Dan Carlin - Crafting Epic Narratives in Hardcore History

Full transcript: Dan Carlin on London Real

5:49 My guest today is Dan Carlin, the American host of the massively popular Hardcore History and Common Sense podcasts. You are a former television news reporter and radio talk show host who started podcasting in 2005. Hardcore History now has millions of downloads per episode, won numerous awards and has a cult following worldwide, including me. Your theater of the mind style is part storytelling, part analysis, and makes history enthralling to the masses, keeping people entertained for over four hours at a time.

6:18 Dan, welcome to London Real. Thank you. It’s always interesting to hear those kinds of things. Thank you. It’s wild to hear those kinds of things actually.

6:25 Still sort of surreal. Yeah, I can imagine, right? Yeah. In 2005, we were doing this. I mean, there was nothing.

6:31 I mean, to think that if you could have told me back in 2005, we’d be here today. I wouldn’t have even known how to process it. I want to hear about those early days, but first I got to get your reaction when you come to London. You’ve been here, I think a few times in the last few years. I know we tried to hook up.

6:45 I’m so glad we have now. But what, you know, for a guy who lives and breathes history, a lot of it, European history, what do you see in this town or what draws you to this town that say the normal person might not see or feel when they get here? It’s hard for me to separate. You know, I was here as a kid for about four or five months and it really got into my blood back then because I was a history nut back even back then. And so I have a hard time separating that, you know, my nostalgia and how it feels familiar from the way I would feel if I came here yesterday for the first time, but it is the most interesting historical city I’ve ever been to.

7:24 And, you know, the world’s full of great historical cities. So I don’t know why in my mind London stands out, but maybe it’s because it’s so easy for an American to walk around here and explore. But you just get this feeling like you can let me lose here and I could run up and down all the little alleys where there’s a lot of countries that have equal history where I wouldn’t feel either as comfortable or as independent and able to do that. But London’s one of these places with, like you said, more nooks and crannies.

7:50 And I mean, you couldn’t explore it if you had 15 years. And is that because it’s English speaking or because the roots of America are kind of here and it feels like maybe an old, old, old generation? You know, it’s the English speaking thing. I don’t think you can minimize that, but I feel like the English make it easier for me anyway. I mean, everybody’s got a different experience, but I was in Paris yesterday and there’s just, you know, this sense of, you know, you’re never quite sure you’re planning around different things.

8:17 Whereas whenever I’ve had any problems here, it’s so easy. I mean, in a weird way, I feel more at home here than in some U.S. States. So, I mean, I just, it feels as though you’re simply in a different part of your own homeland. And that may be the American-British connection, the mother country kind of thing or not.

8:36 I always say, I got my first history book when I was a kid and I didn’t understand it because I opened it up to the very beginning, right? The beginning of history and there’s guys with powdered wigs. And it didn’t make any sense. I got my second history book while I was living here, but it was a history book for English kids. And I opened up the first page and instead of people with powdered wigs, there was a caveman.

8:54 And I thought, okay, that’s the beginning of history. And so that, so connecting to the mother country kind of thing, American history picks up on top of English history. And so maybe there is that, but for me, the English have always made it easy to explore the backwoods of England. And, you know, if you show an enthusiasm for a country and you’re able to communicate that enthusiasm to the locals, I’ve generally found that they’re excited to show you. They make it easy to explore all those wonderful little nooks and crannies.

9:23 Yeah, there’s always this weird kind of love hate relationship between the Brits and the Yanks, more love. And so like when I first got there, they have names for you like Septic Tank, Yank and things like that. But, you know, they do love, they do have love at the end of it. So they might make fun of us and vice versa. But there is this special relationship that’s hard to deny.

9:43 And maybe it’s geopolitical. Maybe it’s the fact that this is an island and it was always, you know, allying with the US against the continent. So maybe it’s the English speaking thing, but there’s something special here. I do think it’s a little bit of, you know, you get a little tea. I always get a little teased about the politics and all that. But I think five minutes after that, as long as you show yourself to be a halfway decent person, I think probably the way they treat each other, if you show yourself to be a halfway decent person, I’ve always felt pretty embraced.

10:08 I’ve never, I’ve never felt the Septic Tank, Yank thing. Okay. I was in the city, so maybe that’s different. How much of Britain, when you walk around, are you thinking of, say, 1940 era, Churchill, the Blitz and all that? Is that like a big part of what you see when you’re here or the things that you notice as you walk around or do you notice more?

