Hardcore History's Dan Carlin: What the Past Can—and Can't—Teach Us

The podcasting pioneer warns that 'history is not like math.'

One of the greatest perks (perqs?) of my job at Reason is that I get to meet and interview tons of interesting people from all walks of life, professions, and backgrounds. Last week, I released a new Reason Interview podcast with the amazing Dan Carlin, host of Hardcore History and, before that, Common Sense. Dan isn’t just one of original popularizers of the podcasting format, he’s absolutely one of the best. Creative, original, ground-breaking.

His deeply researched and urgently delivered takes on everything from Julius Caesar's wars on the Celtic tribes of Gaul to 20th century Imperial Japan's horrific conquest of Asia are downloaded by the millions. Arguably the best thing about Dan is that he’s an amateur in the best sense of the word—he’s not an academic historian (and he doesn’t pretend to be). He does massive amounts of reading and research and then shares it in a way that is absolutely mesmerizing. Episodes stretch on for hours, with nothing but him talking, quoting, reading, describing what happened long ago. He loves what he’s doing and he’s created a ginormous fan base in a way that we once praised the internet for enabling. If you haven’t checked out his Hardcore History Addendum series, you should give it a try. These are shorter than regular HH eps and often involve Dan interviewing some of the people whose sources he uses. It’s intellectual dynamite.

For this podcast, we discussed Dan’s current live tour, how he would update his 2019 book The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments From the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses in light of COVID-19, and whether he believes we can really learn meaningful lessons from history. On that final point, he’s well worth listening to. It’s vital to know history, he tells me, but what it really teaches us is how things have gone sideways in the past, not how things will always turn out in the present or future. ‘What the past doesn't teach are the kinds of lessons that most people want it to teach,’ he says. ‘So for example, you'll often hear someone say something like, "Well, we know appeasement doesn't work because look what happened with Hitler in the 1930s." But that's not what history teaches you because you're not taking into account the variables, right?’

Below is a shortened and cleaned-up transcript that originally appeared at Reason (go here to read it or listen to the audio there. ). I’ve also embedded Apple and Spotify links so you can listen to the full hour-long conversation right here as you read the transcript. I don’t mean to diss the transcript, but the full conversation is much richer and wide-ranging.

Note: I talked with Dan in late 2019 about his darkly prescient book, The End Is Always Near. Listen to that here.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

Nick Gillespie: You're going on tour. What can fans of Hardcore History expect at a live show?

Dan Carlin: I always call them listeners. Fans seems a little self-aggrandizing to me. It's sort of a mini tour, testing the waters here. We'll see what people think of the final product. Rather than give some sort of a presentation that's the same everywhere, I opted to do a sort of a question-and-answer with, for lack of a better word, a moderator, on stage and then open it up to the audience for questions. I figure that does two things: One, it means that no show is like any other show, and it also assures that we're going to talk about what people want to hear as opposed to me assuming that they're going to like something I do on stage and maybe have some people walk away displeased with what they got. So I hope it works out like I'm assuming. We'll see.

Gillespie: You're going to Los Angeles, Salt Lake, Portland, and New York. So you're really hitting very different kinds of demographics, right?

Carlin: Yeah. So they asked me when we were talking about getting the tour started, they wanted to sample some places and just see what the reaction was, and they said, "Well, where do you go already?" I said, "Well, those four places are places I find myself for various reasons anyway." So they said, "Great. Those are four very different places, and we'll get a good idea of what the demand is in those four areas."

Gillespie: Hardcore History gets downloaded by the millions. Do you have a sense of where your listeners are? As we used to talk about in the rock mag business a thousand years ago when I was involved in that, the psychographic. Who are your listeners and what do you think they're getting out of the show?

Carlin: Well, forever we've been told in all the reputable advisement magazines or whatever's out there that we need to do more demographic research. But coming from my perspective that I've always had, I don't like when people do that to me, and so I don't like the idea of doing it to them. So I don't ask them questions about themselves or delve into who they are or what they make or where they live and then how old they are and what their religious beliefs are. But the podcasting tools that are out there now give us more information than they used to, and so you can say certain things, like you can say what states they're listening to you in the United States, what countries they're listening to you in and those kinds of things.

Basically, when we started, I feel like it was much more U.S.-centric, and now the international audience is growing more. Obviously, the big population centers, you have more people listening than in Wyoming, but that's not because people don't like you in Wyoming. It's just there's less people in Wyoming. So to give you a real answer though, no, I don't know a ton about the listeners and I don't want to. I feel like their privacy is valuable to them like mine is to me, and I feel like what the podcasting services give us is enough.

