wanting to improve so that I'm not angry with myself. I mean, I used to get off the radio sometimes or even before that. I remember several nights of coming out after the evening news where my piece had run. and just looking up at the night sky and going, oh my God, I can't stand this, you know, because it wasn't, you just, you want to do a better job. And so I feel like I'm always striving to avoid the negative feelings afterwards of doing something where you just, how could I make a mistake like that? Or how, you know, so anytime there is anything like that, the goal is to not do that again. And this is an artistic problem that goes back to forever, right? The idea that if you do something good, that people like, now that becomes the C grade.

Now the next thing has to be equally that good or somehow you fall. And right, if the next song isn't number one, but it's number two, you're on your way down. So there's this constant need, and this is just a typical artist thing, to try to match what you've done before at least as good. And then hopefully try to exceed that. So I feel the same pressure we all do, right? Yeah. Is there somebody in your universe that kind of whispers in your ear like the old emperors? You are but a man, right?

My wife tells me that. Everybody keeps me humble at home. I'm not going to lie to you guys. I sometimes have to say to them, you know, people recognize me every now and then. You know, you can treat me a little better around here. What I do have sometimes is you mentioned James Burke specifically earlier. I look at the people that we grew up with watching on television. And I don't even mean James Burke. You can name 50 people in 50 different disciplines back in the era of black and white television where they're all smoking. And they may have thought that that was lowbrow conversation then, but it looks like Harvard and Yale stuff now, right? I feel like. we're going back to some of that in the sense that broadcasting is broadcasting, right? And I used to say, and this is what I used to say in those venture capital meetings back in the old days, that this is narrow casting. But narrow casting didn't used to be worth any money because that just meant a few people were watching what you did. But this is narrow casting to a potential global audience.

And if you're only appealing to 0.0002% of a slice of the demographic pie, that can still be a lot of human beings. And so it makes narrow casting viable. Does that make sense? Well, yeah, because narrow is deep and broad is wide. And specific. Right. So we can be talking about Spanish language 1950 science fiction comic books, and there'll be a market for that globally.

And a passionate market, an engaged market. Yes, because you're the only one giving it to them, and they never get specifically targeted like that. That's right. And that's where enthusiasm comes from, and that's where passion comes from. Yes. And that term, broadcasting, you know, it's a farming term, right?

No. Yes. Tell me about it. Broadcasting came about to describe the technique that was used when you basically would plow the field and then just walk around with a handful of seeds and just throw them. And that's what you called it, broadcast? How did the term somehow get applied to media? Same way. Shallow but wide.

You hit a lot of people when you broadcast. It's like shooting with a shotgun. You'll hit a lot. You don't kill anything or you don't kill much. You're shooting with like one of those end fields, right? The first time they came into existence. You got a howitzer. You're hitting a very, very specific target,

but you're murdering it every time. And so it's a very, very different way to plant, and it's a very different way to communicate. and, you know, there's some space in between for sure. But like everything else today, it seems to me that those styles of communication have become kind of binary. And you can tell pretty quick who you can go deep with and who you're going to stay on the surface with.

And that's the compliment that I meant to pay earlier. You have a podcast and now we're in this world that's very... Podcasting has become wide and it's become a little surfacy. There are two and a half million people doing a podcast now. crazy. Can you imagine? I mean, no. But you're shooting with a high-powered rifle. And I think I said this to you, Chuck. It's like you talk a lot about war. We talk a lot about tactics and we talk a lot about technologies and what happens when those two things don't keep apace. And you have scenes like we had in Shiloh where suddenly you've got six guys lying dead in a cornfield all killed with the same

bullet because they were marching in a line the way they would have marched 100 years ago without any compensation for the fact that now they're marching into not musket fire, but something very, very different. That strikes me as somehow germane to the way we talk and the way we present ideas. And it's certainly a big theme in blueprint. Boy, it's the same thing, right? You got people riding in on horses dressed up in their fancy colors, basically fighting like they thought Napoleon was still calling the shots.

With aircraft over their heads. I want to mind the opportunity that I have here, and hopefully the audience won't care. But we get called a lot from various TV outlets and a ton of the boutique production companies. There seem to be as many of those as there are podcasters these days who all want to translate kind of what we're doing into a television form. And, you know, you follow a couple of these down the road. And there's a lot of effort and wasted time. And then eventually you figure out, at least I figured out, in the opportunity, that presented themselves to me, that there was no way we could do this without becoming all the

things. In other words, we were going to turn into them. They weren't going to turn into us. Do you think it's possible to take the kind of stuff that we do and that a lot of other podcasters do, utilizing the freedom of the medium, right? Do you think it's possible to translate that into the more standard forms of media that we normally consume? I mean, can what I do be a television show? No. But what you do can be on TV. Interesting distinction. It's kind of happening right now. The business of podcasting is our best hope of having a long form, unstructured, meaningful conversation. The next logical thing to do with that is to record it and put that up somewhere. And of course, that's happened. That's what YouTube is. Add visuals, things like that. I mean, yes, but it's baby steps.

It's just the tip. Let's just start with three dudes on a screen. We'll still call it the podcast, and we'll still listen to their conversation, but let's create a place where we can watch them and be a fly on the wall. The next step, that's the part of the map that says, here be dragons. That's what Clark Bunting was talking about. Figure out a way to deliver the same level of passion, engagement, and nourishment that Dan Carlin does with hardcore. and turn it into a show. It seems so simple, but you're running headlong.

You're like the guy climbing out of the trench, filled with the corpses, running across no man's land, crawling across the barbed wire, and trying to make it. Because all of the obstacles in your way is just the brute realities of the business. The advertisers, the TRT, your total running time, the size of the act, the mandatory break,

the product integrates, Nielsen, I live in that world. And I've found a way to try and navigate in a way that, you know, leaves me solvent and satisfied. You're fundamentally in this other world. And I'm so interested by the fact that the podcast world and the broadcast world sooner or later are going to couple and have some unholy union. And I don't quite know what the spawn will look like that runs amok as a result of that coupling. But if I were to wager, I'd bet you and I are going to be in or around it. It's coming. I just don't know quite what it looks like. So let me share a story with you about one of these attempts that I made where we went pretty far down the road,

right? We were sizzle reels, all that kind of stuff, right? And the reason that I went farther with this group than any others is because they gave me the dreaded assurance that I would be able to do things the way I wanted to do it, right? And this is, you know, first of all, I'm spoiled rotten. Let's understand that. I am the creative staff, right? I don't have to deal with creativity by committee. In other words, I always tell people, the creativity by committee is not a bad thing per se, but it's like a blended whiskey. I am a single malt whiskey, whereas you may hate what I taste like, but it'll be something very distinctive. The two things that happened when we went on this attempt at morphing what I do into a television show. The first thing was the creativity

by committee instantly reared its ugly head. And it was always with a suggestion, you know, with the air quotes, a suggestion. But then the next thing was the way that I tried to bring what I do into this story was to take a historical event. This is years ago. So if the people who were with me on this are watching this, we were going to just for the sizzle reel, look at the late 60s, early 1970s, the new left with the bombings and the weather underground and all that stuff.

What I wanted to do, because I can't stand things like the recreations, all. the ways they have to fill when you don't have footage. So we shot recreations and the spine of the story, which we usually have in the Hardcore History podcast too. There's at least one, sometimes multiple themes that run underneath it. And in this case, the theme that was running underneath it is what if we had had the modern 21st century anti-terror laws and the capabilities that we have now, but we were using them back then? So we had somebody dressed up in an American flag T-shirt with Abby Hoffman-type hair being waterboarded by Hoover's people. We shot all these things. And they showed them to the test audiences in the outlet that was going to run them. And they said,

we can't show this in multiple parts of the country. I mean, there's whole groups of people that will be completely offended by, but the whole point was to blend the historical tale with the ramifications that might come into play. Now, the Twilight Zone side of the history that we like to focus on. But that's a perfect example of how we were trying to. to create a single malt whiskey version of a show, and they were telling me right now, some of those flavors were too harsh and wouldn't appeal to this demographic. In other words, the broadcasting thing got in the way again, because if it appeals to the people in this state, but not the people in this state, you're doomed.

And so I follow these opportunities far less often than I used to when they seemed novel and interesting and believable. These days, they just look at like wastes of time, I think, to me. What are your thoughts on that? You're in that world, as you said. Well, the headlines, as I said before, will catch up to you. And the technology will catch up to the content. And sometimes the content has to catch up with the technology.

But here's how hard it is to do the thing you've just described. Because it's the very thing that Chuck and I wanted to do. Now, we did it. It was called Six Degrees. And it was a straight up homage. I saw that, by the way. Yes. Okay.

So then you'll appreciate the. approach to the reenactments. Because look, we're in a world where Ridley Scott will be hired by the History Channel to recreate Gettysburg. What you're going to get in that recreation is the very best cinematic look at that day in history that's imaginable. You're going to get the best actors you can find. You're going to have the best sound design there is. You're going to cut no corners. and it's going to be as good as it can possibly be. How do you compete with that? The only way to compete with that

is to completely take the piss out of it, which is why Chuck played 35 characters in 6 degrees. Bad wigs, suspicious costumes, curious accents. We not only cheaped out, we aggressively cheaped out. We leaned into it, yeah. But that's just the beginning, Dan. We also threw animation at it. We threw cheap graphics.

I walk through the... scene in much the way Burke did back in 1978 with connections. But then it's the business of convincing the network to put it on. Now they say they want to make history fun. They say they want to make it accessible and everybody kind of genuflex when you invoke James Burke's name. But here you have a modern day take on that very thing, that very notion of connections. And the skepticism is still high and the brick wall is still there. I had to go to the energy industry. I had to find a sponsor to pay for this thing. And I did.

You had to. Yes, me. I found a sponsor who had millions of dollars who loved the fact that we were trying to make the case that were all connected. And they also loved the fact that, as I'm sure you know very well, the impact of energy on world events can't be overstated. So they loved it. So now I go to the network.

I've got the money. I've got a sponsor. I've got an idea. I got my buddy wearing bad wigs. But I also have a pretty smart show that can make a pretty conceivable case that a horseshoe can help you find your soulmate, and I'll walk you through all those steps over the course of an hour. That's very James Burkean, yes. It's totally Burkean. And by the way, there are no new ideas. Right. I mean, Dirty Jobs is very George Plimpton. Stole that one, too. He had a great line with me once he was talking about, because I had said that I was ripping him off. And he had said that he had had a professor tell him once when he apologized for doing something similar. And the professor said, my dear boy, where do you think ideas come from?

You know, we steal them. That's what they go. Somebody else had them. We found them. It occurs to me, and I'm thinking on the fly here, never a smart thing to do, but that maybe what you're talking about when you talk about, it's coming and a way to imagine that old industry of broadcasting, somehow embracing a more narrow, deep dive. Could the streaming services or the streaming outlets,

that these major broadcasters are employing as almost a parallel distribution system for their content. Could something like that maybe bridge the gap? It's going to be part of it. Today, as we speak on this Friday, my boss, one of them, David Zaslov, who runs the Discovery Channel,

has literally swallowed a basketball. Well, make that figuratively. Yeah, I was going to say. I do not think you know what literally means. That's a TikTok video right there, if that's literally. Maybe he can. I don't know. Honey, get in here. That's a basketball. His company, founded by my old friend John Hendricks in a garage, just bought Time Warner. These two giant companies are coming together today in what's going to prove to be the most consequential merger, I think, in the history of media. What is that going to mean from what we're talking about? I'm not sure, but it's going to be part of it. I'm thinking more along the lines of what happens when you take a couple of cameras. lock them down and film a play.