10:28 They have these wonderful, if you’ve never been to London, folks, they have these wonderful plaques that they put up on the wall to mark historical things. So I was just walking by one today. It’s at Winston Churchill lived here between 1883 and 1885. And so there’s no way to not get knocked over by that. But for me, I mean, I love Anglo-Saxons.

10:47 I love Normans. I love the Roman, you know, history, Londonium. I mean, whatever it is. I mean, I you could throw me into any one of those eras. There’s certain eras.

10:55 I’m not as good as the Queen Anne era is not really my thing, but it doesn’t matter. It’s you everywhere you turn around here, you’re confronted by here’s a glass building versus here’s a medieval one right across the street. That’s the best of both worlds for me. This is, you know, everybody’s got their own favorite cities, but I don’t know how you can’t love this one myself. Why do you come here so often?

11:14 I love it. Okay. And the family loves it, too. Yes, they’re addicted. It’s a problem I’m going to have for a long time. I’m worried.

11:20 My grandchildren may grow up here. And when you’re sitting next to someone on the plane and they say, what do you do, what do you tell them? It’s been it’s an easier conversation now than it used to be. I used to say in 2006, it’s a 40 minute conversation, you know, and say, and the first thing you have to go, well, have you ever heard of podcasting? And it’s and by the end of the conversation, 40 minutes later, they still don’t know what it is. They still don’t know what you do and you’ve tried your best.

11:45 I was coming through customs yesterday in in Paris and you kind of get grilled by the the British guy at the customs thing. He goes, what do you do? I go podcast or just come again. And so we started in the well, have you ever heard it? So finally I said journalist, because what kind of journalism I go podcasting and we were in a big circular feedback loop at that point. But but it’s a lot easier than it used to be.

12:04 But there’s still people that don’t know what it is, especially over here. Oh, really? Do you think it’s different in different. I think we lag three or four years from the states when it comes to adoption of technology and especially podcasting for some reason. I do believe that’s true.

12:17 But I think it’s more of it. For me, it’s more I think it’s more of an age thing. When I did talk radio, I started to talk radio on about twenty six and radios demographics quite old, especially talk radio. They were saying that the median age back then was in the mid fifties. And it was always hard for me because it was a little like practicing medicine as a doctor.

12:36 No one wants to hear some 26 year old talking politics when you’re 20 years older than he is. But now with podcasting, it’s gone. It was the other way for a long time where all of a sudden no one under 30 was listening to podcast. So now I think since you know, we started doing this in 2005, that group has grown up. So in my mind, anybody under about 40 or 45 generally know about it.

12:57 And people older than that, if they do know about it, they’re pretty hip, I think, pretty in touch. Tell me about you. You grew up in L.A. Your parents were in the movie business. What was that like back then?

13:09 You know, when you’re a kid, it’s just your parents. And I mean, I get this with my kids today. I mean, if you were, you know, we were I was speaking somewhere yesterday and I’m not famous anywhere except rooms where people deliberately come to see. Right. But then I get the treatment and my kids are just they don’t.

13:29 They’re just shocked. It’s just, you know, your idiot father and these people want to hear you talk. So I think what’s the question again? I’m 52 years old. Forgetting these things.

13:39 That’s right. Like L.A. Growing up L.A. Well, the movie is in the movie business and that town, you know, back then, what was it like? Did it feel different?

13:49 You know, it’s different in when I think back on it, it’s different. So, for example, I was walking through a room about a year ago and my wife was watching it. I don’t watch it very much television unless it’s a sporting event. And so I’m walking through the room and I just freeze because I hear this voice on the television. That usually happens if it’s my mom, because, you know, there’s like a nerve that goes off when it’s your mother. But yeah, you hear her voice and just go. But this was another voice. And so I stopped and I looked at the television show and it was one of those real housewives of this or that. And I, you know, I don’t know anything. And I said, who’s that lady there? And my wife said, Kim Richards.

14:25 I said, Kim Richards. Well, my mom had been in a TV series with her when we were kids and I palled around with her, you know, on the set. I mean, I don’t know, Kim Richards would remember me, but that voice was in my head. And so when you say those kind of things, you think back and you go, God, I kind of remember that. I don’t think about it because it’s stuff when you’re a kid.

14:42 But now I think, you know, I’ll go to a movie set now and I’ll tell my kids, see those mic cables and all these things we used to step over. I used to do that as a kid. And so it actually, in retrospect, as an adult now, I think about it more and it resonates in the way you’re talking about more. When you’re a kid, everything just seems sort of normal. So it actually just seemed normal.

