Hardcore History podcaster Dan Carlin explains how he started the podcast, his process when making episodes and, ultimately, why history is important, while he guesses quotes from his most famous podcasts, 'Blueprint for Armageddon,' 'Wrath of the Khans,' 'Death Throes of the Republic,' and more. His newest series on the story of Alexander the Great, 'Mania for Subjugation,' is out now.
Category
✨
PeopleTranscript
00:00How long are the answers do you want? Everybody's gonna say what they always
00:02say in these things. You don't sound like you're doing the podcast, but when you're
00:04doing a long monologue like a storyteller, you get into a different kind of mood.
00:09Answering questions, if I sounded like I did in the podcast, you'd sound insane.
00:12You give me the, give me the, give me the hook.
00:15It's hardcore history.
00:20I'm going to lead you through the last moments of flight 1015.
00:24Okay, I know what this is. It's a dead giveaway when you give the flight number, right?
00:28This is me in the remake of the Twilight Zone and the remake of Nightmare at 30,000 Feet,
00:34I think it's called.
00:35I'm Rodman Edwards, the host of Enigmatique,
00:38and I'm going to lead you through the last moments of flight 1015.
00:43This is something I was really happy to be involved in because we've always said that
00:46the hardcore history show has Twilight Zone elements.
00:50When Jordan Peele decided to do the latest remake of the Twilight Zone,
00:53they wrote an episode that was a redo of one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes,
00:58everybody's favorite Twilight Zone episodes,
01:00the one with William Shatner and the gremlin out on the wing.
01:03And so they asked me to do this podcast.
01:06And the host of the podcast's name is Rodman Edwards.
01:10Well, Rodman Edwards is sort of the name of Rod Serling.
01:15When you hear somebody thinks that they want to sort of voice for a podcast in a TV show
01:21that they think sounds like a voice for a podcast should sound like, and they come to you,
01:26I just think that's a really nice compliment.
01:28Somebody said something to me once early on, and they said to me, you know,
01:30you need to think about it a little differently.
01:32It's not always how many people are listening.
01:34Sometimes it's who they are.
01:35Tom Hanks, when we had him on one of our hardcore history addendum shows,
01:40started off, and I'd never met him and never spoken to him,
01:42started off with just so many compliments.
01:44And you don't even know how to respond because it is so overwhelmingly cool.
01:47And all you want to do is just compliment him back because, you know, Tom Hanks, right?
01:52But there's a lot of that.
01:53And I'm not the only podcaster who's had that experience.
01:55Part of it, I think, is the international audience.
01:57And I always said when I was doing radio in Oregon,
01:59if I did a show about Iran, for example, and I got something terribly wrong,
02:03I get one or two letters from some Iranian expatriates who live nearby.
02:08If I say something about Iran now and get it wrong,
02:10I'm going to get a thousand letters from Iran.
02:13I hold within the folds of my toga both peace and war.
02:18Which should I let drop?
02:20Oh, boy.
02:21Sounds a little Julius Caesar-y, doesn't it?
02:23But this is going to be Death Rows of the Republic, right?
02:26Oh, no, it's going to be Punic Nightmares then.
02:29OK, wrong.
02:30This was the first multi-part show that we ever did.
02:32Hannibal's fascinating because supposedly this is a guy who was raised to hate Rome
02:36from, like, babyhood.
02:38And if that's true, you think about how crazy it is.
02:40Like, you're polluting this young person's mind and sort of setting him on this course
02:45that will eventually lead to his death and everything else.
02:48And the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, at least.
02:51And then there's the fact that he's this great general.
02:52So a lot of great generals had really great armies.
02:56And so you try to tease out whether or not the victories are their fault or the fact
03:01that they had this incredible military force.
03:04Hannibal's fighting against better armies.
03:06And so when you're trying to rank generals throughout history, Hannibal has to be way
03:09up there because he's going against armies that are better than his and beating them
03:13time and time again.
03:14We did a show called Apache Tears once, which was the first one we ever did that was over
03:18an hour long.