Gillespie: It's interesting, Brian Lamb, the true radical who invented C-SPAN and turned a surveillance camera on Congress and whatnot, he stepped down a few years ago, but he said that they never did ratings because they don't want to start playing to the audience, and that even if you aren't under pressure to do that, once you know who your audience is, you'll start playing to it. You've been doing this for well over a decade, almost 20 years now, right? Do you feel that way?

Carlin: Well, part of it is an advertising thing, right? So advertisers want to know that information. I mean, we do a tiny bit sometimes, but most of our shows don't have any ads at all because, to be honest, I don't like being a pitch man very much. I had to do it when I was in radio. You don't have a choice. But I always felt a little dirty unless I really liked the product. And then when you start doing the podcast, I had the advantage of being able to just say, well, if I don't either use it for real or if I don't like it, [then I don't have to promote it]. We did Audible, the audiobooks for a while, and I'm a big proponent of reading, so it was easy. We always read the reviews to make sure that even if you like the concept behind the business, that they're treating the customers well.

So I'm happy to do those kinds of things. But we don't do much advertising, so it's a luxury for me to be able to say, "We don't care about the demographics because we don't care and the advertisers that might care we really don't deal with very much." So that was easy. I see your point about the playing to the audience, but I have a different attitude about that. I feel like we self-select our audience. Somebody told me a long time ago that if you just do the shows that interests you, the people that don't like the things that interest you will eventually go away and the people that stay with you you can reliably assume like the same things you do, and so when you pick something you want to talk about, the audience has sort of already been self-selected. I don't know if that's true, but that's what I go with.

Gillespie: Not since you've been doing Hardcore History, but back in your radio days, what was the worst product that you pitched for that you were just throwing up a little bit in your mouth as you were announcing it?

Carlin: Oh God, that's a long time ago now. Off the top of my head, I can't remember, but it was a lot of restaurants. I wasn't a national show, so we didn't get those kind of national commercials. But it's funny though, I mean, I don't feel like they were too terrible because everybody on the station had to read the same ads. They weren't specifically buying from me, so it didn't sound like I'm endorsing it, but I always did prefer if they would just run an advertisement on the show rather than me do what's called a live read where you had to sound like you were endorsing something.

Gillespie: But that's what everybody wants, right?

Carlin: That is what everybody wants. Exactly.

Gillespie: In 2019, and you came on this podcast to talk about it, you published The End is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses. This book came out just a few months before COVID became the latest apocalyptic moment. Did you feel like you were conjuring up material for the paperback or something?

Carlin: With the podcast, obviously, we have no release dates and the reason they take so long is because I really am always trying to do a better job. But when you deal with a book contract, they want their book when they think they're going to get their book. So it turned out I felt a little rushed at the end with that book, but they pushed and pushed and pushed. And then when COVID hit three or four months after the book came out, I remember thinking to myself, "Well, shoot, had it been up to me, I would've missed that because the book would've come out two months after COVID hit and that whole chapter would've been ruined."

There were no warm fuzzy feelings about having thought about that before it happened because millions of people were being affected. To be honest, I know the standard technique is to claim credit for all these things, but I mean, really I was one of the last people on the bandwagon of saying we're vulnerable to another pandemic. I mean, there were a lot of people running around for years saying, "Warning, warning, warning." We had near misses. We had avian flu and we had things a lot worse. So it didn't take a genius to see that coming. I do think the timing was just a little weird.

Gillespie: I remember when COVID hit and the lockdown started, it seemed at first that the market for podcasts seemed to collapse a little bit because people weren't commuting to work anymore. I mean, were people more interested in what you were talking about during the pandemic or less, or did you notice any difference?

Carlin: I think it's binge watching on TV. Again, this sounds awful. We did well during the COVID thing, and we've seen a drop-off since, but I think it's because people are back at work working and things like that. I think we had a time period where people were stuck in the house with nothing to do. When we're doing audio podcasts, one of the real benefits of audio over video is that you don't have to watch something and you could be mowing the lawn or ironing a shirt or making dinner and still have the ability to multitask. So I feel like during COVID, people took the opportunity to listen to what we were doing while they were doing something else, or just we were a good time waster, right? My shows are long.