15:01 But it’s probably the reason you went into television broadcasting. No, I don’t. I think it’s, you know, I have I think it’s a gene. I really do. My great grandmother was an actress. My kids want to do that.

15:13 Did you ever want to act? You know, for about five minutes. But I got you. No, no, no, no, no. And what I was into was we were doing improv and I love to do improvisational stuff.

15:23 I didn’t realize the difference between being a working actor, you know, you working actors out there know and being a guy who stands up and does improv comedy for fun. Right. And so the difference I think I read somewhere an actress who said there was a huge difference between, you know, doing this for fun and then realizing your livelihood depended on it. You know, and I never got to that point where my livelihood depended on it, but I could see it in the distance and I was not gifted.

15:48 You know, I mean, I think if you if you do these things and you’re instantly fantastic, that it pushes you forward. But I find real acting to be more of a struggle and not not natural and not fun. I mean, the improvisational stuff was fun. The real acting is as maybe people don’t know. It’s really hard work.

16:05 And if it doesn’t come super naturally to you, it I guess I took years of it in school and it was great training for where I am now. But I never would have been able to connect A to B and said, oh, yeah, this will be so helpful down the road when I’m podcasting years from now, you know. But I do think it’s a gene. We certainly didn’t get the athletic gene or the math gene or, you know, anything like that. So it’s nice to have something maybe we’re good at.

16:28 And what was L.A. like back then? Was it different? Better is a good way to. It was a good way to put it.

16:34 You know, there’s a couple of websites that I sometimes go to. I was from the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, which is a very specific place. And they’re what it was like to grow up as a kid in the 1970s in the San Fernando Valley. And you look at it, it’s very nostalgic. But one of the differences between London and Los Angeles is Los Angeles knocks all its buildings down every 15 years and rebuilds them.

16:53 So if you don’t go for a while, you don’t even have any landmarks anymore. And where I grew up in the valley, one of the great things about the valley, my grandfather actually was involved in building the valley. And and when he used to try to sell homes to the people of Los Angeles, he had to draw on a cocktail napkin how you get over the hill because there were no one even knew it was like big farms and stuff out there. And and when you when I grew up there, there were big lots and you’d have one like store on one lot.

17:20 And you go there now and they’ve torn that store down and built a strip mall to have 50 stores in that same thing. Well, if you do that street corner after street, you become claustrophobic. And so when I go back to my my old home area, I mean, it’s a little claustrophobic for me because it is so built up and there’s so many people and there’s so much traffic. And the beaches are still wonderful. I still have lots of friends down there, but it would be a tough place, at least for me now to go back and try to deal with that without losing my mind.

17:46 And that’s why you moved out and you’re an Oregon. I actually got a job. I wouldn’t I always say I wouldn’t have picked Oregon, you know, if you said, what do you want to settle? But it was not a bad place to land. And and I met my wife there.

17:56 And so it turned out to be one of those places where, you know, your your life just sort of moves you off in that direction. You find yourself there. But when you go back to places like Los Angeles or New York and you think to yourself, I’m not cut out for this anymore. I’ve lost my edge. I can’t even really drive well in Los Angeles anymore.

18:14 Out of practice. Yeah, it’s an intense city and very different and spread out. And yeah, that’s why I think I never could understand San Diego because there was speaking of a city that’s totally different than when we were. Yeah. And I just would never feel like there was history there.

18:26 I mean, sure there was in the mission mission stuff, but it wasn’t like here. So I’m just wrong. I don’t think anything’s like here myself. Maybe you’re right. I’m just always drawn to the city.

18:36 Talk to me about those early days. You know, I know that you were kind of you had this vision of what later became podcasting before it. And I know that you were like, OK, this is I think you foresaw this new media thing coming where individuals would produce content before it became doable with the Apple platform and podcast. Funny that you know that actually. I do know a few things.

18:57 So can you talk about how you saw that coming? And I think you even tried to pitch that to some investors and things back then because you’re not just one of the people that you know, I mean, I was inspired by Rogan to podcast plain and simple. I was in 2011, which for a lot of people makes me an early guy. You’re a dinosaur. Yeah, I am.

19:16 But I’m not. I’m not compared to you. When did you see this as a kind of potential way of individuals broadcasting and more those early days, like even before you started podcast? Well, it’s very nice of you to give me all that credit, but I can’t take it. I was on the radio and it’s actually a funny story.