03:19And you've got to remember, this is early days of podcasting.
03:21And that seemed like a violation of the listeners' rights.
03:24And so if you go listen to Apache Tears, the very first thing you hear is an apology
03:27from me for making a podcast that was over an hour long.
03:31And the listeners wrote back and said, you know, we have pause buttons.
03:34And there was this light bulb going on over my head moment where you go, oh, yeah, they
03:37do.
03:38And maybe they don't care about length.
03:40And then you would get into the middle of these stories, which I never plan out.
03:43And there's no scripts.
03:44It's sort of a leap before you look, organizational style.
03:48And then you find yourself in the middle of the story.
03:50You go, well, we're nowhere near the end.
03:51What am I supposed to do?
03:53Do you make a 20-hour podcast?
03:55And you start splitting it up.
03:56And well, eventually, we did both.
03:58But I mean, splitting it up was our choice.
04:01You're called the masters of the world, but there's not a foot of ground that you can
04:05call your own.
04:07OK, I know what this is from, too.
04:09This is going to be from Death Rows of the Republic.
04:12And this refers to the fact that Roman legionaries who'd fought in the wars didn't have the
04:18opportunity to then come home and get a hold of a farm where they could raise a family
04:23and do all that kind of stuff.
04:24And this is all part of the context of the time period where the social pressures were
04:30building up there.
04:30We would today call it the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots or the
04:35rich and the poor.
04:36And these are the soldiers who are creating this entire empire that everyone's getting
04:40rich on.
04:41And yet they're not really sharing in the spoils.
04:43And that became a wonderful sort of thing that demagogues or people like that could
04:49use as a tool to get these soldiers on their side, right?
04:52You're going to conquer all this territory.
04:54You're going to lose all your lives.
04:55You're going to have yourself crippled.
04:57Why aren't you sharing in what you're conquering?
04:59It's really the only difference from the time period we have now.
05:01If we end up with these demagogues in our society, you know, pitting Americans against
05:07one another, the difference between our situation and the Roman Republic situation is our demagogues
05:11don't have the armies.
05:13And this is how you get the armies by pointing out how wrong they've been.
05:17And, you know, you follow me and get me into office and we'll fix that wrong.
05:21I think there's a lot of things people find fascinating about the collapse of the Roman
05:24Republic.
05:25Start with the fact that there are real echoes that sound like today.
05:29And I think there's two reasons for that.
05:31One is that, you know, when you have human beings in the story, things always feel a
05:34little similar.
05:35There's that wonderful line that history doesn't repeat, but it always rhymes.
05:38And it sometimes rhymes because we're in it.
05:40And when human beings are in it, there's all the things that make us special.
05:44There's love, greed, corruption, self-sacrifice, all the things that make up humanity.
05:51Then you add to the fact that there are similarities in terms of the system.
05:55So you have another republic, right, with elected representatives and all that that
06:00entails from the corruption to the favors to the demagoguery.
06:04And I think that right there, if you're an American, you see the similarities and find
06:07it interesting.
06:08But I think all over the world it's fascinating because the ruins are still all over Europe
06:13today, right, in countries far away from Italy.
06:15So there is a Roman history that is wrapped up in the DNA of a ton of different European
06:21societies.
06:22The reason that you have all these romance languages in all these different countries
06:26is because Rome was there once, you know, mixing its arcane form of Latin with local
06:31dialects.
06:32The Roman Republic's fall is absolutely psychotic in a way.
06:36And yet, if history does teach lessons, and all the experts are pretty sure it doesn't,
06:41but if it does, the Roman Republic looks like a giant flashing, you know, warning sign.
06:46Now with you asking me all these questions about Rome, I'm thinking about Julius Caesar.
06:51What I like about Caesar—and remember, when you're talking about ancient people,
06:54you never know.
06:55We're going from these sources and stuff, and there's so much propaganda around these
06:59people and people who love them and people who hate them.
07:01I always say there's an MSNBC version of history and a Fox News version of history,
07:04and you never know which one you're getting.
