BEN KISSEL
Hey, what's up everyone? Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left. Ben hanging out with Marcus and Henry.
MARCUS PARKS
Hi.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Today's episode... Totally normal guys, in no way are you nervous. Today's episode, we are honored to have a true legend in podcasting. He's a genius, a wonderful podcaster and just a wonderful man, Dan Carlin from Hardcore History. Dan, thank you so much for being on the show.
DAN CARLIN
You guys, thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're great. You look good.
DAN CARLIN
Well same to you guys. Everybody looks good.
BEN KISSEL
And the lies continue. the beauty of radio.
DAN CARLIN
That's right.
MARCUS PARKS
All right, so Dan, I'm gonna jump right into it with the questions because I got a million questions I've been wanting to ask you for forever. So I've been listening recently to some of the classic episodes and some of the newer episodes and you said in one of your recent episodes that you've been told that you are addicted to context when it comes to telling a story. And I've also been told that I'm addicted to context by both our listeners and by my co- hosts. So my question-
BEN KISSEL
I've been told I'm addicted to Michelob Ultra.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the doctor's opinion.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. So my question, Dan, why are all of them wrong? And we are not addicted to context and that it is absolutely necessary.
DAN CARLIN
No, I think we're addicted to context. I think the problem is that more other people should be addicted to context because so much of what goes on in our world right now is stuff taken out of context and without that context it's easy to misapply facts and all sorts of things. I mean reading any news story today, I keep thinking okay, the first thing I need to do to understand this news story is go do more research on everything connected to the news story so that the facts given to me and the impressions and everything makes sense. It's like why history is important. I had a professor say once that it's like watching a soap opera and without knowing what happened earlier in the soap opera, there's no way to understand the episode that you're currently viewing.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
DAN CARLIN
And that's context, right? So being addicted to context just means trying to figure out what happened to get you to the point where you're currently at.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do want to ask though, when does the context begin?
DAN CARLIN
Yes, that's the problem.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it eventually becomes like turtles and turtles all the way down. And we tried to do it because with Last Podcast on the Left, we tried it now, we stole it from you.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We tried to land the subject in a context so that people can understand. But again, how far back do you go?
DAN CARLIN
I know, that's a good question because you're back in the Jurassic at a certain point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
DAN CARLIN
I was just reading something for the show I'm working on right now and it's one of those chronicles written in the middle ages and it's supposed to talk about the time period it's written about but it starts with the biblical flood with Noah.
BEN KISSEL
It's great.
DAN CARLIN
So they were addicted to context back then too.
BEN KISSEL
That's awesome. And so you got your diploma from PragerU, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, I didn't. So no Prager diploma.
BEN KISSEL
Thank God.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean I guess to that point, what you're working on now, to what extent... Because you've done a huge series on like Ancient Rome and Genghis Khan, I'm going with your pronunciation.
BEN KISSEL
Nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the right pronunciation.
DAN CARLIN
One in a row for me.
MARCUS PARKS
Same here. Uh But to what extent when you're studying this ancient stuff or like medieval stuff, how do you suss out what to trust and what not to trust?
DAN CARLIN
Usually I trust other people. So when you are... And like I would say, I'm a fan of history, not a historian. And so that requires you to trust other people. The problem with trusting historians is that they often disagree with each other. And that was something that we got into early on in the podcast where we inadvertently got someone's chocolate in my peanut butter and figured out that the audience actually likes hearing the different opinions that the different historians have. And so that's kind of what we do. And that's way we provide context also is that we'll say well on this issue this particular guy feels this way.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
DAN CARLIN
This other lady who's an expert on the subject feels this way. and you start to try to help the audience understand the controversy even if we don't always pick sides. So a lot of our shows, you'll hear me give multiple potential interpretations or give a disclaimer and say this might be true, I'm just warning you to take it with a grain of salt though because some people disagree. and sometimes I'll use their names and sometimes I won't, it just depends.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can I ask a dumb question?
DAN CARLIN
Please!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When you're not reading history, what do you read? What is the stuff that you're into that's not work? Because I'm looking for ideas.
DAN CARLIN
Well first of all, it's more that I turn my private enjoyments into work because this is the stuff I read anyway.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
DAN CARLIN
I do read some stuff for fun but it's almost all non-fiction and like an idiot, the fiction that I do read, it's like three or four books and then I just reread them all the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I know exactly what you're saying.
DAN CARLIN
Isn't that terrible? Like you could be discovering a brand new fictional work. But do I? No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No!
DAN CARLIN
I just reread the same one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All I do, I just reread The Dark Tower again. I'm trying to get, I would love a new book. Anything else.
BEN KISSEL
Buddy, if you love it, stick with it. So that's interesting when it comes to historians, how do you decide who to trust and who not to then? Because obviously even in modern era, you can talk with some economists who are like Reagan was great. Others say accurately trickle down economics didn't fucking work and that's why we have no middle class. So how do you trust that these historians aren't spinning in their own right?
DAN CARLIN
Well usually there's a major consensus on certain things. So you'll say 80% of historians will say this and then sometimes we like to throw the a member of the 20% in there just to give an alternative view.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
DAN CARLIN
But there are some historians that are completely off the map. I mean there's one Russian guy, and I should really look up his name because this is like the third time this month I've mentioned him without looking up the name, but he contends that the entire dating system that everyone else adheres to is completely wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is my favorite. That's my favorite.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But who cares? Can't we just agree that it doesn't really matter?
DAN CARLIN
Well actually it's fascinating, his theory, whether it's true or not, is fascinating because it shows how thin the reeds are that certain potential moments that dating rests upon might be. So even if he's wrong, it's fascinating to look and go oh, I didn't realize that this date here is crucial for 900 other dates to be right. Right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So fascinating.
DAN CARLIN
In other words, they sort of use it as a marker that then a lot of other things hinge on. Then of course you get these historians, there are ones to deny the holocaust.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
And some of these guys are legit historians, they're just so far out in left field no one else believes them. So sometimes you have to make a determination whether or not someone's so far off the map that bringing them into the discussion is just confusing and wrong or whether or not what they're bringing to the table adds some sort of interesting angle that the audience would find useful. And that's a judgment call and I'm sure I get it wrong sometimes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No but that's why you're the curator.
DAN CARLIN
I'm trying to curate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm the curator!
DAN CARLIN
Call me The Curator.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like a new serial killer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm trying to get us to do an episode-
DAN CARLIN
A Batman villain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
The Curator.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Curator.
BEN KISSEL
What does he do? He organizes your bookshelf.