19:33 I was at being this 26 year old kid screaming to a bunch of adults who didn’t want to hear a 26 year old kid talk politics to them. I was fighting with the audience all the time. So that was my relationship. I didn’t have a bunch of sycophants. I had a bunch of adversaries and I was screaming and yelling one day about, you know, what are you prepared to do to make positive change?

19:50 And, you know, fight, fight, fight, get off the air and there’s a lot of like individuals that come on the callers. Yeah, yeah, callers. And so there’s a message waiting for me when I got off the air. And all it said was if you want to know what I’m prepared to do, call me and meet me for dinner. OK, so I call.

20:05 We arrange a meeting. The guy’s about my age, but that’s all I know. So I go to the restaurant. He told me to meet me at. And if you imagine the Dilbert character from the comic strip, but with hair down to his waist, little like John Lennon glasses.

20:19 And he was a computer programmer and he’s one of the most intelligent men I’ve ever met in my life. But he’s he’s got his own curse. He’s one of these people that is too far ahead of the curve to ever make money off of it. So I remember he was writing apps for the Newton, if you remember the Newton, which is like a huge precursor of the iPhone. So and then he got out of it before the whole thing hit.

20:38 Well, that’s the story of his life. But I was part of that, too, because he said, let me tell you what I’m going to do for positive change. Put your show on the Internet. This is 1995. And I said, you’re going to what he’s going to put your show on the Internet.

20:50 I said, how do you do that? He goes, I’m going to invent how you do that. And you’re going to be the big demo for it. Well, long story short, he was too far ahead of the game again. But then the idea is in your head, right?

20:59 He educated me about the potential, right? He saw the future and said, why would you why would you even want to be on the air in New York when you could be on the air everywhere, which is a really interesting line when you’re in Eugene, Oregon, right? And so then I got together with a group of people before the long before the dot com bust. And the idea was we’re going to build a company and sell it because that’s what everybody was doing. Right.

21:23 And all we needed were eyeballs. We needed subscribers. We need people who were listening. That’s my role. So we created a show.

21:30 And then in 2005, it was the very month that iTunes started supporting podcasts. We started and because one of the people in the company came to me and said, you know, that show you’ve been planning for years, he goes, do it now. And he was an Apple guy who had just left Apple. He said, trust me, do it now. Well, you know, you can start something at any time.

21:47 There’s no necessarily deadline date. So we could have waited years and sort of said, we’re getting it ready. And he said, start it now. And so we started it. And to be honest, I had a huge advantage at the time because it was in 2005, it was like kids in their dorm room, you know, trying to learn how not to spit into the microphone.

22:03 Well, you know, I wasn’t spitting into the microphone by that point. I’ve been a professional for you. So professional radio. Yeah. So I remember telling my partner, I said, you know, what we’re going to do is we’re going to like the Oklahoma land rush.

22:15 We’re going to go in here. We’re going to secure our territory. And then when all the big boys come in, we’re going to defend it. And then when people like the mate, I remember when ESPN started doing podcasts, he came to me and said, is this a bad thing? I said, no, it’s a great thing.

22:28 I said, because they’re going to promote podcasting so that you can listen to ESPN, and then we’re going to benefit because the minute you get your first podcast, you become a podcast listener. And the big jumping off point at that that was preventing us from growing was people didn’t know how to do it. So if your favorite show said, listen to us on the podcast and you figured out how to do it just for that one reason, okay, well, now you know how to do it. You’re going to go see, okay, what other shows are there?

22:52 So for us, whenever anybody advertised their podcast early on, we figured like they were advertising podcasting. And so we’d already had a little Oklahoma land rush by that point. And ESPN came in when? What was that? Pretty early, if I recall.

23:07 But there were a few of those. I don’t know, but what they were doing at the time, too, it wasn’t original content. They looked at it as another platform to distribute the stuff. So you missed our show, where you can still hear it, the recorded version. But we benefited.

23:19 I mean, I remember there would be these, you could watch these big jumps and subscribers and you would always try to figure out, okay, why did those numbers just go up the way they did? And a lot of times they went up because some big player had just jumped in and swelled the audience, who then after they got their favorite show started looking for other content, which every now and then might include you. Right. But this is a different mentality because back in your old radio days, it would be us versus them.

23:41 Yes. Yeah. And so one thing I noticed when the new media came in, it was like the new attitude. And, you know, again, Rogan kind of championed this. He was just like, no, we welcome everyone here.