Gillespie: Is history the story of massive forces that sweep over whole periods of time, or is it about heroic individuals who actually changed the course of history?

Carlin: Well, I was reading something that historian Adrian Goldsworthy wrote recently where he was talking a little about that and he was saying that while it's kind of discredited to think about individuals having such an outsized role on history, he said, "All we have to do though is look at current events and see how much the personalities of single individuals seem to be important to how current events play out to understand that this would've been the dynamic in the past also." 

Now, I think we all understand that there's an interplay between these people and the opportunities that they have because of what's going on in the world, the times we live in and all these other things for them to do what they do. So if you get an outsized personality on the scene and they're driving a lot of events, I think it's fair to ask yourself, "Would this person have been able to do this with the conditions we were living under 30 or 40 years ago?"

So I think there's a little bit of an axis of two lines crossing. One line is the personality of the people involved, and the other axis are the events, the trends, the forces of the times we live in. When those things intersect, I think that's when you hit that sweet spot where all of a sudden you're looking at some personality and you go, "If not for that person…." I always try to imagine as a way of trying to get some perspective plugging somebody else in that role, right? If Richard Nixon wins the '60 election and he's the one handling the Cuban missile crisis, does it go the same or does it go differently? Or better yet, what if the Cuban missile crisis happens a few years earlier and you have Gen. [Dwight D.] Eisenhower in the White House?

Those are fun ways in my mind of trying to game this out to get a little bit of perspective about what's more important here, the trends in the forces or the individual involved, because if you say, "It would've turned out the same with Nixon or Eisenhower as it did with [John F.] Kennedy," then you start to think maybe it's more of a trends and forces ascendant moment. But if you say, "Hmm, I don't think it does turn out the same with those other people," well, then you can I think actively say that having Kennedy in the White House at that place in time and under those circumstances actually made history go in a different direction than it otherwise would.

Gillespie: Do you have historical figures that you consider heroes? And if so, what are your criteria? 

Carlin: Oh man, I should have a ready answer to a question like that, shouldn't I? It's funny, but off the top of my head, no one comes immediately to mind, but that's not because there aren't people that I greatly admire. I think personality-wise, I am not much of a hero worshiper. First of all, sometimes I look at people and I just wonder if I could have done what they did. So for example, you look at people like in the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and 1960s, when you look at the death threats that those people got, I always ask myself, "Would I have forged ahead knowing that people are talking about hurting my kids or firebombing my house or those kinds of things?" To me, rather than the hero side of it, which is not really part of my personality, sometimes I measure myself against these other people and just say, "Man, I might be craven or cowardly or selfish." I'm not sure I do. So I mean, there's admiration there, but not hero worship, if that makes sense.

Gillespie: Not too long ago, a guy named Daniel Akst wrote a book called War by Other Means, which was a study of conscientious objectors during World War II. I don't necessarily agree with them at all on the question of conscientious objection to World War II, but looking at those guys and what they put up with, I mean, it was like being under a mile underwater with the pressure on you to just cave. It's pretty remarkable. I think we tend to think that we're going to be the person who stands out in a crowd, but we're probably kidding ourselves.

Carlin: Well, if nothing else, it's the old line of these are the times that try men's souls. I mean, you look at these kinds of things and you just go, "Hmm, would I have been the one to shelter a Jewish person in occupied Europe?" Of course, those are the tests. You don't know until you get there. But I do feel like when I read these stories, rather than hero worship, I sometimes feel a little shamed by the whole thing and worried about how I might react in the same situation. So there's admiration, for sure.

Gillespie: You define yourself as a pessimist—and maybe that's not right, maybe you're a realist—but one of the things that your podcast shows again and again is that all societies collapse. All civilizations end at some point. I also hear you talking about how things get better or different and things like that. When you think about something like COVID happening, do you feel like we've gotten to a better place, or are you a long-term pessimist but a short-term optimist? Are you a mid-range person? How do you define yourself and how do you apply the lessons of history that you analyze and dig out in your podcasts into your life span?

Carlin: To me, that's kind of a macro-micro question because I think on a micro level, like an individual human level, there are always bad places to find yourself: bottom of the economic scale, trapped in a murderous dictatorship like North Korea. I mean, I feel like on an individual level, there's awful places to be in any period in history, and they're probably equally terrible to some degree or another. 