DAN CARLIN
That's good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I take your talents and I turn them into mine.
DAN CARLIN
That's right. It's like Bookworm on the old Batman, remember?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
There's a scary criminal.
BEN KISSEL
That's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I keep trying to get us to do an episode that is about the fact that like what if it's like 300 years later than they think it is? Or 300 years earlier than they think it is. like the idea of the dating may be off and then we put together all this research and eventually we're like so what? we get to the very end and we're like well okay, so it's 2323. Congrats.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean one of the missing time arguments that I've heard, it speaks to a larger history. It speaks towards like the history of the Christian church because Dan, I don't know if you're talking about the same theory that I've heard about is that this entire chunk of time was like moved forward or moved backwards in order to make the Christian church more powerful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
MARCUS PARKS
In order to kind of take these pagan rituals and turn them into Christian rituals by saying oh that happened so long ago.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS
Or that happened just a couple of 100 years ago, that they've been screwing around with time just to further their own interests.
DAN CARLIN
I think the Russian guy I'm thinking of actually thinks that certain events that we think happened a long time apart from each other actually happened at the same time and are sort of like double counted by historians. But let's remember that dating itself is relatively arbitrary, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
In other words, if you look at the Hebrew dating system, it's a completely different dating system, right? In other words, if you look at the medieval stuff a lot of times, it won't even try to have dates. What they'll do is they'll say okay, this king reigned here and then 23 years later he dies and the next... So they'll date it based on other data points rather than saying this many years since ground zero. And that's why what you're talking about is like the AD/BC system, right?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
That's just one sort of system, right. The Hebrew one, we're in multi thousand years somewhere. So it's all sort of relative and all that matters is once you sort of fix things that happen to your timeline, so whatever year you call this doesn't matter but you could say oh, this is when the Emperor Augustus died and then you date things based on that. And then everything has to sort of fit on the timeline in place.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
But the year you sort of decide well that seems a little bit like okay, you sort of make that part up and then everything sort of fits on the timeline based on well 23 years after Augustus died this happened.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
And so you start placing things on the linear timeline, if that makes sense.
BEN KISSEL
The nice thing about me, I'm not tethered to history. So Augustus died eating a bunch of cake.
DAN CARLIN
Whatever you wanted him to do, that's right.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, who cares?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's already dead. So my YouTube videos I was watching saying about the mysterious happenings of 9/11 across history, is it real?
DAN CARLIN
I can't comment intelligently on that because that sounds like fiction. And I just told you, I don't even pay attention to fiction very much.
BEN KISSEL
That was kind of one of my base questions here is you say you're a fan of history, why?
DAN CARLIN
My mother's theory on this, and she's not grounded in reality on every part of the subject, she thinks it's past life stuff. She thinks I have all this stuff from past lives and that's why I at three years old and reading-
BEN KISSEL
Well then you're cheating! If you lived all the... That's not history, that's just a bio!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a rerun.
DAN CARLIN
I think that's fiction too for the record. But I mean she was trying to explain how this four year old kid is reading 'Rise and Fall of the Third Reich'. And how do you explain that to friends at cocktail parties?
BEN KISSEL
Exactly. Well he's either gonna be super smart or we have a problem.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
DAN CARLIN
That's right. I think the we have a problem thing was pretty much the standard answer until I graduated college, so...
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean Dan, when it comes to being like a curator, when you have these massive stories like Supernova in the East, Blueprint for Armageddon, Ghosts of the Ostfront, like when you're setting out and you're planning out these stories, are you trying to make a point with these stories or are you just kind of giving a point of view of what happened throughout these massive global events?
DAN CARLIN
Well I don't... For us anyway, we weren't trying to simply just recount a bunch of facts. We like to think that there's an artistic element to this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
And for that to be the case, there's gotta be something that we're adding, otherwise why wouldn't you just go get the books that we're using for our research, right, and that we put on our website? Because those are by reputable historians and you can trust them much, much better than you can-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
DAN CARLIN
So what are we bringing to the table? We have in-house names that we use for a lot of this stuff and you guys probably do too. You develop terms to refer to things that you use in your work. And we call it the spine, right. So every show kind of has usually a major spine and maybe a couple of minor spines that are sort of a throughput idea that if you think about, there's an old line that history is philosophy taught by example. And we try to keep a sort of a philosophical throughput. So like in the show that we did on nuclear weapons, the throughput question was sort of whether or not humankind is ever going to, if we haven't already, develop a weapon system that is so powerful we ourselves can't figure out how to exist with it, right? Will mankind ever become unable to handle the power of its own weapons systems? And the throughput idea was kind of that mixed with sort of the question about whether or not if you had a gun, I think we phrased it this way, if you had a gun pointed at your head throughout your entire life, meaning nuclear weapons, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
There was a generation that grew up without nuclear weapons and then had nuclear weapons and they were acutely aware of the nuclear threat. But people born when nuclear weapons already existed are like people born with a gun put to their head. Do you even notice it anymore? So that was part of an intertwining spine, questioning whether or not if mankind hasn't gotten to the point yet, will we ever get to the point? Because you assume technology is always going to advance and we're gonna invent more and better powerful weapons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
DAN CARLIN
Can we handle the power of our weapons system? And this is where we included stuff like the think tanks that were created after nuclear weapons came to the fore, where you got the smartest people in the world on the subject, put them in a room together, and then had them try to figure out how mankind exists with these weapons that can destroy mankind. And so it's part of a fascinating tale that's a subtext of the nuclear question. And that's something that... I just saw Oppenheimer the other night.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
And when I saw the movie, all I was thinking of is man, I felt like they really missed an opportunity to get into that side of the question. Because here are these people taking us into a brand new era of weapon power and you have to ask the question then about how do you then... What's the old line? There was a line, I think it was Bertrand Russell or one of those philosophers was talking about, he said you can expect expect mankind to walk on a tightrope, for an hour or two or a day or a week, but we're committed to walking on this tightrope of not blowing ourselves up forevermore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Forever.
DAN CARLIN
Right?
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
DAN CARLIN
And so those are the kind of questions that we wove into the story about the early years of nuclear war, not nuclear war but nuclear development. And that's an example of one of the spines, major and minor, that we try to throw into these shows that makes it interesting for us and that adds something that we hope makes it worth listening to instead of just picking up the history books. Does that make sense?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Of course.
BEN KISSEL
Any insight on the snacks in these think tanks? Because I figure this should be a cracker and cheese club.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unbelievable.
DAN CARLIN
I think it's sardines and cigars, myself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It smells like it.