Yeah. Right? A play. Couldn't be simpler. But I stumbled across this very thing not too long ago and found myself completely riveted to the TV because it wasn't quite the theatrical experience, but it wasn't anything I was accustomed to seeing on that particular 60-inch screen. And so it combined these two very familiar elements. with an existing technology and reminded me that sometimes

it's simply impossible to improve upon the simplicity of a given experience. The theatrical experience is a big deal. And I want to ask you, too, about the theater of the mind because this whole notion of trying to bring to life your podcast is something we're exploring too, but it's risky because you're basically saying, hey, I can show you something that's going to be more interesting than the thing your imagination

can create. And I'm not so sure that's not a sucker's bet. You know, I wonder if these things don't go in cycles. So the theater of the mind thing, for example, I remember having a conversation about how we were going to go back. It was going to seem like reinvention to a bunch of younger people, but we were going to go back and rediscover techniques that they didn't need anymore once they provided the visuals, right? You know, I remember my mom was working in London when I was a kid, so we had to go from 1971 Los Angeles to 1971 London, and I'm a kid, right? So the first thing a kid notice is in 1971 London is you go from having a bunch of television stations to BBC 1 and BBC 2, right? And they're probably both showing classical music performances.

And my mother had a great line, though. She goes, if you grew up watching, this as opposed to the Saturday morning cartoons I was watching, you would develop an appreciation for it. But I'm almost wondering if there's the opposite, where if you are devoid of something for a long time that you don't even know how much you might like something like a long-form podcast, or in other words, it becomes novel because you don't see it. The simple rarity of encountering it creates an interest that otherwise we would be blazze about. So a generation raised on TikTok and Instagram and all these kinds of short form offerings, I wonder, you know, I'm always told that they've lost the ability to appreciate it, but might it be 180 degrees different?

Might it create an appetite simply because here we have something new for you? But it's not really new, right? We got that once upon a time, but it's new to them. Hey, look, Chuck, what do you always say about a joke? No such thing is an old joke if you've never heard it before. Right. That translates pretty nicely. Santa Ana, right? Those who don't learn from are doomed to repeat. People look around today and they just can't understand how we could possibly be in the same situation that we were in a generation or two or five or 10 or 50. We all have to discover the joke or the thing or the history in our own way. Yeah, that's all just a long way of saying.

My crystal ball is cloudy too, but I'm pretty certain that some mix of tactics. and techniques and new discoveries and old chestnuts. All that stuff still matters today as it pushes us forward into whatever's next. I don't know that I want you taking hardcore history and making it more accessible in a broadcast way. I don't know. It's the joy of discovering something as opposed to having it blasted out. out to you. It's the difference between buying a thing you find and love or being sold something simply because you were walking down the thoroughfare of a souk or a farmer's market or a mall.

It's different. We got to find you. And that was part of what was special. What do you do? It was the same thing with dirty jobs. It was like a little secret. Nobody was promoting it. It was just kind of out there. And it was just, and then it got big. And then I became a sellout. And then I had to figure out. I took the filthy people. You sold that way before a dirty job. That's true. But you know, this is actually a great point because when I mentioned earlier that I was not a very good talk radio show host, and part of it was because, and this sounds so weird, I don't know how to phrase this.

I'm not going to put on an act, right? They used to scream at me about not creating enough controversy and heat was the word that they liked at the time, right? Heat. Because heat creates engagement and heat makes people come back for more. And I didn't have a problem with creating real heat, but it was the artificial stuff, right? That was the problem. And so I feel like there's an authenticity that we're allowed to maintain because I don't have to meet with the promotion staff and boil down what we do to seven or eight adjectives that

can be used to guide a staff who's going to write a promotional campaign about, I mean, we don't have any of that stuff. Now, what that means is we have no choice but to be discovered serendipitously, right? I'll tell you, this is how long I've been in podcasting. In about 2006, 2007, and we'd already been doing it a couple of years, I was trying to figure out how we could get the word out that there was anything even being offered. I must have called 100 radio stations, and I wasn't stupid. I didn't call radio stations in New York and L.A.

I called public radio stations in, like, North Dakota, and no one would put us on. So then I bought a package of ads in college newspapers around the country, hoping that at least kids are technically savvy. They'll know nothing worked. And yet if you'd have told me, oh, listen, if you'll just boil down your show to seven or eight pithy adjectives, you know, will it a... I probably would have taken that deal once upon a time when we just needed listeners. Now I feel like it's this wonderful luxury we have that we can afford to be authentic because we've reached some level of critical mass where Mike Rose having us on his podcast, you know. But selling out might have been an option years ago, but nobody was buying.

And now I'm in a position where I don't have to sell out because we, to weather the storm long enough to still be here, I guess. Well, the thing that I wanted to say to you, Dan, is that I believe that the people who are coming and sniffing around your podcast to try to turn it into a TV show, they need you more than you need them. Finally. You doing what you want, you being the creative, you know, 800-pound gorilla that you are, you can do whatever you want now.

You've got the platform to do it. You don't necessarily need their platform. They will try to turn it into something different. I'm glad you say that because half the time I scold myself for being lazy for not pursuing more of these potential. Because now they write all the time because there's this like dearth of content or something must explain it. But in the old days, I used to feel bad if I didn't at least pursue some of these things. Now I feel like, okay, as you guys know better than I do, it's a zero-sum game. You only have so much time, so much energy.

And at this point, the 800-pound gorilla allows me to say, you know what? the smart move here is actually not following these TV opportunities. You know, because that's not a luxury everyone has. You know, I mean, that's the fortunate place we find ourselves in now. And remember, too, the gorilla wasn't always 800 pounds. No, not at all. You spent a lot of time at 50, 60, band them weight, then it was 100, then two, then three. So there are a lot of animal kingdom metaphors here, but the frog in the boiling water is also a good one.

You just wake up one day and look around and say, holy crap, it's hot in here. How did that happen? A little bit at a time. So now you're, you know, you're a big deal, dude. But Mike, how much of this is timing? So if Dan Carlin is in the same position in 1978, I don't know. I mean, what am I doing, Xeroxing newsletters and putting them under people's windshield wipers at the supermarket, right? Maybe, maybe, but if you are, you're making it interesting.

you're doing it in a way that the other guy didn't do. If you're who you are back then, you're still looking for the reverse commute. You're still looking for a way to be a jagged little pill. You're still looking for a way to do the thing that other people are doing in a way that either amuses you or that's more efficacious.

That's who you are. I was going to say, I hope you're right. I would like to think that that's the truth. Yes, I would hope so. All right. Well, then how about this way? You talked about heat. Language is, it fascinates.

me and it's so important. And the difference between heat and light is a distinction that I think a lot of people miss. They're easy to confuse. But I look at heat, not just as conflict, but as meaning, as meat on the bone. Light's easy. Light, you just shine it wherever it is and you can look at a thing. People are always attracted to different things at different times. The gorilla is never the same weight throughout the course of his life. Everything is always shifting, always changing. And that's just the reality of the industry we're in. But it kind of feels, too, like it's the reality of the topic that made you famous. This is what history is. And by the way, I said this to Chuck years ago, too. Your podcast could be called the way I heard it. Mine could not be called hardcore history.

Because the way you've taken in so many different versions of what we think the past might be, and woven it together into something that feels persuasive, that's talent, man. That's not slipping a flyer under a windshield wiper. That's a much more complicated trick. If you ever want to change the name to the way I heard it, you can have it. I feel like that Herodotus could have entitled his histories

the way I heard it. That would work perfectly. It reminds me of what I was saying to you earlier, the whole gratitude thing. I wonder, you know, I was a theater major for my first two years. college. And I remember when I, really, sort of as a family thing. And I thought two years into it, I never liked reading anybody else's words. So I did a lot of improv, but I always had a hard time.

I never wanted to read anybody else's words. So I remember when I shifted to history, which had been a lifelong interest, it was the most natural thing to do that. I remember thinking, damn, I just wasted two years of college, right? I just wasted all that time and shifted to history with an emphasis on like ancient and military and all these kinds of things. So now you find yourself in a position, which as my dad said, you never could have connected the dots at the end of your life on how you got there. And all of a sudden, I'm using the theater and the military and ancient history every day in my job.

In a job that didn't exist when I was in college either. You couldn't have even said, well, maybe I'll go into podcasting and figure out a way to make it all work. And yet there you are, right? None of the tools that you'd been taught, that whole theater of the mind with radio, that's all stuff that I ended up using. And so with my kids, one of them's in college, the other's going to go to college soon. I try to teach them the same thing that, look, don't worry about this if you feel like you're wasting your time because they all feel like you need to be in whatever

you're going to be in. If you're going to be an accountant for a living, you better be in accounting school. And I just keep telling them none of this will be wasted. Somehow, some way, this is all going to be stuff you can repurpose and weave into some story. And so when you say, you know, that that's kind of what we do, I don't know how all these influence, came to be, but I use them all the time. It's like it makes you, as I always tell my kids, a more formidable person, a more formidable version of yourself. And so, I mean, I feel like, as you were saying, I mean, the luxury of being able to make a living, weaving these things that I both would do on my free time anyway, right? You have a job you love right away. But also,

I mean, learning how to deal with time codes and editing and all this stuff you learn when you're in the news business, right? I mean, I use all those freaking skills and I can't imagine how it just worked out. I mean, I'm a very fortunate person is what I always say. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure, but if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before, with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students

participating and competing every year. Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode. Join the skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it. You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself and see too how

easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skillsusa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S.

Skills, U.S.S. Skills USA. I'm going to shift gears a little bit and just talk about some of the stuff. Enough about this. Yes, exactly. Shift gears, please. Our audience really enjoys this because peeling back the layers of the onion are always kind of fun. But going back to Blueprint, actually, maybe we should go forward from that to war remains because that virtual experience, I want to hear more about why you did that.