On a macro level, there are obviously times and places that are better than others, right? So I think that sometimes you're lucky to find yourself in a nation that's technologically sophisticated and wealthy on the macro level of things, [where there's] health care if you get hurt [and] not too many invasions during your lifetime. Things like that.

I do think not so much that it's cyclical, because I think that brings up certain theories of history that are arguable, but I do think you feel like nothing lasts forever, whether it's good times or bad times. So I think sometimes this idea that we're living in a particularly good time or a particularly bad time isn't so much pessimistic. Listen, I'm 58 years old right now, and life is good, but you can't help but notice that when you're 58, life isn't going to be good forever, right? So I don't think that's being pessimistic to just know that all good things must pass and hopefully all bad things must pass because change is inevitable. If things are good, what does change mean, right?

So I do think that maybe from the perspective where we're looking at this—20th century or 21st century American citizen, for example, in the grand historical scheme—you're living in one of the best times and best places to ever be around. So the likelihood of that getting better vs. the likelihood of that getting worse would seem to indicate that change is likely to bring a lessening of the good things just because we've had it so good so long, but it doesn't mean it has to happen. It's an odds game, right? Maybe the odds are just 70/30 against wonderful things continuing, but people have made money in Vegas with odds worse than that.

Gillespie: Yeah. I think it was in an episode or an interview that you did with Rick Rubin, the record producer, where you mentioned that your father was a Korean War vet.

Carlin: As he would say, he was in the Navy, so it doesn't quite count the same as being at the Chosin Reservoir or something like that. He was eating ice cream on an aircraft carrier.

Gillespie: Also, he grew up pretty poor, right?

Carlin: Yeah, really poor.

Gillespie: So I'm a couple years older than you and my father served in World War II, was an infantry man, and I feel in a profound way that I lucked out tremendously by escaping a lot of history. Do you think we'll go back to a world that is like the ones that our parents might have grown up in where there is grinding poverty and where war is taken for granted? I think back a lot to my parents who were both born in the '20s. They were the children of immigrants and they grew up during the Depression, then there was World War II. And then when World War II ended, they were like, "OK. Well, it's good. People aren't being killed as much anymore, but we're still going to be poor." And then something happened and they stopped being poor. Do you think we might see a reversal like that in our lifetimes?

Carlin: Well, I think that's macro-micro also. In the macro sense, look, from an international relations standpoint, you don't have to be a genius to see the situation. Let me back up and say that I always think about things in much longer time frames than most people just because that's how I try to make sense of history. It's not better, it's not worse, it's just how I do it. So I always imagine 50 or 60 or 70 years not being all that long in the grand scheme of things. If you look at it through that sort of a time frame, we've been living in the post–Second World War, dual superpower, the United States being the only country with a really functioning economy and not hurt in the Second World War among all the great powers. That's a temporary situation.

Now, if it's a 70-year temporary situation, that's a lifetime. So it seems like a long time to my mom, [who was] born in 1938. All she can really remember is that era. But we're exiting that era now and returning to what they would've probably called in the 1920s a return to normalcy in an international relations sense, not hegemony, but a multipower world. I mean, look at the number of powers you had before both World Wars. It's between four and six major powers. That's much more normal than having two hegemonic powers facing off against each other with their alliance systems.

So I think from a military macro standpoint, international relations, I think you're going to see things we haven't seen in a while and I think we already see things we haven't seen in a while, including a real change in warfare, which is going to upset things, what they call an RMA, a revolution in military affairs. People don't always notice these things so much when they're happening, but I mean, for example, look at how drones in the war between Russia and Ukraine have sunk ships. That's going to be such a huge thing.

There was a piece in The Wall Street Journal today about the mixing of drones, mass swarms of drones with future artificial intelligence capabilities, getting them to work together and what that would mean for things like big, expensive surface ships. Well, those are the kind of things that change the world. I mean, they don't seem like that big of a thing, but if all of a sudden a $13 billion aircraft carrier is a vulnerable piece of floating hardware and you can't use those anymore, and if something like the United States' power projection is based on a weapon system like that, well, then you can see how all of a sudden that makes things topsy-turvy.

The funny thing that most people don't understand necessarily is how this sort of military question actually resonates and pings off a lot of nonmilitary things that affect our lives. Now, in the micro sense of the word, when you get away from these big power changes that we were talking about, I don't know. "I don't know" is the answer. Rephrase the question for me. I'll see if I can frame it in more micro terms.