07:06But Julius Caesar sounds like he was this crazy intellect that you then give a lot
07:12of power to.
07:13And a lot of times the crazy intellect people don't seek power and don't want power,
07:18so they're often on the sidelines critiquing current events.
07:22And I always think to myself, God, wouldn't it be great to have some super genius leader
07:26who could get us out of all of our problems, whatever those problems might be?
07:30But Julius Caesar, if you believe some of the sources, sounds like one of these guys.
07:34Also an epileptic, apparently, too.
07:36You add all these different qualities to him, but he's the kind of guy that they say could
07:40dictate three letters at once while sitting in a litter, directing, and a polymath, and
07:46all those kinds of things.
07:47So when you think about people, I like the idea of somebody with a super genius level
07:53of intellect being in a position to do interesting things.
07:57This is why I could never be a historian, because a historian has to find his little
08:03area of expertise and really study it to the nth degree so that they're a full-blown
08:07expert on Anglo-Saxon farming methods or something, which is great, except that I would change
08:13every two weeks to something else.
08:15All right, let's see this one.
08:19What came after them and 24 hours later is still coming.
08:22It's not men marching, but a force of nature like a tidal wave, an avalanche, or a river
08:28flooding its banks.
08:29I'm going to say that this is the Western reporter's rundown of what the First World
08:36War German army looked like marching through Belgium, and that would be from Blueprint
08:41for Armageddon 1 or 2.
08:44I always get interns in college saying, I can intern for your show, I can do all the
08:49research for you and everything, and I have to explain, you can't do the research for
08:52me, that's where I find all these fun little things, and even I don't know that they're
08:56fun little things until I read them.
08:57This is what takes so long, right?
08:58You sit down and you read all these books, and when you find these things, it's like
09:02a muscle, you develop this ability to go, aha, okay, this is something you build a
09:05piece around, right?
09:07And primary source quotes, like the one where the guy is talking about what it looked like
09:11to see these German soldiers marching through Belgium, well, that's the sort of thing,
09:15there's nothing better than that, right?
09:16He's describing to you on the ground, in real time, without knowing how things are
09:20going to turn out, what he's seeing, and he really brings you to the point where you
09:24what he's seeing, and he really brings you to the scene because he's a reporter who's
09:28trying to do exactly that, right?
09:30So we're piggybacking on the fact that he's trying to bring to his readers what it's
09:34like to be there, you know, at the time, and we're trying to bring to our listeners what
09:38it's like to be back there, seeing it in the past.
09:41We have certain shows that we keep in our back pocket, most of the ones we don't know
09:45we want to do, but there are certain ones where we go, oh, someday we're doing that,
09:48and the First World War was one of them, and when it was the 100th anniversary, we thought,
09:52okay, well, now's the time to tell that story.
09:54The reason it's so important is it gets overshadowed by the Second World War because that's what
09:58movies have played on and all these kinds of things.
10:01The U.S. involvement was so much larger in the Second World War than in America.
10:04We pay a lot more attention to it, but the First World War is what sets up the 20th century,
10:09and so much of what's going on in the world, even today, is ironing out the wrinkles created
10:14in the geopolitical landscape by the First World War.
10:16You know, there hadn't been a general war in Europe for almost 100 years, 99 years,
10:19I think it was.
10:20Napoleon was the last one.
10:22So, you think about all the technological and military developments that can occur in
10:2699 years, and then say, what happens when everybody gets to discover all at once how
10:31much has changed in warfare when you go and fight it, you know, the way you might have
10:35fought it decades previously and get to find out how well or not well that works in a new,
10:41you know, military circumstance.
10:42I describe sometimes in the history show how a lot of times people are pushing history
10:48in a certain direction, but that at a certain point, it's almost like the momentum created
10:53and the impetus that gets going starts to pull like a tractor beam, and at some point,
10:58human beings lose control of the process.
11:00The First World War is the best example I can think of where people look like they're
11:03in charge of things until they're not.