I want people to understand what it is, where they can go to experience it. because if the history channel again is to be taken seriously for anything, it's for their logo where the past comes alive. If you're going to bring the Western Front to life with virtual reality, as it looks like you have, then you may eclipse John Carpenter and all the other horror show guy because this could potentially be the thing that really impacts the way people think about war. for real. It was a very interesting experience, but let's give credit where credit is due. I had not even put on VR goggles or anything. And then one day, and this is not a name-dropping thing, this is a credit where credit is do

think. I was with Rick Rubin, the music producer, who somehow knows every creative outlet that's going, I don't know, there's not enough hours in the day for this guy to be as informed as he is. And he said one day, he said, I want to show you something. And he took me over to the house of one of these OG guys in VR who put the headset on for the first time, and I walked out of there with my mind just pinging, because the guy was a filmmaker, too. He's not a computer guy. He's more of a filmmaker who sees this as a new way to shoot movies. And he was trying to explain to me the different ways that this would impact movies. So, for example, he was saying, from an intellectual property standpoint, you could go redo most of your favorite films. I mean, how many mutiny on the bounties

have they done, right? Well, there'll be a VR one in the future. And he was explaining to me from an Alfred Hitchcock perspective, how a person who was doing a VR movie would have to do things differently than a film director. He says, if the murderers at the top of the stairs and they're coming down the stairs, well, in the movie, you pan to there. But in the VR thing, you have to have a noise that makes you turn and look at it. So it was all these intricate things about movie making through this different lens. And so I walk out of that get together. And my head is pinging about all the different things that you could do with this. And I was thinking about it, I mean, normally in the old days you would have had to have a giant television network or a movie, you know, Universal

Studios or whatever to partner with to do this. And then you run into all the things we've already talked about, creativity by committee, broadcasting, all these kinds of things. But with this, it was an early enough industry so that when somebody said to me later, what would you do if you could do something in virtual reality? And I said, a time machine, which is what I always talk about on my show anyway. So then we started talking about, well, where would you go? And what would you do? And so we honed this down into an idea where I've always imagined, and you guys know this if you've heard me, where the worst place to be in the world on any given day might be. That was one of my TV ideas to the worst place in the world. And I always came back to being

stuck on the Western Front in the First World War, especially later into the war when you've got the remains of the earlier part of the war all around you and you're living amongst it. And so that's how the idea came to be. And a company called MWM, where the people were the people behind this who said, fine, we'll make it happen. And then at one point, this got so hard to do right that we brought in some real experts, the guys at Skywalker Labs over near you. And all these people together, we had to sit down and ask how it is you create a negative human experience in a way that makes you want to experience it. And where the line was between how far you could go. And it's a weird line, because normally, you don't have to consider the historical

realities of the dead. But in this case, we felt it would be an insult if you made something like this not horrific enough, right? I mean, the people that died in this war and who suffered, I mean, you have a fidelity to their experience that you have to create. But at the same time, you also can't make them deaf from the sound of explosions, even though a lot of them came home from the war with hearing problems, right? At one point, we were playing with the idea of a button or a series of buttons right at the start of the experience, which you walk through. So it's part VR and part old-fashioned haunted house

in the sense that if you see barbed wire in the headsets, there's barbed wire there to touch, right? We were trying to figure out if maybe you could have a series of buttons at the beginning that let you pick how intense you want it to be. And so if you want it to be more gory and you could do that. Eventually, of course, you can't,

and it becomes its own form of the broadcast problem, right? where there's a problem with even trying to create something that's entertaining out of this, right? So if you come out of it and want to do it again, is that a personal victory for us or a personal defeat? So it was all these. Yeah, that was fun. Let's get back on the ride. I'll tell you that funny story. We brought it to L.A. to just show it off to a few people a while back.

And it was one of those invitation-only kind of deals. And we were fooling around. And one of the producers said, how do you feel about smells? And I said, smells. he said, well, I found any, and it's almost like finding some sort of weird guy who deals in like exotic animal carcasses or tusks or something. And he goes, well, he works in these kinds of things and they have all these special aerosol cans of like corpse smell and this smell. And I said, I don't know. So we had these fans as part of the exhibit.

So he was spritzing this stuff for the VIPs just to test it out. And it was over the line. You know, when we talk about where's the line, it was over the line. But to answer your question, this was something that sounded like the kind of thing I would like to do myself, which is my current benchmark for whether or not I do something. And the interesting thing about it, because from my standpoint, it's not long enough. You know, when we were charging money for this, I would want to make it, you know, an hour long, something where you really get your money's worth. And they were saying an hour long would traumatize people. We had people diving out of this thing.

There's a scene in a hot air balloon. That's one of the parts of it, not to give anything away. And we had people jumping out of the exhibit there just because of the height thing. But I found it a fascinating example of the medium. And I've been thinking often ever since then, okay, what would you do next? I mean, if you were going to take what you learned, what would be the next thing? So it's currently on display at the World War I Museum in Kansas City right now if anybody wants to go. You may have answered your earlier question.

I'm fumbling around trying to describe a future where technology and tactics and advertising and all of these things come together in a way that makes a creative person go, hey, what if? Well, maybe it's VR. Or something like it. Maybe you're actually on the tip of that spear and you just don't know it. We'll see. Why did I just imagine a product placement ad in a Jenghis Khan's Mongols are running down the street

murdering people, but there's a Coke can over in the corner in the windowsill as you pass. I mean, I'm sorry. I've worked with people often enough to say, well, we're the opportunity. is here to, you know, get a little compensation for what we do. Certainly in virtual reality, they're everywhere. It's like the football games now. You can put an ad on the field. Yeah, it's crazy.

During the game. Yeah. Yeah, it's bananas. What the heck was I going to say? I'm sorry for the interruptions. I'm doing this all the time now. Too much coffee. Well, actually, you know what?

That's not what I was going to say, but it's worth pointing out, this stream of conscious thing that we're doing right now, you improv, not quite improv, but you don't have a script. When you sit down to tell a four and a half hour story of whether it's Epre or Ipre 2 or the Somme or Verdun or whatever it is, you're not reading from a script. I think it's important people understand that. You know, that comes from the radio thing. So we were talking about how there's a format in radio. And generally in like a talk radio thing, especially in your first hour, there's that sort of setting up the show.

So there'll be an intro to the show, big voice announcer comes in. And then you have 10 to 12 or 13 minutes to sort of do a monologue, really. This was the part that I did best. It was all downhill after the first about 15 minutes of my radio show. But when we converted the radio show to a podcast, I was just total stream of consciousness. And then something happened. And this is an example about trying to learn the new medium you're in and the different things. In radio, as you guys probably know, there's a cough button.

You can cut the signal underneath if you have to cough, clear your throat, whatever it might be. So we had done a bunch of podcasts, again, the current events one, straight through. So it would be half hour, yours truly just gabbing away, a lot of coffee, which is the talk radio show hosts, you know, best friend and worst enemy. So I had to clear my throat or something like that. And there was no cough button. And I remember turning to the producer and saying, turn it. Okay, we have to start over. And he goes, start over.

He goes, what are you talking about? He goes, we're just going to cut it out. Pick it up from where you left off. and I remember saying to him, because this is how podcasting was, I was worried I was going to ruin my radio chops. If I relied on little slick editing, I would lose the ability to talk for 10 or 12 minutes. But what ended up happening is slowly but surely I realized I'm never going back into radio.

This is what I'm going to do. And that's when the first edit started. It was over the fact that we weren't just going to start over when something went wrong 25 minutes into the show. The early history show, the first one I think was like 16 minutes. So that was well within the. realm of what I could pull off in a single sitting. But as they got longer and longer, this became harder and harder. And then you would say something like, I remember once we found something that was

wrong. And this is a terrible problem because, you know, this is like a live performance. And then someone comes out later and says, well, you know, you hit a wrong note during that. You need to redo the whole thing. And you just go, it's a live performance. But we would cut things out. So all of a sudden, now you're starting to do more editing. But we've never made any bones about it. I mean, I walk in there and if we do 15 or 20 good minutes and sometimes we only do five good minutes, that stays and the next day I walk in the studio and we pick it up from there. And what this allows us to do also is explore, sometimes we'll go off on a tangent. And sometimes the tangent will be three or four recording sessions before we'll go,

that tangent doesn't work and cut it all out. There's a lot of cutting room floor stuff. So this developed organically. All right. Well, that's super interesting. I'm sorry for Yanke us back to the process stuff, but I can't. I look at it like care, levels of care versus levels of authenticity. Production in many ways, at least in my mind and in my world, production becomes the enemy

of authenticity, at least on TV, at least in nonfiction. The viewer wants an authentic experience. Well, why then would we take great steps to hide the crew from them? Why would we hide the lights? Why would we pretend that we're capturing this performance? It's not a performance. But that's very interesting. You've heard of the fourth wall.

Sure. Breaking the fourth wall. Well, breaking the fourth wall is no less deliberate than not breaking the fourth wall, ignoring the fourth wall. Now, that is more analogous to removing the cough button. You don't have the option now to pretend that, you're not coughing. And if you take the editing process away too, there's the bargain. Now what you're saying to your viewer is warts and all. If I have to cough, if I got to run, take a piss in the

middle of this thing, you're coming with me. Right? If I'm coughing, you're going to hear it. Now, it's not pretty, but you get something for that. In your case, I think you're selling something different. I think hardcore has an element of performance to it, back to your old theatrical background, and I think that's super important. And this show, in its early iteration, was a straight up homage to Paul Harvey. It was the rest of the story. Right. And so I tried to write those stories and deliver them in a not quite stilted, but it wasn't quite me either. There was a little bit of performance art in that thing. So here we are again. This is you balancing all those things.

You need to tell a story. I'm not surprised. I'm kind of horrified to know that you might come in and look back at three days of work and go... Yeah, we do that. We've thrown out whole shows before. But that gets back to what we said earlier. It's my ability to look back and live with it.

There's a great show, and I don't even think it's South Park. I think it's something like the making of South Park. And they show the two creative guys, but one guy really comes up with the whole thing. And they actually follow him around with the camera. I made my wife come in and look at it. I said, this is my situation. It's called six days to air.

Okay, there you go. And it's one of the greatest behind the scenes look. South Park, by the way, I believe will be remembered years from now as the greatest satirical romp of all time. I think those guys really and truly figured that out. And when I saw the documentary you're describing right now, that is a look at how the sausage is made. Sorry to interrupt.

No, no, no, no, no. I've interrupted you multiple times, so I'm glad to even the score a little bit. But there's that one scene, you'll recall, where they have all these ping pong tables and places for the crew and the staff to keep themselves entertained on the skateboards and everything. But the one guy who actually has to come up with the idea is walking around the hallway. And you can even see the look in his eyes. And as he passes the ping pong table, everybody stops and looks as if to say, has he come up with the idea yet? Because you know, as you said, six days to air, right? The clock is ticking. not having that is both a pro and a con thing,

but for us it allows us to do what you had just said. I mean, we'll throw away a show or three days of work or whatever. In order to end up with something, I described it to somebody once as digital stone. A certain point you realize these things are not going away. And so instead of the South Park people who have to come up with something in six days, it's more important for us to make something that we can live with, but also that down the road, somebody five years from now, despite some of the historical accuracy,

which may have changed, new discoveries may have made moot some of the things that we might have discussed. But to have it be valuable for them in the future requires us to realize that the audience that's going to listen to this may not have been born yet. So we're trying to create something. There's a different timeline for us than the six days to air. And the audience consuming this,

we describe it more like a record album or a book. Jimmy Hendricks has not been around for a long time, but Jimmy Hendricks is still selling albums. You had talked about this in terms of framing. Once you decide that these are the parameters in which you're operating, it changes how you do what you do. I remember hearing William Shatner say something to the effect of once, if he'd known what a big deal Star Trek was going to be.

He might have put more into it at the time. And I'm trying to not have that regret, but I find that even listening to the old shows, which may have been considered good by the standards of that era, I want to redo all of them. You can't. You remind me of someone. Yes, you can.

Yes, you can. That's what you're wrong. You can. Taylor Swift is re-recording all of her songs. And I'm walking through Barnes & Noble with a yellow pen changing my book. That's right. You can do it. Chuck is referring to an episode of, do you listen to Gladwell much?

Yeah, sometimes. We had him on the show once. He's done a lot of interesting things. I'd love to meet the guy, but he did a really interesting, examination of what separates creatives in the most fundamental way. And he basically creates two columns. There's Picasso and there's Cézahn. And people argue all the time over who the greater master was. And I don't have an opinion on that, but Gladwell's point was Picasso worked very, very fast. And when he was done, he was done. Cézan was done. Cézon was

never done. He was the guy who would go into the museum with some watercolors. Get that freaking lily just right. He never, ever really finished a painting. Everything he ever sold, he sold as incomplete. And so that's him. That's Cézanne. And you can find who wrote that great, hallelujah. Leonard Cohen. The version of that song you know is the 500th take. Wow. He's Cézanne. And there are other musicians. who are Picasso. And this is true of writers. It's true of performers.