23:50 Joe’s a great guy. He’s a great guy. And even that attitude influenced us over here. And we were never like, we’re not fighting against you. It’s like, no, you start a podcast, too.

23:58 You start a podcast, you come on mine. Let’s all do this. It’s not a zero-sum game. The old days, if you’re watching one network, you’re not watching the other at the same time. I think the original starting to tape things began to be the difference, videotaping things, because then you could watch this late night show, but it didn’t mean you had to miss that late night show.

24:15 I don’t think the people in the old media got that for a while. I think they get it more now because you can see them in the old days. We used to have rules, which we never mentioned the competition. But now you’ll hear the late night talks. Your host almost, you know, saying, you know, oh, did you hear what so-and-so said?

24:28 Well, you wouldn’t have done that back in the day. But it’s not a zero-sum game anymore. So once you realize that if I’m on your show, that doesn’t take away from my show, you go, well, why am I not going on these shows? And why are you not having them on yours? And yeah, it became a way to share the experience and grow each other’s audience.

24:44 Absolutely. It changed media completely because that had been something that had been a facet of media, I don’t want to say since the beginning, but for a very long time. If you’re watching Milton Burrell on this channel, you’re not watching something else on that channel. Yeah, like a scarcity mindset. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

24:58 So it was nice to see that coming in completely shifting and we’ve always adopted it. And yeah, it’s part of the medium as far as individuals creating this content. So you were at O5, 10 years of radio experience. At least. And one of the few radio guys willing to adopt this new technology.

25:13 Because you had thought of this years earlier with this kid that looked like Gilbert and all that. Also, let’s be fair, I wasn’t on in New York City either with this wonderful, you know, another competitive editor. Yeah, I mean, you know, when you’re this outsider, which I kind of have been for a long time, going back to punk rock and a bunch of, but when you’re an outsider, it’s a lot, you don’t have as much to risk, right? I mean, if I’m Howard Stern in New York City, you know, podcasting, that’s a step down.

25:38 Right. Well, for me. You’re being paid $100 million from Sirius FM. Why would you ever… Yeah, a lot of those guys got in really late for just that reason.

25:44 Well, they didn’t need to. Yeah. Which can hurt you in the long, long run because you’re still trying to hold on to this old business model that you might die with. I know. I think it would have been a lot to expect those people, though, to me.

25:57 And some people did, but I think it would have been a relatively interesting character to say, I’m on in New York City, but the heck with that, let’s get into this new podcasting thing. So, and people didn’t realize that you could use it as a way to supplement your audience for a while, you know, like ESPN did with the rebroadcasting. But, you know, it became cool and hip after a while. And that was another thing where, you know, you couldn’t even explain to people at the cocktail parties what you did for a living.

26:21 And then all of a sudden it’s cool and hip. Right. Talk to me about the first broadcast, the first few years of hardcore history. Did it take a while to find your voice or how you wanted to do it? Or was it always the way you wanted?

26:34 We were doing and I, you know, sort of still do it kind of sort of really political current event show, which was a manifestation of the stuff I did on the radio all those years. And I was having a political conversation or a historical conversation at the dinner table and my mother-in-law was the one who said, you know, why are you talking about politics when you could talk about this? And I said, oh, I can’t talk about history. I said, you know, I was a history major in college, but I’m not a PhD.

26:59 I’m not a historian. And, you know, we bachelor of arts, you know, we have a bachelor of arts degree. You know you’re not a historian and you wouldn’t want to try to be when I told her I can’t do that. I said, I’m not qualified. She said, I didn’t know you had to be qualified to tell stories.

27:13 And I thought, oh, wait a minute, there’s a real light bulb goes on over your head. But then that also dictates how you have to do it. Right. If it’s a storytelling thing, well, then you have to tell stories. You can’t sit there and go, let me tell you about the Anglo-Saxons and crop rotation in the 14th century.

27:27 And, you know, you’re not qualified to do that, but you’re qualified to say, let me tell you what happened once with, you know, King George the fifth or whatever. And so that dictated how we started. But we absolutely didn’t know. I mean, my first hardcore history show was 15 or 16 minutes long. My last hardcore history show was like six hours.

27:44 So somewhere along the line, something happened and it was the confidence thing. No, it was the audience. I would I started. I did a show, the first one we ever did, that was over 60 minutes. And at the end of the show, I apologize to the audience.

27:57 I said, listen, it’s unforgivable. I said, I apologize for it. You started going and flowing. Yeah, or whatever it was. It just took too long to tell the story, right?