Gillespie: I guess I might want to stick with the idea of what happens when we go back to a world that has half a dozen or a dozen powers because that does seem to be where we're headed. The fact is Japan is still a major power. Russia is still a major power even if the Soviet Union doesn't exist, but then you throw in China and whatnot. But is world history ultimately military history or is it the history of trade? Is it the history of migration? Where do you see those lines intersecting?

Carlin: Well, I often talk about this when I'm talking about why people are interested in history, whether they know it or not, and that's because history is everything that's ever happened. Sometimes I'll do speaking engagements with schools, and you'll have middle school students or high school students that really don't want to hear some guy talk to them about history. What I try to teach them is that because of the way history has to be segmented into so-called important events or important dates, that's a construct of historians. What choice do they have? I mean, imagine writing the history book of everything. You can't do that, right? So the main thing that historians try to do is find out what's important. I mean, even these chapters where we decide one era has ended and another began is part of the human construct of just trying to organize everything that's ever happened.

So what I tell students is that the truth is that you don't necessarily have to understand when Columbus stumbled upon the Americas. That's an important event according to somebody else. If you're interested in motorcycles or fashion or dentistry or dogs or whatever you are interested in, there is a history of that and that's part of the past too. The actual idea is that there is no rule about what's important in the past. What's important in the past is what is important to you, and then it has a past. The most important thing in my mind, and this is what I tell the students, is context and understanding how things go from where they were to how they are.

So what I always tell these kids, I say, "If you're interested in motorcycles, find the first motorcycle ever built and find the one that just came out yesterday and then trace the development from one to the other, right? So you start to see the process of change in historical development and how things move over a course of decades or whatever, and that teaches you the idea of the history of moving events." And then ask yourself when you're looking at these different motorcycles over the different eras, why they are the way they are, right? I mean, is this the engine that they're using at the time and why did a new engine come? It teaches you the context that creates the circumstances about how these new motorcycles get developed, why they have these new features, these new parts.

So between the two of them, the context and the idea of historical change, you are getting the most important part. People are going to forget 1492, most of them, the minute the test is over and they leave the classroom, but they're not going to forget the important parts of context and the historical change process if they learn it with something that they're already interested in and that has a past that's as much a part of the grand history of things as anything else is.

Gillespie: It's interesting when you're talking, I find that completely convincing. I notice that you don't say the word "progress." Do you believe in progress or do you think that that's kind of a badly value-laden term that obfuscates as much as it clarifies?

Carlin: Maybe the latter, only because progress is an "in the eye of the beholder" thing, first of all. Second of all, I think progress assumes that it's sort of a one-way street. There's a book called Global Catastrophic Risks that I fell in love with. It's edited by a guy named Nick Bostrom who works at the the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford or whatever. Every chapter of the book is written by a different expert, and every chapter is sort of a way the world could end. It's a fascinating book, but in the introduction of the book, Bostrom writes about what he calls existential threat. I was always taught that existential threat means elimination, right? So an existential threat to humanity means humanity just goes away, disappears, the last person dies and it's over, but he has a different definition of it.

One of the definitions of existential threat [is] that everybody goes away, one, but it also includes if humanity gets knocked backward in terms of capabilities and never again reaches its former abilities. So if you imagine that we have a nuclear war and that we lose the ability to put a man on the moon and we never get that back, to him, that's an existential outcome. In your question about progress, that implies that we're never going to move backward, and I think that history has shown over and over that, well, it doesn't mean you that you will, but it means you can, right? I mean, look at the post-Roman empire when you've got crumbling aqueducts and you can't replace them. Well, that's a little like the thing we said about not being able to go back to the moon when you've already been or losing an internet and never getting one back.

To me, progress implies an ever-moving single direction toward bigger, better things and improved capabilities, and I think that that's not a given. I think it's like striking a match; it's possible that, for example, the Roman Empire or China at its height in earlier eras was striking a match and having it snuffed out before we finally got the roaring fire going for good. Maybe having a global world environment prevents a collapse of one segment of the globe. For example, had the Roman Empire been in contact with the rest of the world during that time period, maybe that would've prevented things from going backward because there's a China to relight the pilot lights, so to speak. I don't know. But to me, there's a teleological aspect to progress that I'm not sure I buy into. But look, I'm always hoping for better things, but I'm not sure it's a given that things are always going to get better. I think just maybe that's the pessimism you talked about earlier.