Which one are you? Definitely, Cézanne. Yeah, definitely. Not even close. And you asked an interesting question earlier, and of course I spun it off into something else, but I do want to address it where you were talking about performance,

the fact that there's a performance element to this. And somebody said to me once, and I forgot where it was. I was doing a talk like I'm doing right now, and they said, you don't sound like you do on the show. And I said, well, wait a minute. That's because we're doing a different thing. said, we're having a dialogue here. And if you sound like you do when you're doing a monologue,

you sound weird. Like my theater teacher was this wonderful guy who had this exaggerated, theatrical way of speaking even in normal life. And I said, you sound like Mr. Gilchrist. If you walk around talking like that, but when you're telling a story and you're sitting down, you're going the equivalent of once upon a time, you're telling a story. It's the same voice that I use at home telling a story. But in conversation with Batchel, and forth, it's inappropriate. It sounds weird and affected. It's not that you're becoming a different person. The circumstances are different, right? You are giving a performance, but it's the kind of performance grandpa might have given, you know, a Thanksgiving dinner after he stood up and started

telling a story, too. I mean, when the story gets interesting, the voice pacing gets increased and the level of intensity goes up. And that's just normal. That's not some artificial thing. It's authentic in its own way. Correct. It's fake, real. The caveman around the fire. Yes. or the oral storytellers that have been transmitting history in traditional societies since time immemorial? That's why I'm not sure what I want for you. Not that it's any of my business, but there is a campfire.

There is once upon a time, except it's history and it's facts. And you have woven a kind of spell. And all I would say to you in regard to your earlier question is, whatever you do in the future will either enhance, enhance it or diminish it. I don't know what will happen. I just know that right now in this particular space and time, you got a good thing going. And I'm wondering, what's the best direction back to the theater thing? And I know you're probably your own worst critic, but what's the

best direction anyone has ever given you? You mean like advice? What are we talking about here? I'm talking literally like a director. Like you must have somebody other than you who listens to your stuff, or over the years, maybe it was a station manager, maybe it was a director of a play, whatever it was, was there a bit of directorial advice that actually worked for you? The short answer is, I'm sure that there was. The long answer is, I don't remember it because so much of it was about, and you'll understand this because this dovetails into something we discussed earlier, so much of it was about how they could change what I was doing. But what I was doing wasn't an on-purpose thing.

It was something that I couldn't change. So, for example, as you do, I remember some comments by the boss at the radio station at the urinal during a commercial break. So I run out and just happen to be next to the boss, you know, don't do a lot of talking at the urinal. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I'm about 30 seconds from air,

he turns around and just goes, you ever thought about having your adenoids out? It was because this was the day where having the deep, big voice was still in vogue, and I sound like I sound now, but not as deep, right? So over time, you know, how the voice gets a little bit more raw and resonance and everything. I don't remember they asked the football great Keith Jackson, how he got his voice this way, and he said, cigarettes in Alabama whiskey.

And so it just happens over time. But the point was is that I used to write the liners for the big voice guy. And I talked too fast, and I talked too loud, and I didn't have at the time the preferred voice. And so we decided to turn lemons into lemonade, and I would write all the liners. for the big voice guy to say, he's loud, he's the, that became the branding. And that way it didn't sound like the mistake that it was, the thing that I couldn't correct that they were telling me to fix. It sounded like we were trying to do that.

And somehow I spanned the era where we went from the time when all those things were verboten to where all of a sudden the consultants were telling you, you need to find your own unique voice. And we just grandfathered ourselves into that accidentally. That was kind of the point I was trying to get at. A lot of people have told me what they think I should do, and a lot of people have directed me in a lot of different scenarios. But for me, there was an acting teacher in college who only directed one way. She would sit there and she'd smoke her cigarette and she'd watch you do your thing.

And if she liked it, she said, okay. And if she didn't like it, she'd say, bullshit, smoking her cigarette. and looking back, I'm like, God, can you give me some more? But the truth was, it was invaluable because it forced you to figure it out. My business partner now has a version of this. She might not like what I'm doing, and I'll say, well, what do you think? And she'll say, I was thinking you could suck less, you know? Try it again, and this time just suck a little less.

And let's see how that works. To be forced or to be allowed to figure it out. It seems will almost always bring you to a better place than to be given a super specific roadmap. At least for me, Shameless plug! Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel,

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Pick up a bottle at noblespirits.com, k-n-o-b-E-L-Spirits.com. Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. I think there's a lot of truth to that. But what I always find is it's usually a cheap sort of an advice, especially when we're talking about industry people. And the cheap sort of advice is usually to act like somebody else.

So so-and-so is doing great in all these markets. You should be more like so-and-so. Whereas that was another great thing about the podcasting deal is that you could be the single malt whiskey like we were talking about. And what we figured is was something like that instead of inheriting an audience. So when I was on radio, I was inheriting the audience of the guy before me. So all of that was part of, I had to set up the guy next to me. in this, you're self-selecting an audience over time. And long ago, you know, people would say,

well, why don't you do the 17th century India story or something? And I would say, because I'm not qualified, I wouldn't do a good job, and I don't have to. I'm just going to talk about the things that I'm excited about. And over time, the people that don't like that will leave, and the people that do like that will stay. And then you will know how to predict your audience over time because it will just be anything you want,

because those are the people that would have stuck around. So I'm not inheriting an audience from the network, or the person before me, this is an audience that enjoys what I enjoy because they would have left long ago if they didn't. But it allows me to sort of crystallize our thinking. I mean, advice-wise now, I don't have to listen to anything. Now, I do listen because I want to learn. And the audience, sometimes they have bad advice, but sometimes they have very good advice. And sometimes a lot of them will say, do this, and I'll still do that.

I think when you get to a certain point, the audience that I have likes the way we do things. Once upon a time, they would have told me to get my adenoids out. You know, so, I mean, over time, we've found a way to make my... While you were pee. Yes, yes. That's just called good management, right? I had a little face time with the boss in a very different sort of circumstance. But it does set your equilibrium sort of a skew when you go back on the air 30 seconds later,

and you're still trying to process that. In any case, though, I mean, to answer your question a little bit, I do think that what we've done over time is turn lemons into lemonade, turn our quirks into things that people say now are... We get people imitating the things that we're... considered bad things earlier on. I'm still thinking about your fourth wall comment and trying to figure out if James Burke was breaking the fourth wall with his style or if that was just addressing. And I don't mean to take your show and completely change the direction of it, but was

Burke breaking the fourth wall or was the entire approach to the show to not have a fourth wall? Burke, I believe, was trying to do what Clark Bunting asked me to do 20 years later, which was make history interesting for people who otherwise wouldn't give a damn. At the time, it was a very, very stylistic thing to do. I mean, here you've got a very English guy in a white leisure suit. That's right. With the glasses. With the glasses, with those crazy black glasses.

ridiculous suit explaining with the level of passion that you really don't see with, you know, historians or presenters, that was all new. It was his level of enthusiasm for sometimes the simplest things. And the wind blows and the blades on the mill turn. And then on the other end, there it is, the grist and every change. And you're like, why am I so excited to learn how a windmill works. But it's the same thing with the stirrup, right? Yes. Without the stirrup, they can't stand in the saddle. They can't stand. Then the force of that impact with the lance is going to knock them off the saddle and basically negate the whole point of it. That stirrup was basically puts us on the road to a thermonuclear war. Who was doing

that with that level of enthusiasm in a white leisure suit? This is the professor you wish you had suddenly on PBS, making it interesting in ways we'd never seen before. Today, we'd look at that exact same show and say, old-fashioned, stilted, tried, whatever. Then, man, cutting edge. Could they do that again today? Because this dovetails with our earlier conversation about what an audience is ready for or the cycles of entertainment, you know. because it seems to me not to draw parallels, but whatever it was Burke was doing with the fourth wall,

you have a similar approach. You're directly talking to the audience in a way that makes you a tour guide for an experience, if you will. And I felt like Burke was a tour guide for, you know, you'd mention the stirrup episode, for example, but a tour guide through the context of this thread that he wants you to examine. I feel like you have a similar sort of approach.

which makes it so relatable. I mean, I watch these stupid videos sometimes and once again flashback to me trying to explain to venture capitalists what amateur content might be. There are whole shows with millions of views where they're just watching some guy in India with a straight razor give another person a shave.

It's like Zuckerberg's metaverse and you're getting to roll a burrito, but you can't eat it. It didn't do anything for my beard, but there was something that millions of people saw in that video that spoke to them. I feel like what Burke was doing and what you're doing too is a little bit of saying,

hey, I know you can't be here where I am right now. I also know you might not want to, given the way it smells and how dirty it is, but let me show you this. And I feel like there's something very compelling about that. Same street, different house. Burke had something I don't have. Real bona fides.

He was a real Oxford-educated historian. You have a knowledge base that is way beyond mine. in history. Now, I've got some things that maybe you don't have. I've got access. Absolutely. I got jet fuel. I got planes that'll take me anywhere to crawl through any little pit of despair. In some town you couldn't find on a map with some guy you didn't know exist to spend a day with him to get a sense of it. That's very Plimpton. I am an avatar. I'm a cipher. But I don't show up with a meaningful base of knowledge. I show up with curiosity. Yeah, but there's a reason you're doing it in a not 10,000, other people. I'll take that. There's a thing that works for me, but it's not being prepared and it's not

being informed. It's just being curious. And that's where you and I would diverge. You are prepared. You'll leave three hours of stuff on the floor if you don't think it's up to snuff. I'll tell you something that's true that freaks people out in the industry. Dirty jobs been on the air every week for 20 years. Wow. We've done over 350. Never once have we shot something that didn't air. No. Every single thing we've ever shot, even ones that went so spectacularly off the rails,

we turned into a segment. Once the network understood that that was possible, once they understood that the crew was going to be in the shot, whether they wanted to or not, all that stuff. Those were big battles that had to be fought at the time. Once we showed them, look, it's nonfiction. So if it doesn't go the way we want, that's okay. The viewer isn't tuning in simply to be enlightened or informed.

They're tuning in to go on the ride. They're tuning in to come along. And whether you're in a sewer or up on a bridge or out on a crab boat, you're there first and foremost for access. So that's what I sell. You sell enlightenment. First of all, let me point out that the thing I'd love for those executives to understand, which you guys clearly knew, is that your audience isn't going to tune out because they saw the crew in the shot.

That doesn't have anything to do with whether or not, you know, the TV guide, this is dating us, right? The TV guide review might say, sloppy produced show, but the audience doesn't care at all. It doesn't impact what they're taking away. as you pointed out very early on in this conversation, it might actually lend authenticity to the whole thing because you're not taking out the cough moments and all that. I'm uncomfortable with this idea that I'm bringing this enlightenment to the table because I don't think it's enlightenment. You know, I described it this way.

Let's just play with a number and say there's 20 different ways your brain can be organized. I have a friend who's a math guy. Everything is filtered in his perceptions through the math lens. And I know this because we've had enough conversations where everything is filtered in my mind through the history lens, which simply means in a linear narrative form, right? Contextually. That's how I place everything. I can't even imagine what seeing the world through the math thing is and he can't imagine what mine is.

But when we talk to each other long enough, you can begin to see through lots of discussion how he sees it a little bit better. I can't meditate. And I know this seems like I'm going sideways on you. I can't meditate. I've tried many times, but I find I have a much better chance if there's somebody who's good at it who can sit behind you and lead you through the process. Some people are just good at this, can get themselves. Other people need someone as a guide. I feel like that's how a math person is with trying to help somebody who's not good at math. And as a history guy, and I feel like one-twentieth of the human population sees the world through the same linear contextual lens that I do, we don't need a Dan Carlin or anybody else to appetize us for history. We've probably been reading it since we were kids, right? Because we innately are able to put ourselves in the moccasins of the people in the story. But other people need a little help getting into that equivalent of meditative stage.