28:04 And so I apologize not for wasting their time, but 60 minutes, I thought was a long time. And all these people emails and said, why are you apologizing? We have pause buttons. I mean, we don’t, you know, and they were the ones who said, take as long as you need. Now, of course, it’s a self-selection system, right?

28:20 You’re not hearing from people that go, God, I can’t believe you did an hour, right? But they were the ones, and I don’t think anybody wants a six hour podcast personally, but they really… They obviously do. Yeah, yeah. Or maybe they’re just putting up with me.

28:31 But part of you still somewhat having to hang over from the radio mentality of, first of all, we got to talk about, you know, current events and politics to keep people interested. And we got to keep it short to a certain extent. Did you have to kind of unlearn some of those? I was never traditional enough for that to sink in. I mean, still you did regular radio.

28:50 So is it maybe hard to get out of some of those habits? It was the opposite of that. It was more being free. Like, I mean, for me, the greatest thing about podcasting right off the bat was it was like having a creative white space. If you’re ever in radio or television, you know they have a breakdown, right?

29:05 So in radio, you’re at the top of the hour, you have news, you know, break at 10 minutes. So they have all these… So you get to operate within those parameters. And not just that, you had to assume in radio that people were jumping in and jumping out of the conversation all the time. So you could never go too deep because you’d be losing people.

29:22 So you’d have to reset things when you come back from break. Here’s what we’re talking about now. And so you never got below that initial level. So it took a while to realize, wow, we have all this creative white space. We have no rules on breaks.

29:35 We have no… We can do anything we want. And we can assume that if you listen to the first five minutes, you’ve listened through the next five minutes. So we don’t have to keep talking about level one stuff. Now we can take it to level two stuff.

29:47 So the conversations became different. But you have to do it for a while to sort of realize what having this creative white space means for you. So we had been doing the Current Events Political Podcast for a while before we started hardcore history. So when we started hardcore history, I knew I was excited about the white space. I knew that it was there.

30:04 I didn’t know what to do with it yet. I didn’t know how it was gonna sound. That first show we ever did was just musings. I mean, I don’t think there’s any history there. We made the mistake, maybe not a mistake, a logical deduction, that if you’re listening, you already know the history.

30:19 And so all I did was have the kind of conversations you used to have as a history major with your other history majors. So it was something about Alexander versus Hitler. You stand and go, let me tell you about this combination. Alexander, we assumed you knew them both. So we did a couple of those shows and I started getting emails from people that said, I love what you’re saying, but I have no idea about these people.

30:37 Can you give us some more background? So that became the initial thing that lengthened the shows. But it also starts to go into that realm where you’re getting out of storytelling now. You’re giving historical information. So I had to, and I’m not sure I’ve ever successfully accomplished this in the right way, but you have to figure out, okay, how do I give you the background information without talking about corrupt rotation, the 14th century, and acting like I have a degree in that?

30:59 So there were- So you don’t wanna act like you have a degree and you don’t wanna bore people. No, and listen, there have been several things that have been interesting along this path. One of them is having your assumptions confounded. And one of my assumptions was I was going to get savaged by legitimate historians. And they’ve been very kind.

31:19 Now, as someone once told me, you sell a lot of books for us, which is a nice thing. So maybe they’re clever, but they’ve been remarkably kind. And I’m hoping it’s because we figured out that sweet spot where they know we’re not infringing on their territory. And yet at the same time, I always like to say we’re appetizing a new generation of people to be interested in history. And we do it a lot more.

31:40 History used to be when I was growing up Churchill type history, Toynbee type history, where these grand stories, but also a historian would say to me, these grand, inaccurate bias, you know, all the things. But those are the pageantry things that introduce young people to it in a way that they like it. So I figure if we introduce it to you, you can find out where we were wrong or where we broad brush things and all these kinds of things and read the good history.

32:06 We sell the books that we use for the show’s research on the website as a way to say, if you liked what you just heard, why don’t you go read the original sources we used and really get deeper into it. There’s been a symmetry there that I hope and think works, but I can’t claim credit for having sat down in 2005 or 2006 and saying, let me tell you what, you stumble along the way and hopefully make these right choices. And I think there’s some luck involved and end up here.

32:33 So the historians have been very kind. But you are very detail oriented. And so why did you think they would slate you, the historians? Because I think maybe I would have. I mean, I think if I’d had the degree and I- Who is this guy with a bachelor’s degree?