Gillespie: I don't believe in golden ages really, but to the extent that they are defensible, we're in a golden age of people being able to dig into the past of their own making, of creating their own usable past. The past is kind of an infinite attic or a cellar where you can rummage through and construct a lot of different stories that help you make sense of where you are and who you want to be and where you want to go both on an individual level as well as on a societal level. Do you feel like people are cognizant of that? 

Carlin: I don't know how to answer that because I don't know what people are doing. This is always a problem, it's not like this is new, but it's specifically something that I notice now and maybe it just grates on me more. I feel like we've never been more likely to judge people from the past by current modern moral sensibilities, which is always something that I feel like obscures the past rather than illuminates it. I had a professor once who was so good at trying to get us to put ourselves in the shoes of people from the past and ask the question, "When they do things that we think are despicable now, was that their goal? Were they trying to do despicable things?"

I think, going from memory here, we were talking about people who tried to convert natives to Christianity, and the current line of thinking at the time was that this was an awful thing to do. We were destroying native cultures and their belief systems and forcibly taking them away from their families and teaching them the white man's religion. We can determine now that that was a huge loss in terms of what those people could have preserved, their native culture and belief system, and passed on to their children and all these kinds of things, but was that the goal at the time, to do something negative? He said, "No." He said, "You have to look at the way those people who did the converting saw the world."

You could see it with the Spanish when they came to the New World. If you literally believe that your view of religion is correct and that there is a fiery place called Hell that you will go to if you don't believe what they tell you to believe or what they believe, and then they convert somebody to believing that, then they think they've done a good thing. Now, that doesn't mean they have done a good thing. But when we look back on the past and judge people, I hate the judging thing, but when we judge people, we do so because every generation before us has done the exact same thing. We judge people based on our own modern sensibilities whenever modern is, and I think then we infuse people in the past sometimes with sort of evil overtones that if you could bring them back in a time machine would confuse and befuddle them, not because they didn't do something that we could objectively look at today and say is bad, but because that wasn't their goal at all. They thought they were doing good.

The reason I bring this up is because it's very, very, very possible, in fact, almost inevitable, that the same thing is going to happen with us. It's down the road in the future, they're going to look back on us and absolutely demonize us for any number of things that we couldn't possibly know. I mean, airplane travel, eating meat, experimentation on animals.

Gillespie: There was a book that was very popular about antebellum America by a popular writer named Lydia Maria Child. She was writing before Nathaniel Hawthorne, really, but she writes a story that's set in colonial Salem, Massachusetts. She talks about how we now look at the Puritans as ridiculously closed-minded, horrible people, and we should understand them in context. I'm going to ruin it for people. It was published 170 years ago, so I feel like the statute of limitations has expired on spoiler alerts, but it ends with a Native American who the main character has a child with disappearing and just being literally and figuratively written out of the story.

You read the book now, and she's trying to make a point that you just made. From a modern sensibility today, you're like, "Oh my God, this is an incredibly racist book that depends on the erasure of Native Americans." So, we're always like that. I think it was in an addendum episode with The Rest Is History guys, where you were talking about Thomas Jefferson, who obviously is a morally complex and in many ways just a compromised character, but that he also gave rise to a matrix of rights that were used by people like Frederick Douglass and others to argue for their rights. So history is much more complex than we ever really want it to be at any given moment.

Carlin: I come from a family tradition. I had a grandfather that was very big on "Don't judge other people until you've walked a mile in their shoes." This was really hammered into us, and it turned out to be a really good tool when I got into history as a history major. The funny thing is you can go back to the ancient Romans. I mean, you read their "histories." Go read ancient Greeks like Plutarch. Plutarch's entire work on Lives, which is his famous book, is comparing historical figures to each other, this person against that person, this person. What he's trying to do is make moral judgments even then. This is ingrained in us somehow to want to say, "This person's bad. This person's good," but the criteria we're using is the criteria of whatever time we're doing the assessment in, and that is an inherently flawed problem because that's a moving target, right?

The moral sensibilities are always changing, which is why you can look at a lot of historical figures who's…. I mean, look at Alexander the Great. Depending on the era you're assessing that guy in, he comes off as awesome or terrible and then sometimes back again. To me, that's not a bug though, that's a feature because I think that makes history much more interesting than if we have evil figures and good figures, and those figures are permanently in stone in their positions. History is a moving target. 

This I tell people all the time too, they don't realize that history is not like math, right? It's not two plus two equals four. There's a Fox News version of history and an MSNBC version of history. Depending on which source you grab from which era, you're going to get a completely different spin on the events, how they occurred, who's responsible, and what they mean.