BEN KISSEL
That smells like the end of the world.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you think that we'll have the same comeuppances at some point about... Because our generation was the first ones to really like, we came up in an age, we were the last ones to come up in an age with no digital footprint, right. Like we're all 40 across the line.
BEN KISSEL
Saw both worlds.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We went through the thing, we saw both worlds and now we're kind of like the generations after us are deeply ensconced in the internet. I actually wonder if we're gonna be having the same conversations about stuff like this.
BEN KISSEL
AI, things of that nature, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And how it's affecting our society later on down the line after. Because I don't know what it's doing to our brains. Like it seems like it's kind of tearing us apart.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
From the inside. Not like how nuclear weapons would do it in a fancy expensive explosion.
DAN CARLIN
No, I think about it all the time. The analog generation, right. I always describe it to my kids who don't want to hear it, it's like me listening to my parents talk about when they had radio instead of television. But the analog generation and the generation that eventually had to decide someday we're gonna learn how to operate that weird complicated tool known as a computer, I remember looking forward to it, going god, I don't really want to have to learn MS- DOS and how to deal with this computer and everything. But I'm gonna have to for work. So in other words, the generation that grew up in a pre digital world and that has to then sort of bridge the gap.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
And then these other kids, it's a little like what we just talked about being born with a gun to your head.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think so.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
DAN CARLIN
Yeah, we were born without the gun to our head and we're acutely aware of the digital world. Whereas my oldest daughter was born the year the iPhone was invented I think. And I try to explain to her that this whole texting reality that is concrete to you is about as old as you are.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
DAN CARLIN
Now try to imagine how different the world was before that. And she can't get her mind around it and I think that's how human beings are hardwired.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
But because we existed in that world, we're acutely aware of how different our childhood was, for example, than the way childhood will ever be again. And what's interesting is our childhood was more like the way children experience life from our time to caveman time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yup. Thousands of years.
DAN CARLIN
Than it will ever be again. Yeah, than it will ever be again.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fascinating.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean to the point of being like adapting to technology, you were one of the first people to use podcasts as a medium, like you've been doing podcasting since what, 2005?
DAN CARLIN
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And so why did you make the jump from terrestrial radio to podcasting? And did you ever think that podcasting would ultimately become like the top medium when it comes to broadcasting?
DAN CARLIN
It's so funny, I'm having dinner with the guy tomorrow night who first proposed that idea to me in 1994.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
DAN CARLIN
Yeah. So it wasn't my idea at all. I was on the radio one day and I had a very contentious relationship with my audience, I always said I was the Martian in the day part because I was saddled between two right wing talkers on commercial radio and I was a Martian. I still am a Martian. And so I inherited the audience of the guy before me and the people after me. And so they didn't like me very much and the feeling was mutual. And so I would yell at them during the program and I was screaming one day about what are you willing to do to create positive change? And I got off the radio and I'm punching walls and I'm over caffeinated like I always am. And the secretary from downstairs comes up and says she has a message for me and one of the listeners wants to have dinner with me, which is always a red flag in radio anyway, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
DAN CARLIN
Especially when you're the Martian in the day part, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
It's an invitation for a shooting. But so I called the guy up and he says if you want to know what I'm prepared to do for positive change, let's go out to dinner. So for some reason, and it's funny how these little things can change your life.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
These decisions that you make, that you almost didn't make, that your whole life takes a left- hand turn when you do. So I show up to dinner, the guy is about my age, he looks like Dilbert but he has hair down to his waist, John Lennon glasses. And all I can tell you about this guy to sum him up in a nutshell is this is one of the most forward thinkers I've ever met in my life. And it's sort of the curse and bane of his entire existence.
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
DAN CARLIN
Because he sees so far around the curve that he's always in the wrong place to score off of seeing the future.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
DAN CARLIN
This is a guy who saw apps, right, as the future of computer programming. He was writing apps but he was writing them for the Newton. Remember the Newton?
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
DAN CARLIN
Right? So by the time apps are a big thing for like the iPhone, he's already passed that, he did it with the Newton, now he's onto the next thing. But he didn't score with the Newton. So this is a guy who sees so far in the future that he can't even benefit from it. And in 1994 he said I want to put your show on the internet. And I said what? We're just basically getting used to what the heck the internet is and it's mostly text. He goes I'm gonna put your show on the internet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. I remember them talking about how emails were going to destroy the workplace.
DAN CARLIN
Yeah. I'm like what do you even mean? I said how would you even do that? He goes well that's where I come in. I'm gonna invent how to do it and you're gonna show people how it's done.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
DAN CARLIN
Okay, so a long story short, everything grew out of that. And once again he was too far ahead of the curve, I went back to commercial radio. But then down the line when the opportunity started to be obvious even to idiots like yours truly, I'd already been exposed to the idea. So I got involved as a founder in a tech company with a bunch of other people. And one of the things we were gonna do was push what at the time was called amateur content.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
DAN CARLIN
Now we call it YouTube.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
DAN CARLIN
Everything you can think of is amateur content. But back then I'm out there trying to sell this idea to venture capitalists who think it's the dumbest thing they've ever heard. And the excuse I always got was if anybody was ever any good at anything like this, they'd be paid for it. So nobody invested, the thing went nowhere. But I put a show together to show people what amateur content would look like. And it was our very earliest few shows of the podcast, not the history one, the one we did before that, the political one which was just a variation of my radio show. And when that company went belly up, I took that show and continued to do it myself. And that was what the 2005 podcast was. But it all grew out of the idea of this guy I'm having dinner with again tomorrow, when he said we'll put the show on the internet and I said how do you put a show on the internet? So I'd gotten a headstart on that idea because this guy was so forward thinking, that's the short answer.
BEN KISSEL
What were some of the things that gave you hope that this was gonna be the future? 2005, I mean I didn't know about podcasts yet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I didn't have hope in 2005.
BEN KISSEL
We were entertainers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that was before I had hope.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Were there little things along the way where you were like you know what, what this is gonna work out?
DAN CARLIN
Well I tell you, I was worried about stupid things looking back on it now. Like I remember I think it was like show 5, 6, 7 in there.
BEN KISSEL
Which is just amazing that you had shows 5 and 6 and 7.
DAN CARLIN
Yeah, I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's just like you've done so much.
DAN CARLIN
It was a long time ago.
BEN KISSEL
We all started somewhere.