11:06It's going to be a very cold winter.
11:09Okay, this is going to be John F. Kennedy after the summit with Khrushchev went so terribly
11:17in the early 1960s, and this is connected to our show that we did on the Cuban, well,
11:23it wasn't about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
11:24It was about the early years of trying to live with the ever-growing power of nuclear
11:28weaponry.
11:29Kennedy gets into office.
11:30He's the new young breed, and I think when you get into office and you're new and you're
11:34the new level of leadership, and he's not a baby boomer, but he's the first president
11:38sort of of the baby boomer era is the way he's seen, takes over from a really old World
11:43War II general, and you get this feeling like, okay, we can do things differently.
11:47We're going to get in there.
11:49We're young.
11:49We got a lot of energy.
11:50We're going to put some new proposals forward, and he runs right into the Soviet leader,
11:55Khrushchev, who almost treats him like a baby.
11:59Kennedy walks out of that meeting with Khrushchev, and you can see his entire enthusiastic hopes
12:05have been shattered, and he realizes this is going to be a lot harder than he thought
12:10it was, and that's why he says it's going to be a very cold winter.
12:13And before things are over, they're worried it's going to be a very hot time when the
12:17Cuban Missile Crisis happens, and it's Khrushchev and Kennedy nose to nose trying to avoid World
12:24War III.
12:24Blitz shows are badly named.
12:26I thought they were going to be shorter, and instead, over time, what they've evolved
12:30into is things that deal with concepts rather than events, so rather than like a history
12:36of the fall of the Roman Republic, a blitz show might deal with, for example, how a society
12:42or a planet learns to deal with the ever-growing power of its weaponry, which is what Destroyer
12:48of Warrants was about.
12:49War has always been potentially an existential threat to somebody in the story.
12:54If the Mongols are coming, it could be an existential threat for you and the people
12:59who live in your city or your country or whatever.
13:02Nuclear weapons is the first time that it's an existential threat to everyone, and you
13:07don't even have to be involved in the conflict.
13:09You can be an innocent bystander, and so I think reminding us what it means to think
13:14maybe you might not wake up in the morning, which is exactly what people during the Cuban
13:19Missile Crisis who were in the halls of power thought.
13:22They were calling their wives and thinking, this might be the last phone call we ever
13:25have.
13:26Well, that's where you're really focused on what's important.
13:29The way we framed it in that show was that there was a generation that lived before nuclear
13:35weapons and that lived through nuclear weapons.
13:38That's a generation that understands the threat because they grew up without it.
13:43But everybody who's been born since that time has a metaphorical gun pointed at their
13:48head, but has had that gun pointed at their head their whole life.
13:52And the question in the show was, if you've had a gun pointed at your head your whole
13:56life, do you even notice it anymore?
13:57The show was intended to point out what that gun is, what can be done if that gun ever
14:03goes off, and if you forget it's there, how dangerous that can be.
14:07When I talk about what people should listen to, I feel like that show doesn't have to
14:11go through a whole bunch of interesting sort of gyrations to be important to us.
14:16You just have to listen to it and you know, okay, this is something that's important to
14:20know because we're still dealing with it right now.
14:23When we go off to hunt for wild game, we'll go first to drive them together for you to
14:28kill.
14:30Well, it sounds vaguely Mongolian, doesn't it?
14:33Does that make sense?
14:33Well, then it's Wrath of the Khans.
14:35I'm not sure who said it.
14:37Could be Genghis Khan, could be Subedai.
14:40But yeah, I would say Wrath of the Khans, right?
14:42Genghis Khan is sort of the high-water mark or the most sort of exquisite iteration of
14:48the various nomadic steppe people cultures, which were around from basically the beginning
14:53of recorded history.
14:54So I mean, I think the first one ever mentioned is a giant influx of these people in Assyrian
15:00times.
15:00So we're talking about biblical times.
15:02And all those people followed one another.
15:05Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Turks, it's all these people that they're not the
15:11same people, but it's a similar horse-driven nomadic culture.