And maybe they need a guide. And a person who already sees history that way, because that's how they think, can help a math person see it through their lens a little bit better. And I feel like that's what we're doing. There's a reason there's a, even at the bookstores today, that sell stuffed animals and toys and music and almost no books. There's still a nice history section there because there's a group of human beings who they're naturally inclined. They didn't need anyone like me.

But I do get nice emails from people who said I never liked history, but something about the way you did it, helped me to figure it out. And then they go on and love it without me. So once I can learn to meditate with help, sometimes I can get back there myself. Once we appetize people on this stuff, they go on. That's why I always say if something's wrong with the story, you'll read something from one of the many sources that we list on our websites that we use and you'll learn it the right way. But you might not have gone to those sources or wanted to read them until somehow you were appetized for the subject of history, right? Does that make sense? It makes perfect sense, especially in the world we're living in. There's a group of people that I refer to as the correctors.

And that group is now pretty much the entirety of the species. And they are also the reason the podcast is called The Way I Heard it, back to the whole expectation thing. It's like, look, anybody with access to the internet can find a source to confirm or deny any claim that anybody makes anywhere at any time. That's a thing. And that is shaping and impacting, I think, a lot of the way we communicate with each other. but I am curious about how do you deal with that? Because you do such a great job at bringing in sources from other countries, for instance. The French have a very different recollection of Waterloo, I would suppose, than the Brits.

Who's writing the history? Who's telling it? But still, it doesn't matter how good you are at this, Dan. You're going to get some stuff wrong. And when you do, my God, I'm guessing you hear about it. Yeah, I've been fortunate. And this is part of what we're trying to always do better. So I'd said earlier, there's always this sense of wanting to continually improve.

So if you go listen to the early shows that we were doing in 2006, 2007, it was a very different world back then in terms of expectations. And in the process of getting better and in the process of having competition out there that was also raising the bar and more and more people getting into podcasting, including professional outlets. And all of a sudden, so the standards change. And so when you talk about, are you getting in trouble for things that you get wrong? There's a line.

And I think I just read it the other day. And I'm careful about quoting people now because every time this plays to your point perfectly, every time you quote somebody, they say, that's actually not a real quote. So I'm always careful. And I use all my journalistic, self-protective words, you know, defensive journalism. Like Mark Twain is alleged to have said. But one of the things Mark Twain is alleged to have said, and I'm going to forget what I was going to say here. Sorry, this podcast is so long.

if I'd had more time, it'd be shorter? No, he had a line about being right or wrong. He had had a line about it's not the things that you don't know that get you into trouble. It's the things that you think you know and that you're wrong about. So where I get into trouble is not normally on new information, except that once upon a time I knew this and what I knew is no longer true. But because you think you know it, don't go check that. So for example, we were all raised with history books when we were kids, right?

But so much of that stuff is wrong, you don't know it and you think, okay, I don't have to learn that because I know that, right? I went through college. I took these courses. I know that. Yes, but in the 25 or 30 years since I've been into college, there's new things and new discoveries and things that we thought were true or not true. But because you think, you know it, you don't go check that. That gets me in trouble much more than things that I'm learning for the first time because I'm reading the best info. I will say pronunciation is, you mentioned French. That's a perfect example of something. I'm going to have a problem with even if I research it. And by the way, in 2006, 2007, researching something like that was a lot tougher than it is today,

I can just usually type it into Google and have an audio pronunciation guide help me where that wasn't available in the old days. But even with that, my Chinese pronunciation might be horrifying, even if I'm imitating something I just heard online. So I think I get into trouble more with the things that I think I'm. I know because I used to know them than the things that I didn't know that I've recently boned up on. Got it. To me, that distills down to our current love affair with certainty. And I think you've done a great job of being both accurate, informed, curious, but could be wrong. That was the alternative name for this podcast. I could be wrong. I probably am. Right. Talk a little bit of If you would, and by the way, I'm going to be respectful of your time.

You got somewhere to be, you got to be anything. No, no, I'm more worried about you guys and a very long-winded guest, so I'm fine on this end. We're way over what we normally do, but I'm telling you the fans of the show are going to love you and they're going to love this. Certainty. That seems to be the thing that we're very, very long in these days. Everybody sounds so certain, Dan. Historians sound certain about the past. Scientists sound certain about the present.

Journalists sound certain about whatever they're ripping and reading. Our politicians, of course, sound certain about everything. And it's so easy to talk in a crisp, well-modulated baritone, assuming you have one and drive the point home. We just hear it everywhere, from advertising to Fox to MSNBC, to everything in between. if you would, just talk a little bit about how certainty can be our friend with regard to understanding the past and maybe, maybe a barrier in the same way production is a barrier to authenticity. Is certainty a barrier to understanding?

The short answer is yes. The long answer is, you know, we're getting into actual things that touch upon personal struggles that I'm having trying to make sense of reality. Yeah. Because we history people tend to look at the past. and always assume that there's, you know, as the old saying goes, there's nothing new under the sun, right? But there are some new things under the sun. As anyone who's raising kids now understands, your children have things at their disposal and a world that those things have spawned that has never existed before ever.

I read a line once that said that a person living 100 years ago would have had more in common and understand more about something from the time, the biblical era of Jesus Christ, than they would with now. And so what we're seeing because of the, and this is one of my favorite topics to get into is the pace of change, human beings and societies can't change at the level of speed that the new iPhones are changing

and that that pace is speeding up. So even if you could get a handle on it, it's moving faster all the time. There's going to be a point where if it hasn't already happened, there's going to be a divergence between how quickly things can change and how societies and individuals can change.

to keep up with that. So for example, when you look at all of the things that are analog in this world, let's talk about countries, nation states, things like that. Those are created in a pre-modern world. Once upon a time, the Soviet Union considered a single radio signal from radio-free Europe that could cross the iron curtain to be dangerous as all get out. Now, look at what you couldn't have the Soviet Union. in today's communication era, right? And yet, that Soviet Union that feared that one radio signal had more in common with ancient Rome, the Persian Empire, all those people who would have wanted to control information that same way than they do within now where everyone realizes not only can you not control it,

but countries have troll farms of people that work with their intelligence agencies to deliberately throw misinformation out there the same way that an aircraft trying to confuse a heat-seeking missile will throw chaff and flash out to confuse it, right? So if you can't control the truth by having a single outlet that you control, you can control it by throwing so many falsehoods out there that you can't find the needle in the haystack. So when we talk about what you're talking about, I always look at it in terms of we have a guinea pig generation going on here. And so something like nuance that you mentioned earlier or certainty, I feel like that's less of a thing now than even ever before because of all of the stuff that is thrown out there to hide facts,

because facts themselves. I mean, what did I mention to you earlier? I get in trouble with former facts that are no longer facts, stuff that we thought we knew, but that is no longer valid. If you can't have something that corrects the record, you get into trouble. I'm worried, and this is what I meant about this getting personal, I'm having a crisis of confidence in the very idea of democracy. See, because if it were ever true that the average human being, and it was never the average human being, we all know that these democracies were not, you know, the kind of democracies that we have now in ancient Greece or something. But if once upon a time those people could handle the level of nuance that that era required,

I mean, the stuff you have to filter through now to find the truth, if truth even exists, is so incredible. I used to spend my life in journalism reading tons of different newspapers, right? Back in the newspaper day. I used to know all the reporters and their tendencies and everything else. I'm a sophisticated news consumer because it used to be my job. And I can't wade through the crap out there today to find the nuggets of knowledge and truth. So what is a person who didn't have the luxury of being paid to do that eight hours a day?

How do they navigate it? And if we have to navigate it to be playing our role in a Democratic Republic that we're supposed to play, and yet we can't navigate it, what does that mean? So I'm trying to figure out in a political sense and in a structural sense how people can make a Republican Democratic system work in an era with the challenges that we have now that we've never had before. Not just that, what we have now is probably going to pale in comparison to what we're going to have soon. And so if we think it's bad now, what's it going to be like when you actually have a meta world to compete with? What's truth and nuance going to be when people can put on the equivalent of goggles to get to the VR World War I experience thing you were

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The world we're in now, or at least the state of mind. that we're in now for a lot of people, we just can't square the facts with the present. We have statues that can't be allowed to stand for all sorts of reasons. And I don't need to get it super political either, but I just listen to Blitz, your most recent, which, by the way, the one on the slave train. Yes, dude. Wow. It's just, it's crazy because you paint a picture. you're really good at painting a picture that brings history to life with just your voice. Here's the Cézahn thing. All I see is a disorganized mess, right?

Yeah, but you manage the expectations. Look, folks, if you don't know what we're talking about, Dan's most recent foray is a five and a half hour look at the Atlantic slave trade. It's called Blitz. Human Resources. It's a Blitz edition show, but it's called Human Resources. But, yes. Oh, okay, right, right.

When you do a Blitz, it's sort of just a very, like a very, quick sort of lightning strike thing. It was supposed to mean that it's turned into a different kind of show. So a normal topic will be five and a half hours. Yeah, I know. I have problems. Well, compared to 22 hours. That's my big comeback.

That's what I always say too. But usually we examine something that's less structured, right? So we can dive in and out of the idea. And in the normal shows, it's more linear. And, you know, this happened, then this happened, then this happened. So. Yes. But here we are in this day and age.

You're taking a really. deep dive into slavery. And you're making a point, which I think is super important, that is this institution is not peculiar. It's not unique. An unwilling labor force has been at the heart of virtually every advanced civilization ever. It's the default setting. Right? Always, always, always, always there. And so personally, I don't think that pulling statues down in the public square is any more an effective message than eliminating racism by reducing slurs to a single letter? I don't think that really does anything, but I have to admit, I listen to your thing, and I thought, well, look, I can understand why people don't want to see Christopher Columbus's statue.

I understand why that would rankle. But I think that the thing that worries me is that we can't, fix the present or change the future. I don't think until we really understand what the past was, we certainly can't fix it by whitewashing over inconvenient words or pulling down statues. We need to understand why. That's kind of what I was getting at with the certainty thing.

The people who want those statues down are certain they need to come down and they have reasons for it. The people who want to keep them up are certain to. everybody, it seems, is dug in. And maybe one of the ways we can navigate out of that binary trap is to better understand, in this case, the long and horrifying history of the slave trade. You know, it's worth pointing out because I always feel better about our own times if I can find things that make them seem more a part of our humanness rather than some anomaly.

We have some anomaly now that's so terrible, you never like this. And can you imagine? But there's a long history of destroying statues when times change. And some of my favorite pieces of, they're really art at this point. But from the ancient world, you'll see the sculpture of a ruler or something. And somebody would have gone in and defaced the front of it and knocked out an eye and do a, I mean, or like you'll see these wonderful mosaics or something. And somebody will have chipped out the face of somebody that they don't like or whatever.