DAN CARLIN
Yeah. And they all sucked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
DAN CARLIN
Show 5, 6, and 7 were not very good. But I remember in radio you have a cough button, as you guys probably know, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
So you're gonna cough or clear your throat, you push the button, you're off air for a second. So we're doing this podcast and there's no cough button. So I used to just go, I mean there's nothing written, I do it the same way today. It's completely improvised, I get up there and I just start talking. So I mean I was like 15 minutes into some long rant and it was going really well and then I had to cough and I remember turning to the producer and go oh man, I said, we gotta start over. He goes what do you mean start over? We're not starting over. You're not gonna do 15 good minutes again. And I said well what are you proposing we do? He said well you just pick up where you left off and we'll scrunch it together. I said you can't scrunch it together. I said you'll ruin my chops, I'll never be able to go back to radio again.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
DAN CARLIN
He said are you thinking about going back to radio? And that's when I sat down and went you know, radio kind of sucked.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
For me anyway. I mean I was the wrong guy for radio, right. So I was kind of going yeah, what am I preserving those chops for? And that's when you started to realize okay, we got some tools in this podcasting that you can't do in live radio, right.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
DAN CARLIN
So it was all, as it is for all of us, right, a growth process learning what you can do, what the tools are. And in 2005, we don't exactly have, you can't go like research what other people are doing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
DAN CARLIN
So you find out later that other people were learning these same lessons, we were all learning them sort of at the same time independently.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
DAN CARLIN
But yeah, the funny thing is is if you go listen to the shows in 2005, they sound so horrible now. And yet at the time you grade all this stuff on a curve, right? I mean it's only as good as what the technological expectations at the time were. But god, I sell those old shows.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
DAN CARLIN
It seems like you shouldn't sell those old shows now, right?
MARCUS PARKS
I mean but for me though, I first heard Hardcore History for the first time in 2007.
DAN CARLIN
Yeah, that's early times.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I've been listening since that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You've been doing podcasts for 18 years and your family is still alive. That's incredible.
BEN KISSEL
That is amazing.
MARCUS PARKS
But when I listened to him back then, I also come from terrestrial radio, from FM radio, and I was working as a janitor at the time, as many FM radio guys were doing in 2007.
DAN CARLIN
I was gonna say, it sounds like a natural co-gig.
BEN KISSEL
Perfect.
MARCUS PARKS
But I found your podcast and started listening to it just constantly. And it really did for me, it changed the way that I felt like what was possible of what you could do with this podcast medium. But in those early days, like your first episode is 16 minutes long.
DAN CARLIN
Yeah, different sounding, huh?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's 16 minutes long. But then now, your series on WWI was what, 22 hours?
DAN CARLIN
Something like that. Well it's funny you say that though because, and this is something I think we also all sort of independently discovered, when we did the political show, the current events show that we started off with, that was simply a repurposed radio show, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
So it was something that we did on radio. But when we decided to do a history show, that was something we designed specifically for podcasting. And I remember thinking it was like this giant whiteboard we had to work with. There are no time limits, there are no mandatory breaks, there's no skeleton at all. You can do anything you want.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
And I was intoxicated by the creative space we had to work with because as you know in radio, you have little creative windows that you can operate within plus management will also constrain those spaces even farther.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
DAN CARLIN
The first time we designed a podcast as a podcast, it was an exhilarating experience and that's when I knew I was never going back to radio. Once I was able to sit there and go why would you ever give this up? Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
Especially when you done radio. Any sort of romance or any of the cachet involved, it's like when I did television as a news reporter. Once you do television, you don't need to go back and do it. It satisfied whatever, it de-romanticized it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
There's nothing cool about that. What's cool is the creative white space.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
And that's when I knew I was, that's when you had like the tire don't back up here with the spikes. I was never going back to the old media once I got a taste of the creative freedom of this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Did TV people ever try to get you? Did TV people ever come over and they're like-
DAN CARLIN
Yeah, they still do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
But well first of all, I have a face made for radio now which makes it easier to say-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You talking to three of them.
DAN CARLIN
Yeah, it makes it easier to say no. But at the same time, I was a bad TV guy. And you know when I knew I was a bad TV guy? I was in news and you start off at the low rung and then you know you kind of made it when they start using you to shoot the promos, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
So you're gonna shoot a promo, now you're one of the guys that they want to advertise. And so all these other colleagues of mine would go shoot the promo, it would take him like five takes. And I remember the promo because it was so painful. All you had to do was you started with a side shot and you turned and you faced the camera and you smiled.
BEN KISSEL
Classic.
DAN CARLIN
They did it in like five takes. Yeah. So I was on take like 49 before the cameraman who was a friend of mine said this is not gonna work, is it? And I said it's not, it's just not. Or like when I was in the field as a reporter, I was a pretty good reporter on like the merits of reporting. But when it came to like looking good, I always looked like Colombo out in the field.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My secret sex symbol. He's a low key sex symbol.
BEN KISSEL
Peter Falk, yeah.
DAN CARLIN
Yeah, I was not a low key sex symbol, I looked rumpled. I looked like I'd been literally in the field as they say. But so in that sense, I was not the TV guy and it was uncomfortable for me, right. What were my hands doing?
BEN KISSEL
Right.
DAN CARLIN
I did a couple of sizzle reels for some TV companies that wanted to do things and I had the exact same problem. It was like a bad flashback.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
Like what am I gonna do with my hands? And they would sit there and focus inordinately on how my pants looked and the crease. And I just can't deal deal with that, I'm a content person.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
I'm not a visible person, if that makes sense.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. And there's a superficiality to television that obviously podcasts can erode, right. We actually get to tell long stories, you can do long form, you don't have to worry about the next ad break coming up. There's something about it that's very refreshing and very earnest. And I think that's one of the reasons people love your podcast and love podcasts in general because... Damar Hamlin when he got hurt with the Bills. So this guy almost died in the football field, right? So everyone's crying in the stadium, right, and then Buck is like all right, let's go to break. And everyone is dead serious and then all of a sudden it's (singing) Whopper, Whopper, Whopper, Whopper.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Really brings you out of it. And you're like nothing... That man is about to die on national television and the ads just roll on.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And the thing about you, Dan, is that you were the one that showed everybody else I think the whiteboard that we could all use, that we could do whatever we wanted with this medium. I know you definitely showed us what the hell to do with that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
That's a great compliment. I hope that's true, I'd like to think that's true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is true.
MARCUS PARKS
It is true. It is true for us at least.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We say cum a lot, I think 200% more than you do.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But that's our oeuvre. You know what I mean? That's our life. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well okay, back to history. I want to ask you a couple of history questions, just your opinions on certain things. So like we talk on this show a lot, when we talk about like cultural history, we talk about like the secret authors of the 20th century. And usually when we talk about them, we talk about them in terms of occult figures like Aleister Crowley or-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
L. Ron Hubbard.
MARCUS PARKS
L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Parsons.