15:15And the Mongols were sort of, if not the high-water mark of that, then as we said, the sort of
15:20the most exquisite example of it fine-tuned and taken to its logical conclusion.
15:26And that's what made them so incredibly fantastic.
15:28And generally, those people were only problems when a great leader arose and could create
15:32giant steppe confederations.
15:34Could unite a lot of tribes.
15:35And Genghis Khan united a lot of tribes and consequently made them a force in modern history
15:40that people still have a hard time quantifying how important they were.
15:43I think that the individualism of all these people shows that there isn't one sort of
15:48quality or circumstance that makes a person, that there's innumerable number of things
15:53that can put you either in a position or have you be born with the qualities or mix the
15:59two of them, right?
16:00Born with the qualities and in the position to find yourself in historical circumstances,
16:06right?
16:06So if you put all those people in a room at a cocktail party, I'm not sure if you'd
16:11say, wow, you know, all these people are quite alike.
16:13I think you'd probably find that they bring different skills and qualities to the table.
16:17And one might argue that the circumstances that they excelled in might have required
16:22very different sort of abilities and strengths.
16:26As fate would have it, I'm in the midst of a very long time-consuming and intensive part
16:32of the hardcore history process.
16:35Well, clearly I said this, but this is how I feel before every show.
16:41So I'm in the midst of a very time-consuming and intensive part of the hardcore history
16:45process.
16:47I have no idea when I said this.
16:48This could have been yesterday.
16:50Well, I was totally wrong.
16:52Well, I was totally wrong.
16:54Okay.
16:56Again, that could also be about every Common Sense show after we started the Hardcore History
17:00Podcast.
17:01This, I'm going to get a t-shirt.
17:02This guy could just get a t-shirt that says this, this perpetually useful.
17:06Common Sense was what I used to do on the radio.
17:08So Common Sense is predated.
17:10We started in 2005, but I've been doing that since about 1993 on the radio.
17:15And the whole idea was to do something where we talked about the problems of a two-party
17:19system where there's sort of capture in our system by these two parties and the fact that
17:24they know there's capture, right?
17:25You can work with that if you're Democratic or Republican operatives.
17:29You know that people don't have a lot of choice.
17:31The fact that we have problems in our system that sort of require systemic reform and that
17:36we're kind of all in this together, right?
17:38I mean, this idea that we're going to get hyper-partisan and start thinking, you know,
17:42we're going to point fingers and one party's bad and the other party's good.
17:45And that may be true.
17:46Maybe one party is bad.
17:47The other party is good, but that doesn't really help us, right?
17:50So the show was really about the dangers of hyper-partisanism.
17:53At a certain point, I almost thought things were turning our way during the Common Sense
17:57shows, but at some point it was like the ship thinking, you know, it was writing itself
18:02from a list and then it just rolled over and capsized.
18:05And so it almost seems like it's the horse has gotten out of the barn, if I can use a
18:10thousand analogies in one answer, and it's too late to close the barn door.
18:14I don't know what you do to warn people about the dangers of hyper-partisanism when we're
18:20past any worst case scenario that I was envisioning.
18:23When I started in news, we used to have to have two confirmations for any news story
18:29and they had to be from our people.
18:30You couldn't get a confirmation from another news outlet.
18:33Well, we're so far away from there that even the traditional news outlets, to me, look
18:38like social media reporting used to look like a couple of years ago.
18:41And social media reporting, to me today, looks like AI.
18:45I love history and I love feeling like we're in the midst of something important, but there's
18:49that old line that, you know, be careful what you wish for or may you live in interesting
18:53times and we live in interesting times and it's going to be very interesting to see where
18:57this goes.
19:00Everywhere we are surrounded by dogs and sorcerers and whores and killers and the godless who
19:07love lies and commit them.
19:12Well, this might be a Prophets of Doom reference, okay?
19:17And Prophets of Doom is a story, I mean, the best way for Americans to envision this is
19:21what would have happened if a guy like David Koresh had gotten a hold of a medium-sized
19:26German city during the Renaissance and got a chance to control it for a significant period
19:31of time.