I don't have a problem if people say times change. So we're not going to celebrate this person the way we used to because our value system is different and we want to celebrate the people who, you know, you want to have things that in the old days you would have said that provide a good example for the kind of youth we want to create. I mean, there'd be a whole bunch of things that they would say. Now, I don't like to see any statues go away myself, but that's because I'm a nut. I would just add new statues next to them or I would change the context or whatever you might do. But the certainty question, I don't have a problem with the certainty part as much as I have a problem. with the fact that nobody cuts anybody some slack for not having modern day values when none of us would have modern day values if we existed in a time when those weren't the values. So by judging people by the standards of today and measuring them by a standard that they didn't know existed, you create conditions where there's almost nobody from the past worthy of celebration. And so that becomes the issue. And here's the other thing you forget.

you also screw yourselves for the future by not realizing that there's going to be a time where the values that you have today that you're so certain with that you'll change society's heroes because of it, you don't know what you're going to be judged on 500 years from now either, right? So you have to understand that the culture operates in a way that you can only, if you're lucky, understand the now. That goes back to my question about whether or not we can do our jobs in a democratic society. anyway, understanding the now. But then to try to say, well, you know, this guy from the past, he's a terrible human

being because he did X, Y, and Z, but X, Y, and Z were being done everywhere and nobody thought it was bad. How is that person supposed to know? The other thing you get to, and I'm sure you understand this as well or better than I do, is the way our heroes are squashed into, you know, we told them in the recent episode, cardboard cutouts of the sort you see at a convenience or a two-dimensional image, and the statues are like this, too, that is supposed to. to sort of represent these values, right? This is a person who represents this idea, this value

that we celebrate and want our society to emulate. But then when you find out that that person is a person and has qualities that you wouldn't want your child perhaps growing up with, or that are a little inconvenient, because it clashes ironically with their other qualities, that somehow we throw the baby out with the bathwater and don't realize that everyone is human, few of us are saints and that people who do things that we really should celebrate can also be terrible people. I mean, in the most recent episode, we try to talk about Thomas Jefferson's ideas. Here's a guy whose ideas are actually used by the very peoples he enslaved, right, in places like modern day Haiti, as the impetus for them getting their freedom.

So that doesn't make Jefferson a better guy in the things where he wasn't a good guy, but it shows how somebody can actually contribute something. to humanity that we should celebrate and we can still celebrate that without endorsing the things that he did that we wouldn't want to celebrate. In other words, you don't have to contribute a 360 degree perfect person to humanity to be a positive impact. You just have to contribute that really important thing. And in Jefferson's case, it's those immortal lines, right? We hold these truths to be self-evident, right? That all men are created equal by their creator with certain inalienable rights, unalienable rights. But my point is, is that that, that

guy contributed so much to world freedom at the same time he's enslaving hundreds of people himself. So what do you do? Do you throw out the great lines that contributed to people becoming free because they adopted those same words and values and ideas? Because that guy had unfree people working for him. I mean, I guess what I'm saying is none of us are perfect. And if we have to be perfect for our ideas to matter, we're all in big trouble. Right. So that's where the nuance comes in. the nuance, the certainty, and in this case, the discernment. The reason, aside from all the other bootlicking we did, the reason I'm a fan is because of this very thing. I have ten questions I wanted to ask you.

I didn't ask you any of them because the truth is I prefer to have this kind of conversation. I do the same thing in my interviews. This is it. It's being able to discern and accept the undeniable. reality that Thomas Jefferson was a genius whose head was filled with great ideas who held slaves. You have to hear that, America. You have to know that that is the case and you have to find a way to square it. You must discern. I hate to break it to you, but Hitler liked dogs. And he was a pretty good painter. That kind of cognitive dissonance, Jenghis Khan,

as I learned from my friend Dan, was a remarkably progressive guy, right up to the point where the progress didn't suit his empirical goals. Yeah, if the guy who discovers penicillin is a bad human being, he still discovered penicillin, right? Give it up. Give it up for a whole. Millions of people are alive today because, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? I worry more than anything else that in

our rush to be certain have lost our ability to discern. I think you're 100% right. 50, maybe 100 years from now, what are our descendants going to look back and judge us on? Meat eating, capital punishment, abortion, take any hot button that's controversial today, flash forward, and imagine the certainty with which our descendants will look back and say, what were they thinking? Driving cars? Eating cows? So crazy. And yet that's exactly what we do right now. We look back just 150 years. What were we thinking? How could we imagine, tolerate, process the idea of owning another human being? Well, for starters, maybe you didn't see them as human beings. Maybe you saw them as property. But I think one of the things that you had on was that's not true either. They knew they were

human beings, thousand years ago. Of course they know it. It was just so inculcated in the way progress happened and in the way countries became countries that it was baked into the whole thing. What's baked into us today that's going to be so self-evidently insane through the eyes of our descendants in 100 years? I don't know. Well, let me ask you a question. And this is the stuff that I think history is pretty helpful with because it doesn't teach lessons the way people think it teaches lessons, but it teaches other things. So I would ask on this question of nuance, whether or not this is really a new development like we think it is, maybe people have always had this problem with dealing with nuance. Maybe that's how you get witches burned at the stake and all

these kinds of things when you turn around and realize that maybe what we're seeing here is the same tendency people have always had, but just a heck of a lot more power to show it off to the rest of us through social media and everything else. And once upon a time, because we're old enough to remember this, when Dan Carlin, because he did, wanted to say something, he would write the editor of the paper locally to try to get a letter to the editor published, which might or might not be published, but you had to write a little thing at the head of it going, here's my letter, here's the issue that it relates to, here's what I want to say, blah, blah, and they might or might not publish it.

But there were gatekeepers all across the way. You know, and again, this is flashing back to me trying to sell venture capitalists on amateur content. But one of the big selling points at the time was the gatekeepers will be gone, right? Nobody can tell you what to say. We had something that, you know, again, I'm trying to be humble, but we had something called news based on your views,

which I invented, which was going to be the news page of the late 1990s internet with a slider bar. And the slider bar initially would have left, right, and center but it was going to devolve into all kinds of sub-political genres eventually. And as you change the slider bar, the headlines would change, the outlets that the stories were coming from would change. And it was intended not to give you a safe space where you only thought like the people, it was more intended to show you the different ways that coverage happened

and how you could shade stories differently or pick as an assignment editor, different things to cover. And so it was a compare and contrast kind of deal. But what ended up happening is that world became true. And instead of having, you know, I used to say even if the New York Times and the Washington Post were wrong in the 1970s, enough people believed it that you had a base of knowledge that you could argue with other people about over the water cooler. So you could say, well, I saw this in the New York Times.

And that was enough to shut down somebody saying that's not true. Once you can say, no, I don't believe the New York Times because they might be wrong. Then that's as far as the argument gets, right? you disagree over sources and it never gets to the discussion. I feel like that question about have we always been nuanced or not always been nuanced is that I don't think humanity's changed at all. I think our ability to see exactly how not nuanced our neighbor might be is the part that's new. And that's why it feels so shocking.

You know, it's a little like finding out how many people might be smoking marijuana, but you don't know it until they make it legal. And then you go, where did all this happen from? I think it's a similar sort of thing. I think we're being exposed to aspects of humanity that you would have had to have been exposed to on a one-to-one basis, you know, in the old days. And now you can just read it person after person after person on Twitter. Judge Danforth, who I think consigned some of those witches to their fate, man, he was certain. The townspeople, they were certain.

Don't burn somebody or hang somebody unless you're pretty damn sure. That is a heck of a thing. Do you look around today and see which trials? Do you see that kind of thinking in the headlines? You know, it's funny. And I don't know if this is an answer to your question or not, but it's what I first thought about when you pressed us with it. And this is that so much of this is dishonest.

So I don't mind a legitimate political debate because you could find the most intelligent, well-informed people in the world. And that doesn't mean they're going to agree on things, right? You know, some people make it sound like, well, if everybody were smart and informed and they would all think the same way, but they don't. The dichotomy is not between, a certain right answer or a certain wrong answer. The dichotomy is between people who can have a debate on the merits and people who don't.

And a lot of times the reason they don't is because they don't know the merits because the people that are giving them their information are not sharing the merits because it's not in their interest to do so. It gets back to the heat adjective we used earlier. Every time I look at media now, I hear somebody in the background going heat, heat, heat, heat in my head. Because that's what this is. I mean, we have people who divide, and I'm just going to use the United States,

days is an example. We have people who divide us from each other for money. Now, I'm okay with dividing us from each other as part of the normal political part of a Democratic Republic, which is not a bug, it's a feature. We're not supposed to all be on the same page, right? But to have people who have an interest financially in not just dividing us, but to create more heat, right? To create more anger at each other because it sells, right? This is, if you want your ratings to go up, make people angry. Okay, well, if you make people angry at the fact that there's lead in the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, and this is really important, well, that's an old 60 minutes trick. That's advocacy, journalism in the sense that you get people angry about something they didn't know

about. It's outrageous. And because they're outraged, progress happens, right? Changes are made. But if you get people angry and then you point them at their neighbor and say, it's their fault, well, holy cow, how far are you from Rwanda then when one radio station there is able to incite people. Let me tell you a quick story. When I was a news reporter, I was stuck in a relatively small community. In the relatively small communities, you're not doing the big news. You're doing knife shows. And then every now and then there's something that happens that seems like a real story that you can sink your teeth into. So when real big stories happen, and you guys already know this, this is for your audience, it's very common to do something that's called localizing a story.

So when I was in news, everything went down in the former Yugoslavia. So it breaks up and you start having the sort of images on your television that we're seeing come out of Ukraine right now. So we localized the story by finding people who were from that area who would move to our area and you would go interview them. And they were from all the different groups, Serbs, Croats, Bosnian, Muslims, and you would talk to them and they all said the same thing. Things were going great. We didn't have any of these problems. These ancient hatreds we'd had for each other had disintegrated. I can't tell you how often I heard the story of the inner marriage between these different groups, right, as a sign that this is all over.

But then when things turned economically in the former Yugoslavia bad, and demagogues could get up there and blame ancient hated peoples, it was like the embers of a fire that had not gone out and you could just pour a little gasoline on them in the right circumstance and get people angry at their neighbors. And you saw what happened. I feel like we have a financial, we've created. And maybe it always existed because we're old enough to remember the Joe Pines and all those kinds of people. But we've created a dynamic here where there's a financial interest in Americans being turned against each other. And when we were younger, you know, it's funny with I know all the little defensive journalistic wiggle words because I use them myself, alleged, all those kind of things. Once upon a time, the defense of people who did this would be that they are not angry at the individuals, right? That these are people who have a mindset that is damaging to the country.

So we're out there to change their mind. somewhere along the line that changed to this is an immutable part of people's character. And if the Democrats or the Republicans, I'm just throwing in a couple of words there, if that person can't change their mind. But if their views are destroying America, well, then what's the answer, right? You follow the logical progression. How do you fix that problem, right? If it's not about changing minds and if they're destroying the country, what is the logical inference there?

And when this is done, not because these people are true believers, right? the feature, not the bug in the system. You're allowed to have a different opinion. It's natural to have this Hegelian dialectic struggle between the two sides. But when it's not done honestly, when it's not done because you really feel that way, but because this is how you create anger and heat, which sells advertisement, when it's not an honest debate and the debate itself demonizes your countrymen, it's very hard to find a societal force to contradict that, to stabilize, to create an equilibrium in between, things that are dividing us and things that keep us together. To go back to James Burke, he said on my show when I interviewed him that he thought nation states might be obsolete

and that in the future, people were going to be able to create virtual nation states through all of the communication tools we have based on like interests and all these kinds of things. So if you can imagine the United States devolving back into 50 component states, but they weren't Alabama, California, Nevada, they were instead people that had decided to be together because they had enough in common. And if things changed, you could leave the Alabama virtual country and go to another one that suited you. In other words, what you always worry if there was a civil war and divided into two countries, what I always say to people is, you know, you're going to have children and they're going to read stuff. And then you're going to end up with people who think just like the people you broke away from

in a generation or two. But if you could shift allegiances and constantly be moving to countries that more likely represent your points of view, this James Burke future type scenario, well, then that might be more interesting. But we have to live with each other. And right now, we have people who are paid to make the enemy your neighbor. And I just don't know how without some sort of countervailing force that ends up well. Does that make sense? It makes a horrible sense.