32:46 Yeah, and who does he think he is? And you know, they’re bigger people than I am, maybe is a good way to put it. And I think they have a beef. I mean, I think if you say to yourself, well, who is this person to be giving you this information? One guy had an interesting line, which I thought was relevant.

33:02 And he said, I don’t have a problem with you, but I have a problem with people that try to do what you do sometimes because not everybody approaches it the same way. And yet there’s some wonderful history podcasts out there. I mean, Daniele Ballelli’s got one. Mike Duncan’s got one. I mean, those are great people.

33:18 And so I mean, I think that we’ve opened up the door here in a way that I hope helps historians and history as a genre. I know we’re sending lots of kids to college who wanna take history as a major. And you know, there’s a crisis. I read several books years ago about this crisis of we’re killing the next generation of classicists and historians because it’s so minutely focused and we’re writing so much for our peers in the other halls of education and not enough for the people at ground level.

33:53 But it’s hard if you’re getting into the very, very disciplined scientific peer-reviewed type stuff that they write, it’s hard to interest your 10-year-old kid in that. Whereas, if I get up there and talk about knights and flags and battles and all this, which is the stuff I like, you can interest a lot of people who can then go on and take that class on crop rotation in the 14th century later. And I think that’s a really good question from somebody who’s really good at teaching it.

34:15 Yeah, I think we’ve all had a Dan Carlin moment. And this was mine. It was like a November or December and it was super cold outside and I was on my balcony grill because I’ll grill in any weather. Me too. And I have a gas grill.

34:26 That’s because we’re both from the same place, we’re paisan. That was that. Paisan. And so I’m grillin’ and I’m listening to one of your podcasts. It might’ve been you describing the Siege of Munster, maybe.

34:35 I mean, that’s one of my favorite. Me too, I like that one. I don’t know why that’s my favorite, but. Because it’s bizarre. It’s bizarre and I’ve never heard this story before.

34:42 I have a way of being able to tell the story that never ends and feels like it goes on for three hours in a way where. Because it does. Yeah, it does. Because it went up for how many days? And I feel that as well.

34:52 I feel like I’m there and it’s just this never ending thing. And it’s raining out and I’ve just got this kind of smile on my face that I feel like I’m there and that you’re guiding me through this thing that happened, which makes it more real as opposed to if it was fiction. I don’t know if men tend to have a harder time of engaging with fiction, I don’t know. When it’s something that actually happened, it was like a special moment for me. But how would you describe your style of doing these things?

35:23 I have a theory and we talked earlier about genetics and theater and that kind of stuff, but I think that different people organize their worldview and their thought processes, or maybe they’re born with the hard wiring that goes a certain way. Some people think about things in a mathematical sense, for example. I think people who gravitate toward history naturally are able to sort of put themselves in that moment. In other words, why is talking about names and dates in the past interesting?

35:50 Well, if you’re able to project yourself into that story and feel it a little bit, it’s enough of a draw so that you’re interested in it, but what about the people who can’t do that? And I think if there’s anything that I bring to the table, it’s the ability to maybe take you with me if you’re not normally that way and say, let me give you an idea of how history majors and people who are born liking this stuff, how we feel about it. And sometimes that’s all it takes to open the door to them.

36:19 They don’t need you after that, right? Once you show them that path and they can start to, and people have said that to me, I listened to your show, but now I’ve moved on to this book or that book. But I think sometimes that some people can do this naturally and that makes the history majors, but all they need is a little guidance sometimes to develop the technique where now they can do it themselves. I wish I could do that with some of the subjects I’m not good at, but I mean, I think that’s maybe like a guide or an appetizer, like I said earlier, to making the past something that’s more like a dramatic movie or where you can start to feel, I’m very into what it must have been like emotionally to go through a lot of these things.

36:55 So we do a lot of really dark topics and people say, are you really just interested in it? Do you like those things? I say, no, I’m amazed at the human capacity of the people in these stories to surmount these challenges and these things that happen to them. And the more extreme the challenge is, the more amazed I am at the human capacity to deal with it. I mean, you look at these war stories that we talk about and you say to yourself, how did these people not just deal with it at the time, how were they able to cope for the rest of their lives?

37:25 And so that to me is what gets me interested in this story. And we’re old enough to admit these kind of people who went through these amazing stories and you talked to a Holocaust survivor and you sit there and you go, how do you do it? And I think part of it is an admiration because you don’t think necessarily that you yourself could do that, right? And so like we mentioned the Munster story, we started the Munster story off, I think, it’s a long time ago now, with the execution of the people at the center of the story.