DAN CARLIN
L. Ron Hubbard.
MARCUS PARKS
Pike people who truly did, that shaped the century as we know it. But nobody really knows it. Do you have any historical figure that you feel is like a secret author that shaped the world that no one really gives credit to?
DAN CARLIN
You know I'm sure given enough time and thought I could come up with one but off the top of my head... Well it's funny because you see, and I devolve toward the mean on a lot of these questions and I apologize in advance, but one of the nonfiction books I read every year, and it horrifies people when I tell them this, but I think it's actually behind me in the bookshelf right there probably, is 'Mein Kampf', right. And people say well why would you read 'Mein Kampf'? And I said well in the same way that you get a chance to really, when you're reading nonfiction as opposed to fiction, you get a chance to know the author a little bit, right. I said how interesting is it to get a chance to get into the mind of this person who... You don't want to make it sound positive, he made such a difference in the 20th century, because it sounds like he made a positive difference.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
DAN CARLIN
But he made an impact would be a better way to put it. And his wild, evil ideas continue to live on and are on the upswing today. So to get an idea into the mind, I mean the one thing you get when you read 'Mein Kampf' is you see what a conspiracy nut this guy was, right? I mean there's things like that and you turn around. So I mean when I think about secret authors, most people don't think about Hitler as an author.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
But he was an author before he was the Chancellor of Germany, right.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
And he wrote a book besides 'Mein Kampf', the second book which I have not read but apparently it's also very instructive into the minds of this guy. So to me that's getting a little bit closer to understanding one of these people who continues, I mean one of the things we mentioned in the WWI show that you brought up is how it's an inflection point in the modern world.
MARCUS PARKS
Right.
DAN CARLIN
How the world before the WWI is a different world and the world after WWI is a completely different world. And WWII is an offshoot of WWI. Hitler is one of those figures that when you read 'Mein Kampf', you can see how he's a different figure because of WWI.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
And so when you say secret authors, I mean I don't think of Aleister Crowley as having a huge impact but L. Ron Hubbard did. But the kind of impact L. Ron Hubbard had, even though I'm not comparing it to Nazism at all, is more like the kind that Hitler had in the sense that he comes up with this book, the book itself has an enduring impact, some movement springs from it. I'm trying to think if you could say that Aleister Crowley started a movement. He has fans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We connect-
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well LRH stole the structure of Scientology from the OTO.
DAN CARLIN
Did he?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So basically so if you go deep into like the lore of L. Ron Hubbard, he was like a pen pal of Aleister Crowley's.
DAN CARLIN
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When Aleister Crowley was deposed, once he was like in his waning years, Aleister Crowley's writings also, which is interesting because the autobiography of Aleister Crowley is fascinating as well because you see how much more is a lark, how much more of it was like he was entirely aware of what he was creating and what he was doing and his acerbic sense of humor. But LRH is like all of that stuff is ritual magic and ritual ideas that have been stolen from esoteria from across the board. So it's weird that L. Ron Hubbard can be like drawn back to like John Dee.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like that character where he's like... They keep stealing from the same source.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It's the same problem that we were talking about earlier. How far back do you go? How much context do you give? Because you could just keep going back and back and back with these guys.
DAN CARLIN
I think that ability though to go back and pull from the past like you just mentioned, I think that's like a superpower.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
I think that's one of those things where if you can do that well, that's one of those things that you would trade a number of other... It's almost like D&D character and you roll the various things.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
DAN CARLIN
That you have the ability to do that if you score an 18 with your three 6 sided dice on that quality, it's gonna help you in the dungeon quest, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Yeah, it helps me in this context and everywhere else it hurts.
BEN KISSEL
Well look at that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean? Everywhere else it makes me a social pariah.
BEN KISSEL
We went from talking about dates to talking about people who never get dates. That's fantastic. I love it.
MARCUS PARKS
So do you have a favorite sort of... You mentioned this word earlier, hinge. Do you have like a moment in history that you see as just this extraordinarily important hinge moment that just everything after it just kind of depends on?
DAN CARLIN
Oh my problem is narrowing it down. I mean WWI is a great one because we live in that world now, right?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
So the door that swung open there is the room in which we live now. But there's hinge points all over the place. I love Alexander the Great. I mean if you don't have Alexander with those crazy conquests of his, it's hard to imagine what happens without it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
I mean there's a lot of... Because you can play history two ways. One way is if Alexander doesn't do it, someone else does.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
Right? The other one is without Alexander, it never happens. And it's the old historical argument about the great man theory of history vs the trends and forces one, right. So the argument is sometimes that you have these unusual figures that push the envelope and then all of us sort of follow in their wake.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
Or you have the circumstances in place that create the conditions that somebody just exploits, right. So you create the room and the door and someone walks through it vs nobody could have walked through that door except that particular person. Or as we always say on the podcast, it's probably an interplay between the two. You might, Alexander is a very unique figure but had he existed 200 years before his time, maybe he's not able to do what he did, right?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Right.
BEN KISSEL
So it's sort of like the Dr. John approach of if I don't do it, someone else will. So do you think it's more on the person or the parameters that that person was raised in? Because obviously-
DAN CARLIN
I think it's the interplay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
I think it's the interplay.
BEN KISSEL
It's just both.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
I think it's a magic moment where if... Same thing with Hitler, I mean if you have Hitler 100 years before Hitler-
BEN KISSEL
Whenever I think of Hitler, I think of magic moments.
DAN CARLIN
Magic moments.
MARCUS PARKS
(singing) Whopper, whopper, whopper, whopper.
DAN CARLIN
Touché. That's right, touché. But I mean think about this, if Hitler is Hitler 100 years before the time period he exists in, he's not doing anything because he's not a noble.
MARCUS PARKS
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's an asshole. He's just a normal asshole.
DAN CARLIN
He's some peasant that none of the blue bloods are gonna listen to at all in an era where you have to be a blue blood for someone to listen to you. Right? So that's what we mean by the confluence of time and place vs the individual. And it's hard to imagine anybody doing what Hitler did other than Hitler because he's this weird mix of... I mean he's such a crazy, mixed up, screwy, weird character that it's hard to imagine there being a bunch of those dudes walking around in the 1930s.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well one of the I guess time and person, one of those points that we got stuck on recently, we did a serial killer, we did an episode on a serial killer named Gilles de Rais who was active during Joan of Arc's time. He was active during the Hundred Years' War.