Are you more concerned at this point in time about the likelihood of a world war or the likelihood of a civil war. Hmm. I think you could make a case. So I always try, this is always a fun exercise, a stupid but fun exercise. I always try to imagine how our era will be written about in the future. So when time compresses, when the outcome is known,

when people can go back and connect the dots in a way that those of us living through the time can't, I always wonder if they'll see this as a precursor to some terrible thing that happens in the future. And I don't have an answer to that. I do remember that there were some papers written that said that the natural tendency in the United States, and this was in the 1990s, is to pull apart and that it is only certain cataclysmic events, things like Pearl Harbor or 9-11 or wars

that create the countervailing force that pulls us together again. So that's why I said, I don't know what keeps us from drifting further apart if current trends continue. So that would lead to some sort of division. I don't know if that's a civil war or a breakdown in the political structure that allows people to freely leave or James Burke's possibility overcomes everything else. I do know that when you have nuclear weapons on the planet, that that is always something that needs to be in the back of our minds. And also, and if the United States has a civil war, let's not joke about this, that would be a catastrophe, not just for the United States, but for a lot of other countries in the world, right?

We are a pillar of the international system. But if you have a full-on nuclear conflict, that means people in other countries who have no say in our policies and no say in the other side's policies are going to be caught up in the 200 to 600 million people that die in that and the permanent damage to the planet. I feel when you have something out there that is that catastrophic, right? The kind of catastrophes that used to be called acts of God in your insurance policy once upon a time, I feel like that has to be at the forefront of our thinking. And I think the current problems in Europe are the perfect example of why we should be thinking about these all the time, because now we're thinking about the possibility. But if you've been thinking about the possibility 10, 20, 30 years ago, and some people were, let's be honest, maybe you don't get to this point.

But when people say, you know, the only reason it's getting that much coverage in a place like Ukraine is because it's white folks shooting white folks and you don't get this kind of coverage in Africa or the Middle East, and they're right about that. But this has the potential for nuclear war somewhere in the potential threads here in ways that fighting in the Congo doesn't. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Rowe gently criticizing her. her oldest son for his longstanding and well-established commitment issues. You'll learn about the latest offer from Pure Talk,

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service in this country, supports our veterans in a meaningful way, as well as the MicroWorks Foundation, and allows me to exploit my own mother in a national advertising campaign. Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just, just 3499 a month at puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure talk. Yeah. You know, you talked about these ancient simmering animosities

that a little breeze can bring to life in the same way. We call that human history, yes, yes. Yeah, right. But what about the unintended consequences, not of the animosity? but of the friendships, of the alliances. I learned in blueprint that, you know, the Brits had an obligation to, what, Belgium, I guess, right? Or Brussels. Belgium, yeah.

Belgium was created to be in neutral, and everybody had sort of vowed to defend the neutral party. And then when the war broke out and Belgium was invaded, everybody was sort of put on the spot, right? We have an obligation. Yeah, that's what scares me. It's scary. You're right there. Poland's right there. Ukraine.

I mean, it's, it seems. like to some degree, anyhow, the First World War happened, not just because of simmering ancient hatreds, but because of alliances. You look at NATO today and you look at the map and there's Ukraine and there's Poland and there they all are. And here we are again. Just a hair's breath away, it seems. And I don't know, what's more frightening to you? Our friends or our enemies. Our alliances or our hatred. just to back you up, it's always been considered one of the potential causes or one of the main potential players in the First World War, right? So an individual disagreement between the

country of Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire all of a sudden involves multiple major powers fighting each other in the worst war that the world had ever experienced, right? So when people were doing the post-mortem literally after that, they were trying to untangle all the various causes. and the alliance system was given as one of the main potential players in this. But an alliance system is funny because you can make the same argument about preventing war until it doesn't. I had been amongst, and it sounds horrible today as the Ukrainians are suffering brutally by what's being done to them. It sounds horrible to have said that years ago, but I still feel this way, that NATO should not have expanded closer to Russia. You know, this was hardly a unique viewpoint.

There's lots of people. I mean, Tom Friedman from the New York Times. I mean, that's about as mainstream as you get. I mean, he was saying this. Pat Buchanan on the far right was saying it, sure, and you guys on the far left, there were a lot of people that said this is not something we have to do. And there was a great, you guys have probably experienced this in one place or another. It's a great sort of a management exercise.

And they will say, take out the most easy, obvious solution to solving the problem and now solve it without that. NATO was the easiest way to create the condition. where there could be some sort of deterrence to any sort of future. Because you know this. If you talk to the people who border Russia, modern day Russia, they almost seem fanatical to you about it. I would kid them sometimes. You know, we got Russia on the brain.

And I always used to say, you know, Russia, if you look at their history, could be forgiven if you said that they have a case of national PTSD from their recent, you know, last hundred years of history. But here's the thing. The people who live next to Russia also have a national case of PTSD. but theirs is about things the Russians have done to them. So those people are always going to say to you, it's not fair. If you have an alliance system to protect yourself from the Russians, but you leave us the most vulnerable out there in the cold, right?

Because they're going to come and get us because they have that PTSD about Russia. So what we had said at the time, and I've said many times since, is that if you take the easy NATO answer out of the equation and then solve the security problem without it, well, then you talk about an alliance between these people who have a shixt. interest in a revanchist Russia, right? So you got the Baltics, you got Poland, you got Ukraine, and you can play with a number of other countries, the entire old Warsaw Pact, you know, although, you know, there's a lot of obvious differences in some pro-Russian sensibilities in a bunch of

these districts. But the by and large aspect was, is this was a way to not only create a deterrence so that those people had some defense, but you weren't creating that deterrence out of a historic enemy. I mean, NATO, we look at it as benign because it's our alliance. But, generations of Russians grew up with those as the threat. So rather than antagonize a country that has historical PTSD, because it's been invaded twice in the 20th century, right, with horrible things, go through communism, all that sort of stuff, what if you had a regional alliance between a bunch of countries

that had a shared interest in protecting each other from a resurgent Russia? And here's the other advantage of something like that, is that I have friends in the Baltics. And what I've warned them about for years, and I don't mean to sound anti-American, American with this, but I say, don't depend on us. I said, if Latvia gets invaded and we're in a position where we have to go to Def Khan crazy on this and get into a nuclear war of Latvia, the American people are not going to follow you. What's more, and this was an argument a lot of people made, too,

most Americans didn't understand that they were pledged as an Article 5 pledged to treat Latvia. I'm not picking on Latvia, but you know what I'm saying, as an attack on Los Angeles, as the equivalent of that. You'd mentioned the Belgium example in the First World War. There was serious talk in Britain about not upholding Britain's pledge to protect Belgium because the consequences of letting Belgium go seemed far less important than, and had they known what World War I was going to be. I think you would have even had a greater number of people going, what the hell? You know, we can free Belgium later. You're talking about millions and millions of people dying, right? So what I had told my Latvian friend is you would be better off forming an alliance with people who feel

exactly like you do and who have just as much skin in the game. Because I guarantee you if Latvia's invaded and Poland is an ally of Latvia in a regional alliance, they're going to come to Latvia's aid because the polls are right there too. So this was not an attempt when you said NATO shouldn't expand toward Russia's borders to deny those people a way to deter Russian aggression. It was to take the easiest path off the table, but also the path that was probably going to serve those people least well if, you know, do you know what hits the fan? Yeah. I guess it comes back to mutually assured destruction. It sounds like you're saying that back in the day, the Brits had no idea really about mustard gas.

They had no idea about the way a trench war could unfold. They had no idea. Right. Whole new deal. Had they known, maybe they go a different way. Your point was this is a nuclear world and everybody got the memo. Everybody knows. And so when we look at these pictures coming out of Ukraine, your heart breaks and I get angry

and you see these people handcuffed. Oh, and there should be repercussions, yes. There should be repercussions. But if somebody pulls me aside and somehow or other, I'm in the White House and they say, Mr. President, here's a situation. You know, way leads on to way, I think Tolkien said. where the tail grew in the telling, Frost said, Wail leads on the way, whatever it is, you're going down a road and you're doing it at a time when we know everybody's armed to the

teeth with tactical nukes. The Brits didn't know that 100 years ago. And so is there hope? Is there hope in that? I always try to look at the worst case scenario and then ask yourself, if that happened, how would you feel about what you're doing now? See, the nuclear worst case scenario is so much worse than almost anything in a man-made sense that you can think about, that it really makes almost nothing worth it. And this is a known problem, by the way, in things like nuclear brinksmanship and blackmail. This is the stuff the guys at the Rand Corporation used to try to work out because everyone understands that nothing is worth a full-on nuclear exchange. So that allows bad actors to get away with stuff, right? I can take this little area

because you'll never incinerate 300 million people for this. But if 300 million people died and a nuclear war, you have to ask yourself, what on God's green earth would you be able to say to the survivors made that worth it? And this becomes the problem. So, and I think there's a wonderful conversation to be had here when we talk about what might we get out of this whole situation. And it's something, it's a lesson many people knew already. But this is perhaps the danger of having single individuals in control of countries and especially in control of countries with nuclear stockpiles. And the reason it's an important conversation to have, but it's, you know, is because our own country has been evolving more and more in that direction for both good and bad reasons since the end of the Second World War also.

So this is an example. I mean, let's pretend, and we did this in a, I did a, we called it an emergency common sense show recently because everyone was yelling at me. But the question about whether or not, I mean, what if this guy's sick? You know, everybody's portraying him as a three-dimensional chess play. What if he's sick? I always hear the same thing and I hear it from our government too. Well, don't worry. You may not know what they are because we can't tell you for obvious reasons.

but there are controls put into place. Really? So I don't know, but I'm thinking right now you're looking at this and going one guy, I mean, this is going to sound terrible to Ukrainians, and I apologize in advance, but you know my work and this is how I function. I'm watching these videos because I'm a war guy, and I'm watching these videos showing these attacks by Ukrainians on these Russians and these convoys. And the one thing you'll notice if you've seen him is, of course, you know, the minute a tank or an armored vehicles hit, everybody gets out of it and starts running, and then they start killing the people that are running. And I'm looking at this thinking to myself, these are the bad guys in this story. But I feel terrible for these 19-year-old kids because

they don't want to be there either. The person that wants them to be there is one guy, as far as we know. And there's something wrong about that. And here, in our country, too, I mean, you know, we were talking about the political situation and we didn't even get into a key question, but it's in play in this situation, too. Oversight, the idea that there are corrective measures that come into place to say this went wrong here, whether it's in a political situation or a military situation or even in the way we fixed the lead pipes in Flint, Michigan, right? And you say, okay, next time let's not do this or let's make sure someone's watching the watchers, right? And this dovetails with another political point, which is the whole question about holding our own side

to a different standard that we hold the other side to. This dovetails into the oversight question, right? If you can't call your own site out to something you would call the other side out for, that's a broken oversight point in the body politic, right? Not even in the structural thing where you have Congress watching the president. This is Joe Schmo, you know, not watching his own political belief system compared to his neighbor. If you held your own party to the same standards you hold the other party to, we'd be in a different world. Yeah, we would. And in the interest of landing this plane, let me try and combine two worlds.