Gillespie: Somebody like Winston Churchill. Depending on if you're raised in America or England, you love Winston Churchill. It's not complicated. He was the man who saved the West. But if you're from the Indian subcontinent, you have a radically different view of Winston Churchill. We shouldn't pretend as if one side or the other doesn't exist. We should really sit with the complications and try and work things out rather than dismiss that, which makes us have to work to understand things better.

Carlin: Sometimes I ask myself, "What's realistic to imagine someone doing?" Now, we should point out that someone like Churchill lived long enough and was involved in politics. He didn't die until 1965. He was born in the 19th century and was active politically almost that whole time. So we're talking about a figure that spanned the British Empire at its height to the post-war British coming down from imperial heights. So this is a person that in the whole second half of his career was somewhat of a political dinosaur. So contextually speaking, he had detractors during his lifetime and political career. Before the Second World War broke out, there were a lot of people that thought he was a warmonger.

So that's a wonderful example of what we were talking about earlier, when the axis gets crossed between the individual meeting the proper time and place. And Churchill knew it. I think he said something like if he could go back in time, he would always choose May 1940. That was his moment, and he knew it. 

But to me, someone like Churchill, you have to ask yourself how much that guy could have been different given where he came from, his influences growing up. Again, to me, that's a little like what we talked about earlier, where you're judging the Spanish priest for what he's doing, trying to save people from Hell. How much did that guy have any agency in thinking any differently?

So I don't want to write off good and evil in the past because I think that if you take this too far the wrong way, it makes you not able to judge [Adolf] Hitler or not able to judge [Joseph] Stalin. So we have to be careful, but at the same time, I do try to sit there and go, "OK, these people are all products of their time and political and social environment and the civilization they came from, and we have to take that into account too." 

Gillespie: How do you decide what you're going to get into, or do your topics find you? I mentioned "Supernova in the East," which is a real achievement. I mean, just of you being able to sustain that level of intensity and engagement with the topic. The "Celtic Holocaust" series is amazing too, but do you go looking for just these horrifying episodes in the past, or do they find you?

Carlin: Well, first of all, you're really kind. I appreciate that. I'm not always as easy on myself as you are on me, right? Well, thankfully, the "it's not me" thing though is part of the motivation. I mean, a lot of these stories, that's what makes me think of them as interesting, right? Oh my God, can you imagine being here and these people in this time period? I mentioned self-selection of the topics earlier. If I'm interested in it, that right there is requirement No.1, because we don't have scripts for these shows. So I don't read them and then think, "I'll write a script for this and then I'll record it." I just go in and record it. So it's based on inspiration. So if I'm not into the topic, it just doesn't work. You would hear it in my voice, right?

It's also why I can't talk about certain things. I'll get requests from people like, "Can you please talk about 17th century India?" I'll have to say no. I said, "Because I don't know anything about 17th century India, and I couldn't learn enough about it in the short span of…." It's funny, the listeners think it's forever between shows, but if you're trying to educate yourself from ground zero, it's a short amount of time. So all of these topics we choose, the No.1 requirement is that I have to be interested in them. No. 2 requirement is I have to have some foundation of knowledge that we can then build upon. So all these topics that we do shows on, I knew something about before we did them.

And then a lot of what I'm learning is what I've gotten wrong by reading histories from a long time ago, because a lot of these stories, there's a lot of new histories that I haven't read since the last time I was heavily into the topic, and that turns the tables on a lot of the old ideas about what really happened and who was responsible. Sometimes secrets come out that were not available. There's a lot of stuff in the Second World War we know now that even when I was a kid growing up we didn't know. Enigma machines, for example. Stuff like that. So I have to know something about it. I have to be interested in it.

As far as what I'm interested in, well, a lot of these stories you may have noticed have what we call here when I'm doing them spines, philosophical spines. The ancient historian Thucydides said once that history is philosophy taught by example. That's another one of those things that gets a lot of flack today, because in some senses it's wrong, but in some senses it's not. In the sense that it's not wrong, we try to find some deeper philosophical question that the story highlights.

So we did one called the "Destroyer of Worlds," which was about the early years of trying to live with nuclear weapons. The spine in that one is, can human beings learn to live with the power of their ever-evolving weapons system? So even if you manage to live with what we have today and design systems and safeguards and everything, what happens when you invent the next most powerful weapons system after that? So that's an idea, a philosophical question that runs through the entire show.