DAN CARLIN
Okay. Easy way to hide what's going on, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he also... Because Gilles de Rais was like her main dude, that was like her like army captain.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's sort of my question is that there are some historians who specialize in Joan of Arc do not mention Gilles de Rais at all, or at least he might get a small mention as like a minor general in her army. But historians who focus specifically on this character of Gilles de Rais, who was actually an absolutely real person who held a high ranking position during the third phase of the Hundred Years' War.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS
They portray him as basically Joan of Arc's best friend, that during Joan of Arc's first battles, he saved her life time and time again. And that he's been basically erased from history since. So do you think that like when historians write about subjects like Joan of Arc, do you think that people sort of erase embarrassing connections, embarrassing events in order to sort of feed the narrative that they want?
DAN CARLIN
Well I mean this is the ancient idea about historians and the problems that they face right at the very beginning, right. Because you can't have a 15,000 page history book.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
So simply deciding what to include and what not to include begins the process of pruning and trimming and simply by leaving things out, you change the way things are viewed. And it's not necessarily intentional, although it can be, but even if you're trying to not have it be something that gives a false impression, simply by having to trim and prune, you're already changing the narrative. Because of the constraints, you can't have it. The aliens may have a history book somewhere that has every word of everything that's ever happened. But the rest of us have to prune, right?
BEN KISSEL
Right.
DAN CARLIN
So you introduce the deformities in reality right there and then you get to the point where you're at, which is do you do it deliberately? Now we should point out that a lot of historians, because they have to sit there and prune, will say well I'm just gonna narrow the focus. Which makes sense, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
I'm gonna tell you everything we're going to know about Joan of Arc personally without getting into every friend she ever had. But then, and this is what history abhors a vacuum even in history writing, that's when it opens up the door to saying we've had 5000 books on Joan of Arc and nobody's mentioned the serial killer best friend, so I'm gonna write the book on the serial killer best friend.
MARCUS PARKS
Right.
DAN CARLIN
And then if you're a Joan of Arc fan, you read all the books on Joan of Arc and that gives you more of the various pieces of the tiles that put together create a mosaic, that gives you a better view.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
But no one work-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
And if you're the work that focuses on Joan of Arc's serial killer best friend, you're missing other things because it's not a 15,000 page work. So I mean that's sort of how by the very nature of the limitations in the number of trees out there to make paper pages out of, you get these deformities.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's kind of crazy these kind of actual, just practical things change the face of our entire history.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Our reality.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Our entire reality.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's so wild to me. That's why I like history now. He got me. I was never into this stuff and then as the years went, he really got me deep into medieval history.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that whole area fascinates me.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because there's gaps, there's like all these things. I don't know what we're missing when you're reading about the... And it's interesting the way that even just saying that of course, yeah, they have to cut shit out, they have to print the books, they gotta ship the books.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The book can't be 25 lbs.
BEN KISSEL
Well that's a great point. And when it comes to getting people interested in history, what was the string for you? Because you can look at history through sports lens, through music lens, through politics lens. There's so many different ways that you can look through history and see, you can look at race through the history of sports, so on and so forth. What is a string for you that got you excited about the past and maybe something to help our audience that maybe wants to get into history? Like just a place to start because it's history, it's pretty big.
DAN CARLIN
I go through phases. So people will ask me sometimes why don't you do a show on 17th century India or something? And I'll say because I don't know anything about 17th century India and all the shows that we do were things that I already had some pre-existing knowledge about. And the reason I had pre-existing knowledge about them is because at one time in my life, I was really into that subject. And even though I moved on from it, you retain a certain amount of foundational knowledge that you can then read new books on and sort of build off of, right. I don't have to start from no knowledge about 17th century India, I can work with things that I was into. So all of the shows that we've done at one time or another were subjects that obsessed me. And if you look at the throughput, I'm ashamed to say almost that a lot of it's military.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
DAN CARLIN
And this again gets back to my mom's theory that I was... How does a three or four-year-old get so interested in military affairs when he's a basically nonviolent child?
BEN KISSEL
You're the only kid playing with G. I. Joes who's just working on diplomacy between states.
DAN CARLIN
That's right, that's right.
BEN KISSEL
No, we're not fighting, guys.
DAN CARLIN
No, but I mean whatever I was into. I was into Native Americans for a while. But the Native Americans I was into were warrior Native Americans, I wasn't into the ones who were putting things together with shellfish and nice little pottery things, I was interested in warriors. So I mean that's the kind of stuff where you end up learning about the pottery and the basket weaving and all that stuff as a consequence of being drawn into the subject from the warrior side of it. And so if you think about that as being ground zero of an explosion, then you learn about the other things because of being taken in by the subject matter connected to a military thing. And then like we were talking about, like the rest of the story you have to flesh out for the context and everything else, where you want to understand the world that these warriors live in. You wanna understand their reality, their values, what they were losing when their culture was being destroyed. So for me, the ground zero thing I think was the military stuff.
BEN KISSEL
And Dan, I'm sorry you did trigger why we know so much about shovels.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because of Marcus.
BEN KISSEL
Because while researching the Donner Party-
MARCUS PARKS
Okay.
BEN KISSEL
Marcus really got into the shovels that they used and then Henry thankfully edited about five pages.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He truly loves wagon manifests.
DAN CARLIN
You know you guys make me think, at the University of Colorado, and I don't know if it's the same as it used to be, but the grill in the student union is named the Alferd Packer Grill.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DAN CARLIN
Who was a cannibal, one of those Donner Pass type guys.
MARCUS PARKS
But on the other hand, the Donner Party was kind of what... That is what got you into history.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It did.
MARCUS PARKS
Was when we did our series on the Donner Party. I don't know if you've read this book called 'The Indifferent Stars Above'.
DAN CARLIN
No. But remember the Donner Party, those people were forced to do that. I think Alferd Packer, I think he had developed a taste.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that was a whole different thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was a chef.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean? They had to do it to survive.
MARCUS PARKS
But I did learn something important on that episode, like doing that series, because I really did get really heavily into what they took on their wagons.
DAN CARLIN
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Like what they took with them out west because I thought that said so much about the people themselves.
DAN CARLIN
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
And what they expected once they got out there and what they didn't expect to happen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well that was the first story I remember really reading and then getting more into like older history, medieval history of understanding. I was like oh people have been just like us for a long time.
