Dan Carlin on Podcasting, History, and Hero Worship

In March, Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with one of the great pioneers of podcasting:Dan Carlin, the host of Hardcore History. Carlin's deeply researched and urgently delivered takes on everything from Julius Caesar's wars in Gaul to Imperial Japan's horrific conquest of Asia are downloaded by the millions. Gillespie and Carlin discussed how to understand the moral choices made in the past, how Carlin would update his 2019 book The End Is Always Near in light of COVID-19, and whether we can really learn meaningful lessons from history.

Reason: Who are your listeners and what do you think they're getting out of the show?

Carlin: I don't ask them questions about themselves or delve into who they are or what they make or where they live and 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. When we started, I feel like it was much more U.S.-centric, and now the international audience is growing more.

To give you a real answer, though, 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 what the podcasting services give us is enough.

In 2019, you came on this podcast to talk about 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 version?

To be honest, I know the standard technique is to claim credit for all these things, but 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. It didn't take a genius to see that coming. I do think the timing was just a little weird.

Were people more interested in what you were talking about during the pandemic or less, or did you notice any difference?

We did well during COVID, and we've seen a drop-off since, but I think it's because people are back at work. 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 during COVID, people took the opportunity to listen to what we were doing while they were doing something else. Or we were just a good time waster, right? My shows are long.

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

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 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.

I try to get some perspective by imagining somebody else in a role. 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?

If you say, "Hmm, I don't think it does turn out the same with those other people," well, then you can say that having [John F.] Kennedy in the White House at that time and under those circumstances actually made history go in a different direction than it otherwise would.

Do you have historical figures that you consider heroes?

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. Personality-wise, I am not much of a hero worshiper. Sometimes I look at people and I just wonder if I could have done what they did. People 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?" To me, rather than the hero side of it, sometimes I measure myself against these other people. So there's admiration there, but not hero worship.

Daniel Akst wrote a book called War By Other Means, which was a study of conscientious objectors during World War II. Looking at those guys and what they put up with, it was like being 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.

If nothing else, it's the old line of, "These are the times that try men's souls." 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?" Those are the tests. You don't know until you get there. 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.

You define yourself as a pessimist—or 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. 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?

To me, that's kind of a macro-micro question. I think on a micro level, 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. 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: health care if you get hurt, not too many invasions during your lifetime.

Nothing lasts forever, whether it's good times or bad times. I'm 58 years old right now, and life is good, but you can't help but notice when you're 58 that life isn't going to be good forever. 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.

Is world history ultimately military history? Or is it the history of trade? Or maybe migration? Where do you see those lines intersecting?

Sometimes I'll do speaking engagements with schools, and you'll have middle school 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? 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. 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.

What I tell students 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, there is a history of that and that's part of the past, too. There is no rule about what's important in the past. What's important in the past is what is important to you. 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.

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. You start to see the process of change in historical development and how things move over a course of decades. That teaches you the idea of the history of moving events. Then ask yourself, when you're looking at these different motorcycles over the different eras, why they are the way they are. 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 the minute the test is over, 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, that has a past that's as much a part of the grand history of things as anything else is.

The past is kind of an infinite attic where you can rummage through and construct a lot of different stories that help you make sense of where you are, who you want to be, and where you want to go. Do you feel like people are cognizant of that?

I feel like we've never been more likely to judge people from the past by current modern moral sensibilities, which is something that 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. He'd ask the question, "When they do things that we think are despicable now, was that their goal? Were they trying to do despicable things?" We were talking about people who tried to convert natives to Christianity, and the current line of thinking was that this was an awful thing to do. We were destroying native cultures and belief systems, 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 and passed on to their children and all these kinds of things, but was the goal at the time to do something negative? He said, "No. 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, 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, we do so because every generation before us has done the exact same thing. We judge people based on our own modern sensibilities, and 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 possible, in fact almost inevitable, that the same thing is going to happen with us. 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.

A good example is somebody like Winston Churchill. If you're raised in America or England, you love Winston Churchill: He was the man who saved the West during World War II. 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 to work things out rather than dismiss the things that we have to work to understand.

We should point out that 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 postwar British coming down from imperial heights. 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 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. How much did that guy have any agency in thinking any differently?

I don't want to write off good and evil in the past, because if you take this too far the wrong way, it makes you not able to judge Hitler or 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."

How do you decide what you're going to get into? "Supernova in the East" is a real achievement. The "Celtic Holocaust" series is amazing too. Do you go looking for these horrifying episodes in the past, or do they find you?

Well, first of all, you're really kind. I appreciate that. If I'm interested in it, that right there is requirement No. 1, because we don't have scripts for these shows. I just go in and record it. So it's based on inspiration. 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 like, "Can you please talk about 17th century India?" I'll have to say no because I don't know anything about 17th century India, and I couldn't learn enough about it in the short span [of time]. 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.

As far as what I'm interested in, well, a lot of these stories you may have noticed have what we call "philosophical spines." The ancient historian Thucydides said that history is philosophy taught by example.

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—I don't want to ever have a formula or 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."

The last thing is more of a practical thing. 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?" 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 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, do I have a couple shows then from widely differing periods? So you could go, "Oh, I'm really not interested in that. 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.

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

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 never this major League of Nations proposal—but the idea of Esperanto and that we have to have human beings communicate better if we want to avoid the kinds of things that happened before. 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.

What's the function of history for you?

I truthfully look at it more like the past is there to teach us what can happen. You have examples of the worst-case scenario.

What the past doesn't teach are the kinds of lessons that most people want it to teach. For example, you'll often hear someone say something like, "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. 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, "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.

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, that doesn't teach you anything specifically. It teaches you generalities.

Now, the [George] Santayana quote about if you did not learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it: I think it doesn't work that way, because we take the wrong lessons. I think people use history to have it prove what they want it to prove. 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.

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. Give it a sideways glance and ask what the person trying to teach you about the past is trying to get you to understand.

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