19:32This is one of those weird stories.
19:34So when we talk sometimes about stories that you knew you were going to do or that you
19:38always had in your back pocket, I had this in my back pocket, but part of what was so
19:43exciting about it was I knew most Americans had no idea that this ever happened.
19:47In a place like Germany, this is a much more well-known story.
19:51In fact, if you go to the German city of Münster today, they still have the cages that they
19:57put the corpses of the main people in this story, spoiler alert, when the story ended.
20:03And I guess the cages fell down during the bombing in the Second World War and they put
20:07them right back up, maybe because it's a tourist attraction or whatnot.
20:11But it's a fantastic story from an era where religions of Christianity, the various different
20:17sects, were at odds with each other, where the Bible was being translated into the vernacular
20:22so regular people could read it and interpret it, and all of the various sorts of historical
20:29unravelings that things like that create.
20:32I mean, anytime you have a communications revolution, things get interesting.
20:36Gutenberg Bible, movable print, social media.
20:40And this is an example when somebody who was very religious and very sure of their religion
20:46and almost had a sense, like Charles Manson, feeling like the Beatles were talking to him
20:51through the music, that they were being spoken to and being told what to do, and then having
20:56the power to actually act on what they felt like they were being told what to do.
21:00It is a wild, wicked, and weird story.
21:04And what I like about it is most Americans, at least, have never heard it.
21:08It's like The Sopranos plus some homosexuality.
21:13OK, this is probably going to be several shows.
21:17This could be, but I'm going to say the Macedonian Soap Opera.
21:20No.
21:20OK, so Glimpses of Olympus.
21:24Oh, see, I said it could be many different shows.
21:26Alexander versus Hitler.
21:28Holy cow.
21:28OK, well, the reason I get them confused is because it's all about the same thing.
21:32It's what the Macedonian, and I say Macedonian, not Macedonian,
21:36but I'm a heretic on that front.
21:38The Macedonian royal families are wonderful to pay attention to.
21:42Wouldn't have wanted to live in it, but they are, I mean, the amount of violence,
21:49civil wars, assassination, hostage taking, homosexuality, sorcery.
21:55I mean, it just, it's so good from an entertainment standpoint.
22:01And it's so bizarre because anytime you get into ancient history,
22:05the amount of stuff that's just off the charts, weird.
22:08A lot of the stuff in the Macedonian political scene we would recognize today.
22:12But then you throw in these things that we would not recognize today.
22:16I mean, you start with Alexander the Great's mother
22:19and the snakes that she supposedly had all around her.
22:22I mean, Alexander the Great's father lost an eye famously.
22:25Philip II was a one eyed guy because he got an arrow shot in his eye.
22:30But I love the way the ancient soothsayers supposedly told him he was going to lose an eye.
22:35He was going to lose an eye because he was going to peek through the keyhole
22:38and see his wife, Alexander's mother, having intimate relationships with a god.
22:43And when you do that, you get your eye knocked out,
22:45the one that looked through the keyhole.
22:47So I love this stuff.
22:48The Macedonian soap opera was another one we did.
22:51And we called it a soap opera because it was like a soap opera,
22:53but you add all these other things.
22:55What inspired me to start this podcast was a conversation I had over dinner
22:59that involved my mother-in-law.
23:00I tell the same sort of stories over dinner that I tell in the podcast.
23:04And I always say in the podcast, it's a rainbow and unicorn free zone.
23:08So it was a traditionally horrible, bloody story over dinner.
23:10And I think in order to change the subject,
23:13she said, why don't you talk about this sort of stuff in a podcast?
23:16Because we were already doing the current events podcast.
23:19And so I told her, I can't talk about this in a podcast.
23:22I said, I'm not a historian.
23:23I don't have a PhD in this.
23:24I have a BA in history.
23:25I don't have a PhD.
23:27And I always say, if there's one thing a guy with a BA in history knows
23:30is he doesn't have a PhD in history.