MARCUS PARKS
Forever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That like we've been the same idiots walking around dealing with the same stuff.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like all of the stuff that happened with the Donner Party was literally just hubris, a guy just wanting to get a shortcut, like that thing where it's the very human idea of we're gonna try to cut this in half, guys. It's an American dream, we're gonna cut this in half.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean? And then everybody dies.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
I'll take it even farther than that. You know what I've been into for the last couple of years is primates. Like looking at apes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the shit. Yeah, this is the shit.
DAN CARLIN
Because it's the exact thing you mentioned but going even to the more base level, right. Watching chimpanzees deal with each other is like watching human beings beings deal with each other at a much more... You know you do the factoring in math and you get to like the lowest common denominator? It's like watching human society at the lowest common denominator. And I've become fascinated in that and I feel like I actually learned about human societies now studying the lowest common denominator in some of these higher ape groups.
BEN KISSEL
And when it all comes together, that really focuses when you get the music. Also you totally change my idea when it comes to the meetings, sardines and cigars, that changes everything.
DAN CARLIN
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
For some reason I was like oh man, that really changes the temperature of the room. So once you mix it all together, it's just such a beautiful thing and it helps just understanding. How much does history help you understand the present?
DAN CARLIN
I don't even understand how other people understand... So I have a friend who's one of these guys who sees the entire world as math, right. I mean everything is factored through his brain which is math.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is Russell Crowe? The actor Russell Crowe?
DAN CARLIN
No. It should be, it should be. So we'll have these discussions and I'm just fascinated by his thought process and he is by mine because everything in mine is through history but not like history books but like I mentioned to you earlier the context, right. Everything is... It's the past episodes of the soap opera. I only understand now based on what happened yesterday, what happened the day before, how we got to here. And I can't even visualize how other people figure things out without that, just like he can't figure about how other people figure things out without math. And I feel like there must be like 25, 30, 35 different ways of looking at the world and all of us fall into one of those various groups. And so I talked to other history fans and when we first did the history show, I thought I was doing it for other history major types. That's why the early shows sound so different. I don't really give you any history because I thought the audience was going to be people who already knew the history. It's just all the twists and funky stuff, right? But those people, I went to school with them, we all saw the world through that lens, just like I imagine a bunch of mathematicians all see it like my friend. So in answer to your question, it's the only way I make sense of now. That's the entire way I see the world.
MARCUS PARKS
All right. So I want you to-
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right, he's gearing up.
BEN KISSEL
He's gearing up!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We got him a little bit longer.
MARCUS PARKS
All right, we got you for a little longer. I want you to play a little bit of what if. I want to ask you a couple of what ifs. And actually I want to ask you one big what if, it was one that we really got into that was sort of inspired by your WWI series, is the question of Rasputin. Like how important was Rasputin to WWI? If you take the figure of Rasputin out of history completely, does it change WWI or the history of Russia at all?
DAN CARLIN
I'm going to guess, and we'll throw that out there, I'm gonna guess not. Because I think by the time Rasputin is making a real sort of impact on, his real impact was he had the ear of the Czar of Russia and his wife, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
I think once Russia... And this is what 'The Guns of August' is about, Barbara Tuchman's famous book which basically shows how once the gears of the momentum of the first month of WWI get going, you're stuck, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
I described it once like pulling the pin on a hand grenade and then trying to decide you're going to put the pin back in there. Once you pull that pin and then lose it somewhere, you're done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
And I think once Russia starts taking the kind of... It's funny because you could make, and this is why history is important too, you could make certain analogies with Ukraine and Russia today and the war going on there. War creates such a strain on societies that it is a challenge for their political systems not to just collapse. And what was happening in Russia already before WWI broke out, I mean they had a big revolution or a revolutionary attempt that collapsed in 1905, right, the war breaks out in 1914. So they already were seeing the cracks in the edifice. And so to then put immense pressure on Russia, the kind of casualties they were taking in the war, the amount of money that was being spent, the dissatisfaction among the public, and all that sort of stuff put in motion an inevitable collapse that was going to happen. And I don't think unless Rasputin could have convinced the Czar to end the war and I don't think Russia was in any position to end the war. And I think that the Allied powers that he was allied with wouldn't have let him end the war. Then I think Russia's stuck anywhere and they're on like a crazy train to collapse.
BEN KISSEL
Well mentioning history and how it kind of conflates with modern era, Rasputin or Lyndon Johnson, bigger dick? Who do you think had a bigger penis?
DAN CARLIN
Here's the thing, I have a specific view on Lyndon Johnson and that's that I think, and I try to say this about a lot of historical figures, I think he was trying, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm of the same opinion.
BEN KISSEL
Dan, you're skirting the question. I need to hear inches here.
DAN CARLIN
I think Rasputin, you're talking like actual physical proportions? Is that what we're talking about?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of course he is. He doesn't know, he doesn't do the reading.
MARCUS PARKS
He stopped trying.
BEN KISSEL
You can do sports, you can do history. You look at history through dick size.
DAN CARLIN
Here's my favorite Lyndon Johnson story, you guys will appreciate this. And I read it in a book about Richard Nixon who was the next president after Lyndon Johnson. So I don't know if it's true or not but I read that when Richard Nixon, who was a Quaker, right, so he was raised a certain way. When Richard Nixon got into the White House, there's the shower that the president uses in the shower, right, his bathroom shower. And Lyndon Johnson had had installed in the shower a shower jet in the middle of the shower that shot straight up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
DAN CARLIN
And this so upset Nixon he had it removed.
BEN KISSEL
Oh the taint!
DAN CARLIN
So that's my Lyndon Johnson story.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god. People were mad that Obama put a basketball court in. I'd be livid with Nixon. That's the perineum wash!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's my taint spray.
DAN CARLIN
Bill, why didn't Bill Clinton put that back in?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right back in!
BEN KISSEL
He's a dirty man.
MARCUS PARKS
I guess the last thing today, Henry wanted to ask you about aliens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I saw you recently put out an essay about the UAP situation. Because I know that you've been trying to get into ufology a little bit. First of all, don't. Don't come into this, don't do it, don't become a ufologist. They're gonna take everything away from you. You're gonna lose everything.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Henry's been more upset than ever even though he's gotten everything he wanted this year.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But where are you at with it? I saw like now that this disclosure movement, whatever is happening, whatever this David Grusch character talking about what they have, what they don't have in terms of having an object retrieval program. Like they have something. There's all these buzzwords. Where are you at now with your understanding of the UFO phenomena? Your essay was great.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was such a good breakout of like... I was like oh this is the entire history of ufology, great. He just does it in a second. You just shit it out and it's incredible. I don't know how you do it.
MARCUS PARKS
He means that in the best way possible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, of course. I can't believe it. But where are you at now with aliens?