Most of the shows we do, not all of them, I don't want to ever have a formula or slip into a rut or have a format, so sometimes we switch it up just to be different and get out of the sameness of it all, but most of the shows have a philosophical throughput idea that we're trying to explore. A lot of times that's the first thing that makes me go, "Aha. Well, this would be a good thing to talk about because exploring that philosophical throughput idea would be interesting." Those are the many things that have to cross together to make me go, "Ah, that would be a fun show."

And then the last thing is more of a practical thing. I will look at the shows that we've recently done, and I try to look at the archives the same way I look at history, trying to imagine it 10 or 15 or 20 years from now and ask, "Do we have a nice mix?" Because we usually keep about 10 shows free, and then we move them to the paid archive after four or five years. I try to make sure we have enough diversity, subject matter diversity in the 10 or so free shows so that if you didn't like "Supernova in the East," which was about the Second World War in the Pacific and Asian theater, and we have six maybe shows on that, do I have a couple shows then from widely differing periods? So you could go, "Oh, I'm really not interested in that. Oh, but I like the idea of the Romans and the Celtic people, so I'll listen to that show." So there are some attempts to try to switch it up a little bit in terms of historical periods or throughput ideas or that kind of thing.

Gillespie: What would you say is the happiest show that you've done?

Carlin: Oh, that's a trick question, isn't it? I did one once called "The Organization of Peace" that was about the League of Nations. The whole League of Nations thing is this almost rainbows and unicorns attempt to try to imagine a better world through a shared understanding that we had just been through the worst war in the history of the world and we never want to go through that again. There were so many fun aspects of it, like the idea…. It was a minor idea. It was never this major League of Nations proposal, but the idea of Esperanto and the idea that we have to have human beings communicate better if we want to avoid the kinds of things that happened before. So we all need to speak the same language, right? So there's a lot of hopeful stuff in that show because the League of Nations itself was almost a naive attempt to hope for a better world and try to figure out what the heck would be involved in working toward it. So that might be the most hopeful one.

Gillespie: What's the function of history for you?

Carlin: I truthfully look at it more like the past is there to teach us what can happen, right? So it's a little showing you the Black Swan phenomenon in terms of examples. So when you say something like, "Well, how could this go sideways on us?" You have examples you can point to in terms of the worst case scenario. I mean, what the past doesn't teach are the kinds of lessons that most people want it to teach. So for example, you'll often hear someone say something like, "Well, we know appeasement doesn't work because look what happened with Hitler in the 1930s." But that's not what history teaches you because you're not taking into account the variables, right? First of all, Hitler's a person. All dictators are not exactly the same, and all circumstances aren't exactly the same. So you can't turn around and say, "Well, we learned from Munich that you can't appease dictators, therefore we shouldn't appease Saddam Hussein because he's going to act exactly like Hitler acted. We know that because Hitler acted that way." It doesn't work like that.

Now, what it can show you is what a worst case scenario might look like if things go sideways like they did in the late 1930s. What history really teaches you is how contextually things get involved. When we see, for example, rights being taken away from people in a society, like political parties being banned or safeguards that keep people from being able to be thrown into prison without any sort of due process, I think history teaches you what's going to follow next in most of those cases. Usually, it's benign, but that doesn't teach you anything specifically. It teaches you generalities, but I do think it's useful in that sense.

Now, the [George] Santayana quote about if you did not learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it, I think, one, it doesn't work that way because we take the wrong lessons. You can't use dictators because of Munich. I also think that people use history to have it prove what they want it to prove, you have these ideas that you could go back and construct it in ways, or you can choose historical approaches in ways that lets you say two plus two equals five, if you want it to. There's an old line that even the devil can quote scripture for his purpose, and history is far more subject to that than biblical narratives are, right? So that's why I think you have to be careful about this idea about history teaching X, Y, or Z and become suspicious of the teacher that teaches you that.

There are things to learn, but they're much more amorphous and much less specific. So that's what I would say. And then the idea that it could hurt you to learn from the past, well, it can, depending on what they're trying to teach you. Especially give it a sideways glance and ask what the person trying to teach you about the past is trying to get you to understand. But for broader generalizations that we talked about earlier, about how I talked to kids about context and how things evolve, I think those are really valuable lessons, but they're not very useful necessarily in applying specifically to individual cases. 

Audio Production: Ian Keyser