23:32And she said, I didn't know you had to have an advanced historical degree
23:35to tell stories.
23:37And that was the light bulb going on over my head sort of moment where I went,
23:42and that's when you realize it's not that you can't tell them.
23:45It's that you have to tell them a certain way.
23:47And so much of what people like about hardcore history
23:50are our attempts to figure out how a guy with a BA in history talks about history.
23:55And in the first show we did, it was only 16 minutes,
23:57because we just talked about the weird stuff, right?
24:00The interesting stuff, the stuff that history majors talk about on their lunch break.
24:04But that sort of requires that you know the story,
24:07because I'm not telling the story.
24:08We're just talking about the cool stuff.
24:10And then based on listener feedback I was getting,
24:12they were saying, hey, we like that cool stuff you were talking about,
24:15but we don't know the story.
24:17And so you start to have to add context so that they can enjoy the weird stuff.
24:21And that's how the layers start to get built on the show.
24:24And so when people talk about how they like hardcore history,
24:27and how layered and complex it is,
24:29they assume I went out and designed it that way,
24:31and it wasn't that way.
24:32It evolved over time with a give and take with the listenership.
24:36Same thing with the length.
24:37When they say we have pause buttons, that gives you permission to go longer.
24:41And so one of the things that evolved over time is,
24:43okay, if I need to give context, how does a guy who's not a historian give context?
24:48And so we invented things like what we call audio footnotes,
24:52where we quote historians so that you don't have to believe the guy who's not a historian.
24:57Then we started quoting historians who disagreed.
24:59Well, that opened up the door to historiography,
25:02which is traditionally one of the most boring subjects in history degree learning.
25:07And yet people love it.
25:09And so all these sorts of things are kind of,
25:10you know, you got your chocolate in my peanut butter,
25:13serendipitous sort of developments,
25:15but they've combined to create a rather compelling show.
25:19But I can't claim full credit for it,
25:20because I feel like the audience has input the whole time.
25:23Learning history is important,
25:25because there's no way to understand the times you live in now
25:28without looking back and trying to figure out what happened before you got there.
25:32And I had a professor once who said that life is like being born
25:37into the middle of a television soap opera.
25:39And if you don't go back and watch the old episodes,
25:42you have no idea why this person is mad at that other person,
25:45and why somebody is getting slapped in the face,
25:47and who's cheating on whom, and all those kinds of things.
25:49We learn a lot of names and dates.
25:51And I mean, that's the traditional knock on history education, right?
25:54You learn about something in 1492 or 1066,
25:57and then you hopefully get a good grade on the test.
26:00And then you walk away and you forget the date,
26:02and never use that information again.
26:04But history is something that you can really use
26:07if you understand the parts that are important.
26:09The parts that are important are not these events that happened,
26:11or this date when they happened,
26:13but how things evolve, and the historical process,
26:16and the context like we were talking about earlier.
26:18Everybody's interested in history.
26:20The way you explain that to people is that history includes everything.
26:23So you just find out what they're interested in already,
26:26and then point out that there's a past for that.
26:28So if you're interested in motorcycles, or fashion, or sports,
26:32or whatever it might be,
26:33you give an assignment to a person that says,
26:35okay, you're interested in motorcycles.
26:37I want you to go find me the very first motorcycle ever built,
26:40or maybe even the precursors to it.
26:42And then I want you to find the last one that came out yesterday.
26:45And I want you to trace the development and the evolution
26:48from the beginning to the end,
26:50and explain the developments,
26:51the important people that helped create those developments,
26:54and show how we go from A to Z.
26:56That teaches you how things move forward,
26:59and how things sort of build upon each other in layers.
27:02And you can take that template that you used
27:04for the motorcycles you were interested in,
27:06and overlay it over everything in life,
27:09and have it make useful sense.
27:11So instead of forgetting a name or a date after the test is over,
27:14you can use what you learned about the evolution of motorcycles
27:17on the evolution of anything.
27:18People like history more than they think they do.