DAN CARLIN
(chuckling)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's it?
DAN CARLIN
I don't have an answer because I'm not one of those people who tries to... I feel the same way about the Kennedy assassination. I'm not somebody who has a strong opinion either way because I just don't feel like I have the evidence, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
But I appreciate and enjoy examining the potentials. And I am somebody who, I suspect that the math that has been done... When you start actually paying attention and I know you guys probably already know this, so I apologize, but when you start paying attention to how many planets are out there in the universe, and this is just assuming one universe, right. Once you start getting into the idea of multiverses and all that, then it starts getting impossible. But once you realize how many planets there are, then it becomes a weird, it almost becomes weirder to start saying that there isn't anymore life out there than to say that there is. Now then you get into things like the great filter, right. This idea that if there is life out in all these places, then what is happening to kill it off before it develops space flight? Those are all fascinating ideas. There's a book I have called, I think it's called 'Where Are They? or something. And it's a book basically about the whole question that if they're all out there, where are they?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where would they be?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. It's also a ufologist whose family has decided to leave him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where did my wife go?
DAN CARLIN
That's right, that's right. But so the answer to the question is that I'm very interested in the subject because I always wonder, and this is how a history mind works also, that if aliens did come to the planet or if major major world governments were made aware that there were aliens, how on earth would they handle it? Right?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
And here's a better question, how would we want them to handle it? And that's something that we did in that article you mentioned, which was start to wonder if the government knew about aliens and we wanted the government to act the way we would want them to act, how would we want them to act? And I read this book on UFOs and that was sort of what we hinged that article that you mentioned on, and the author tried to take a sort of a skeptical approach. But some of the things that she brought up that would happen to us if aliens were real, I had never thought of.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
And the one that was the most interesting to me was the religious question.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh sure.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
I mean what if aliens know what happens to us after we die? What if they know about is there or isn't there a god? And if there is a god, what is the god? I mean do they instantly invalidate all of our religions? If they instantly invalidate all of them religions, well anybody who's paid any attention to religious wars or just what happens between two religions when they start fighting, I mean people die.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
DAN CARLIN
So you start saying okay, if the government knows that exposing us to the fact that there are aliens would expose us to all these things that would destroy the structures upon which our world is built, would we want them to not tell us? Or would want them to ease us into it? And so for me without being, because I don't have the evidence to say if there are or aren't aliens, but we can have a great amount of fun speculating on if there were, how would that best be released to us?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
And maybe you guys remember there was a theory years ago when they started making movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and all these things, that this might be part of the plan, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
DAN CARLIN
That this was all part of easing us so that we became more comfortable with the idea, we didn't view it like 1950s flying saucer type stuff, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Then of course with 'The War of the Worlds', how that radio play turned out, I think there's reason to be hesitant if you are in power I suppose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do believe there is some talk about, I do believe that there is some slow rollout that they're trying to get us to understand something and I don't know what it is. But I think the smart religions are just folding it in. The Vatican has a whole ufological department. They apparently, that's one of the people that might have a UFO they're saying, that they might have something somewhere in the Vatican City, which is the best, coolest/scariest thing I can possibly imagine. Like the Mormons are already folding it in.
BEN KISSEL
Not just for the aliens, they're Catholic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like that's one of those things where like you'd be surprised.
DAN CARLIN
Well didn't L. Ron Hubbard sort of fold it into his?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the OT3, man.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That Xenu reveal gets you hard each time. You know it's coming.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then once it gets you, wow.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They really do. Well Dan, thank you so much for joining us.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you, Dan.
MARCUS PARKS
We can't tell you how much we appreciate it.
BEN KISSEL
It's awesome.
DAN CARLIN
You guys were very nice to have me on, I hope it lived up to the hype.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh it was fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh absolutely.
BEN KISSEL
I was just thinking about what's the Dan Carlin from 2330? What's that history podcast gonna be? And it'll be interesting that as we live this history together, it'll be fascinating to see how it all goes.
DAN CARLIN
What's gonna happen when the analog generation dies out and nobody remembers what it was like?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god. There will never be a game of hopscotch again.
BEN KISSEL
That's right, it's a tragedy.
MARCUS PARKS
And I also want to say to our listeners, if you enjoyed our series on the Manhattan Project, Dan Carlin's episode that was called The Destroyer of Worlds, it's a six hour episode about what happened next.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's great.
MARCUS PARKS
And I enjoyed it immensely. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed it.
DAN CARLIN
Light and airy, rainbows and unicorns just like all our stuff.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you so much. Thank you all so much for listening. Dan Carlin, obviously check out Hardcore History, I'm sure many of you have already. But if you haven't, it's a must listen. And Dan, again, you're just a podcast legend and you're a hero of ours.
DAN CARLIN
It's an honor to be on, guys. Thank you so much.
BEN KISSEL
It was an honor to have you. Thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you, Senpai!
BEN KISSEL
All right, there it was, our conversation with Dan. Marcus, you held it together.
MARCUS PARKS
Thank you.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You did really good. I did better than I did with Kissel with Blasian Sugar.
BEN KISSEL
You did do better, you did do better.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well you didn't try to hook me up with Dan.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
So that helped. Thank you all so much for listening.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Any good takeaways, Marcus?
MARCUS PARKS
Any good takeaways? He was wonderful.
BEN KISSEL
he was wonderful.
MARCUS PARKS
He was just so-
BEN KISSEL
Also he's handsome. That's the thing with radio guys, most of them that say I got a face for radio are actually handsome. And the ones we are like 'I'm Studly Steve' look like potatoes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well that's the joke from the Wayne's World, being like Handsome Dan? Hi, hey.
MARCUS PARKS
How are you?
BEN KISSEL
All right everyone.
MARCUS PARKS
Work is hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Work is hard.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you for listening. Hail yourselves!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan.
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein.
BEN KISSEL
Megustalations everyone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail me. Go fucking listen to Hardcore History.
BEN KISSEL
Hardcore History.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Educate your goddamn self.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Go check it out. And I have one more thing, one more plug for Hardcore History. If you want to get the first 55 episodes, you need to go to his website, you can buy them there. They are absolutely worth the money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's worth it.
BEN KISSEL
Awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
They are audiobooks all on their own. And just go to the RSS feed and I think it's something called Glow. It'll give you a little copy and paste link where you can put it on your podcast app. So yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
Ghost of the Ostfront, start with Countdown to Armageddon. Any of them are all incredible.
BEN KISSEL
All right everyone, talk to you soon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bye!
BEN KISSEL
Bye.