This plane might crash, Mike. Let's just deal with the reality. It may have crashed out. ago. This may be a Twilight Zone episode. This may be the first episode that we actually cut in had. This may be part two. I was more thinking cutting room floor stuff is what I was thinking, violating all your principles. Hey, I want the hardcore cutting room floor show. Take all that crap you think's no good. Put it together. Get an advertiser for God's sakes. Put it out there. It's already done. Your fans will love it. We call the crap. I'm not happy with the old shows and we sell

them on the website. Okay, here's my point. I think we're talking around the notion of the benevolent dictator. And most people seem to agree that if you got one person in charge who happens to be benevolent and smart and wise and prudent, that's the quickest way to something like peace. You're saying the stakes are so high, people are so armed that it's not fair, smart, prudent, or wise, or otherwise sensible to put all that on one person who could, easily get sick or become a bad actor. But going back to entertainment, this crazy industry that we're in

right now, why is it so bad? Why is most content so bad? You hit the nail on the head before because there's a committee. There's a bunch of people and they all want to weigh in and they all want to have a say. So instead of getting a racehorse, you wind up with a camel, this weird thing with two humps and jacked up legs and walks funny. And yeah, it doesn't need a lot of water, but Jesus, hideous to look at. Nobody really wants a camel, but you get one when you have a committee or a consortium or a star chamber, whatever it is. It seems like there's a thing to unpack. Are you better off with a group of people calling the shots or one woman or one man? And is the answer different in entertainment than in geopolitics and world affairs in history? I don't know. But that seems to be the

thing that we keep circling back to, how do we get a better podcast? How do we get a better TV show? How do you get a more just democracy? How do you get a more functional republic? A committee? A commissar. A king, a duly elected official. Please sum it up for me in ways that my small brain can understand. We had said something in that recent emergency common sense show about Putin when we were discussing all the various things that might be involved, including sickness or anything like that. The more obvious answer, and I think, this is a problem with any single person authoritarian type system is that his interests may have at some point diverged from the interests of his country. And so the things that we look at,

because if I look at the situation from a Klauswitzian standpoint, right, ends and means, war is just politics or policies by other means. If you buy what Putin is saying about things like part of this is because Ukraine was getting closer to NATO and all this kind of stuff and having armed enemies on our border, well, this entire affair has just made that situation 9,000 times worse. The Swedes are upping their defense budget. I mean, how far do you have to go for Sweden to go, you know, we need more tanks. We just need more tanks. My point is that from a Clausewitzian's standpoint, this would appear to be a monumental error because he's going to have no trust on a personal level ever again for that guy. But he's also going to have all these places close to the Russian border going

See, it wasn't PTSD. We told you this was going to happen, and the arms industry is going to funnel tons of weapons. He's going to have exactly what he said he didn't want. But here's the thing. What Putin's interests are in this case may not be the same thing as what's good for Russia. And it's difficult for us to disentangle those two things,

but dictators especially run into these situations where what keeps the dictator in power might be something that costs the lives of thousands of poor tribal farmers or people who are just these 19-year-old kids that are being killed in this war, And they're the bad guys, and they are. But those 19-year-old kids didn't personally do much to, you know, end up the way they end up. Is it possible if he's not crazy?

Is it possible that the thing he actually wants is the eastern part of the country, Crimea, the oil-rich parts of the country? Is it possible this whole thing? Yes, three-dimensional chess then again. Now we're looking at this as somebody who's a rational actor, who's doing this for reasons of strength. thing in its country long term. That's absolutely possible. And that would be devolving toward the human mean when it comes to national actors and, you know, the Assyrians would understand that.

That's sort of a need. And one of the things we wrote in the book that I did that I didn't know in advance was how much the modern historians have been able to figure out like individual areas that had tons of the ancient equivalent of oil, right, whatever it might have been. And that they would seize these areas the same way that Saddam Hussein would try. to seize Kuwaiti oil. I mean, the way that these rational actors involving with nation states or kingdoms have been operating is a pretty tried and true method. And if this is what Putin was doing, somebody like Machiavelli or Ashurbanipal or Cyrus the Great of Persia would be able to look at it and go, oh, it's a smart move right there. Well, sure. In human resources, you made the point that

we don't think much about sugar these days, except for the fact that it rots our teeth. It's ubiquitous. Yeah, it's everywhere. But boy, there was a time when sugar was oil. There was a time when salt was sugar. Yeah. And so isn't it interesting how those commodities come and go, but how the need for them will always allow us to justify damn near anything?

My stepfather said you could actually, you know, there's lots of lenses through which to view current events in modern times. He said he had found that the most useful and the most predictive was money. I mean, I hate to break it down to something that's so basic. And he wasn't talking about modern times. He was talking about all times, whatever passed for wealth. What should people do who want to get their head around your body of work? Where should they begin?

What should they read? I'm asking two different things because the guy on my mind right now is George McDonald, Frazier. Have you read any of the Flashman Chronicles? No. What is it about? Oh my God. All right. I'm going to change your life. Okay. That's what I was looking forward to. All right. Okay. The Flashman Chronicles basically look at a hundred year period of Victorian dominance through the eyes of a famous general named Harry Flashman. Flashman, his entire life story was found by an editor named William Padgett Morrison in a sea chest in Leicester. And by putting together this incredibly dense series of journals from this old soldier, Frazier

writes this series of books. Now, the construct is Harry Flashman isn't real. He's the only thing in the books that never existed. He becomes your reliable narrator because he is a coward. He is a poultryon. He is a liar. He always takes the easy way out, but is always confused with the hero and therefore promoted through the ranks. So it's sort of like Zellig meets Forrest Gump. And so the guy who made history fun for me, aside from my dad, and the guy that really answered Clark Bunting's challenge was George MacDonald Frazier. That's why I know a little bit about Lucknow and Kahnpour. I know more about Custer's last stand than I otherwise would have because somehow Harry Flashman is there. And it's all such a believable construct, Dan, that the first book,

Flashman and the Great Game, which talks about, of course, the great retreat through the Khyber, right? Right. Russia and Britain. Yes. Oh, and also Balaclava and the Light Brigade. Right, right. The Crimean War. The Crimean War. It's all there, dude. It's all there. And it was so believable, the construct was so believable, that McDonald's first Flashman book was reviewed by somebody for the Sun Times, I think, and the London Times, as a serious work of nonfiction. Because the end notes are so dense, and every page has a footnote, and you go to it, and here you have Frazier saying, Flashman may have been wrong about this, because everything is told through the eyes of Flashman, but Flashman is the only thing in the books that isn't real.

So Frazier's a real historian who tried to make history accessible for people by creating a fictitious character whose only virtue, whose only virtue was an inability at the end of his long life to lie. And so you have this remarkably craven, fallen, old man. who has no choice but to tell you the truth about the Borneo pirates. And so you get these stories through this avatar. You need to read them just because you'll love it. Well, I like the concept.

Oh, it's so good. It's so good. But anyway, that's my giant parenthetical. My recommendation to you, one of my favorite books ever. I forgot what the big point was. Committees, Camels. I'm just so glad that that happens to you, too. I find it astounding.

As the older I get, and you know, it'll happen during interviews like the one we were having where you're going, really? And when you give long answers, this argues for just saying yes and no to the questions more often. I'm back here right now looking for one of his books. I got all these Travis McGee books. I think the question was, where can people start to take a deep dive with you? I believe the answer is Dancarlin.com. So we know what role you're playing in this whole conversation, right? Here's the thing. With what we do, and you'll see the differences in the download numbers, too, it's based on your interests. So go find one of the shows. Usually we keep the last several years free on our website and then we migrate them to the archives. But go find one of the free shows that speaks to you subject-wise and see what you think. And I think you'll get a pretty good idea of our approach. I was going to say within the first hour, but that's a whole show for most people. For us, I'm just getting warmed up. That's a breathing exercise for me.

unfortunately. To review war remains, that's in Kansas City at the National World War I Museum and Memorial. And I don't know how long it's going to stay there, but it's there right now. Your favorite history book of all time? Oh, God, you can't do that to me. Yep, I'm doing it. I can't even recommend books to people because of it. You know, I don't know. I mean, I'll go back to her rodat dance because I can. The one that you wrote, Dan.

Yes, no, no, no. I'm tossing you a softball, my brother. No, no, no, no. Sorry. guys remember the saizan versus the uh that whole book needs to be revised sorry jesus man what a pleasure we never have anybody on for more than an hour and this has all been somewhat indulgent but for me anyhow really a treat to it i was enjoying myself too thank you guys for taking the time i appreciate it of course chuck you got anything else because i know you're and chuck thank you for being here too we could stand to hear a little bit more from chuck

more careful what you wish for man oh i'm out of here at the end of the show you're the one that has to deal with the long-term effects. Hey, about what Dan said. Right. That's right. That's really a pleasure. We've wanted to have you on for a long time. We've been fans for a long time

and just really appreciate the way that you bring history to life, the way you humanize. Because I know you've said this a lot that everybody in history is a person just like us who has loves, hates, is trying to do the right thing in most cases. but you put it through a human voice. You never lose sight of the humanity in the history.

It really draws me in. Can I just tell you how weird it is, though? How weird is it that that's become something that's novel? I mean, we talked about cycles earlier. The idea that just trying to see things from the viewpoint of the people in the story is somehow the novel approach strikes me as a little weird. You guys, I don't even know what to say about the comments. Coming from somebody who does such a good job at what he,

does, which is what we discussed. You're a tour guide for experiences that most of us would never get near for any number of reasons, including financial means and everything else. And yet when you're done with it, you get the feeling that you've got a wider variety of experiences on which to call from. And yet, you know, like the old joke about you can learn by putting your hand on the hot stove or you can learn by reading about somebody else who put their hand on the hot stove. You consistently put your hand on the hot stove. And I feel like we come out of it better people, but you can learn by reading about somebody else who put their hand on the hot stove. And I feel like we come out of it better people, but you can learn. because of it. Well, one thing's for sure. Nonfiction is a fascinating genre and reality, when it lives up to its name, is a great way to make TV. But the real stories, the best stories, they've already been written and already sadly been forgotten by so many. But you're keeping them alive, man. You're making them relevant. You also know how to wear a ball cap in ways that very few do. We've hardly scratched the ball cap surface here. So that's a two-hour show if you want to cycle through my available option. So thanks, man. You guys are wonderful. Thank you. Thanks, Dan. And if your format ever expands to include a guest, it goes without saying I'd be

honored. And I'm serious about that edited footage. I guarantee your fans would absolutely slobber for the chance to listen to stuff that you either deemed irrelevant or indulgent or too far down the rat hole. All I had to know was that you were available for guest appearances. And we'll make that happen. So I'll try to keep it far enough away. we don't impact, we don't cannibalize the audience for this show. But we'll do that. Thank you for the offer. It's the other side of the fourth wall.

There you go. Wait, that should have been the name of the show. Well, it is. You know, I go. It's the longest show we've ever done and the furthest we've ever gotten before really landing on a title. But I think that's probably it. Perfect.

That's where you live, my friend. There you go. Thank you, guys. You're the best. I appreciate it. This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry it went on so long, but if it made you smile,

then share your satisfaction in the way that people do. Take some time to go on and leave us a r... I hate to ask, I hate to make, I hate to be a nudge, but in this world the advertisers really like to judge. Judge, you don't need to write a bunch, just a lighter too. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. Not four. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review.

And not three. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. Definitely not too. All you've got to do is leave a quick five-star review. Even if you hate it. Five-star. Especially if you hate it. Thank you.

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