37:52 We tried to explain how unbelievable the experience must be. I think they tied them to the same stake or something. So that one guy who’s about to get the same treatment that the other guy’s getting is tied to him while he’s getting it. And I thought to myself, God, I remember being a kid and seeing my sibling get a shot and I’m about to get that same shot. Okay, well, that’s that thing magnified a bazillion times.

38:14 And so I long ago figured out that you self-select your audience, right? You choose what’s interesting to you and then several shows later, if you’ve done that, your audience, whatever’s left over, are people who like that same stuff. And so now I’m at the point where I can just, if I’m interested in it, I know whoever’s left listening is interested in it too. And so this fascination with the extremes of the human experience and the Munster story is about as extreme as it gets is kind of what gets me into it.

38:42 I do think that my mother always thinks, my mother’s a little, there’s a past life thing and that you went through some of these things once upon a time and you’re still hooked to it. But I think it’s just the ability to have a sensitivity to not feeling what those people feel, to have an interest in the fact that they did this and felt this and went through this. And you always try to relate it to present day time. Or often times. Analogy, yeah, we’re using a lot of analogies.

39:07 And you kind of say, well picture this in this scenario. It would be a lot like this person today doing this and this and that. Is that something that you always did or you always felt like it was important to make those current references? That’s an interesting angle too, because I think that’s dangerous. I mean, I think we’re playing with fire without a little bit, but I don’t see any other way to do it.

39:26 And the reason you’re playing with fire is because analogies are inherently not quite right, as we all understand. So when you said it’s a little like this, that’s exactly what it’s a little like this. But those are the things that allow it to be real. Because otherwise, if you’re talking about the Munster story, we’re talking about the Middle Ages. And there’s so many things that are different.

39:45 You know, the old line that the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. Well, okay, so how do you relate it to something that you can understand? And that’s why the analogies come in handy. But I’m very careful with them, because inherently, I mean, the one thing again, you know about being a history major, but not being someone who’s a doctor, is those analogies are a great way to have somebody misunderstand the past. And so carefully you try to say to people, imagine this, and that to me is the storytelling element.

40:14 So when you say, you know, I had a grandfather who was a fantastic storyteller, maybe that’s genetic too, but you have to find ways to make things relatable. And then you have to be careful that you don’t go overboard. So yeah, the analogies are really important, I think, but they’re a little dangerous. The monster siege, you keep saying we. Who’s we when you go to create this piece?

40:36 It might be the royal we, it might be. Okay. And how long does it take from the very start of maybe catching your eye, or you thinking, you know what, it’s about time I tell this story, to where I finally get to pay for it and download it on my. It’s free for years. It’s free for years.

40:55 We don’t put them in the pay-to-arker for years. For years, okay. I wanna talk about your business model at some point. All right, so until I download it, what is that length of time and what happens over that process? And is it fairly consistent?

41:06 It’s getting longer, isn’t it? I mean, I’m doing about 2.5 shows a year now, and that’s unforgivable also. But that’s fine with you, right? No, I’d like, you know, we’d make a lot more money if I could get one out a month. I’m not that competent.

41:19 You know, I have these wonderful tales in my back pocket that I keep. And the Munster story was one, right? You read these stories years ago and you can tell. Someday I will tell that. You know, and I have some that I keep, like the next one I’m gonna do, and we never talk about what they are in advance, but the next one’s a back pocket story where you go, okay, people really wanna hear this.

41:36 And then I throw more obscure things in between. It starts with a lot of research, as you might imagine. And some of these stories, we did a big, long series on the First World War. And, you know, it’s a little, I always have to leap before I look with these topics a little bit because by the time you started the research, if you’ve decided you screwed up and you made a mistake, it’s too late, right? The conveyor belt is moving and you’re committed.

41:59 So you have to sort of roll with the punches. On the First World War I, I forgot without thinking that every country in that war has their own version of the history of it. So you can’t just read five books or 10 books from Britain or the United States. You have to go get a book of Italian history on this. And you have to go get a book from the German point of view.

42:19 Well, now you’re exponentially increasing the amount of reading material, but I always try to show it, this is my view of things, I like to try to have a Rochamond sort of effect on these stories. I always explain it to kids like it. There’s a Gilligan’s Island episode where a crime happens. And then for the rest of the episode, you get to see how every character in the show saw it differently. And that’s, I try to point out that, look, history is something that is just like our lives right now, where if you and I look at a political situation, you may view it entirely differently than I do.

42:52 And I got a letter from one guy, and he was a great letter. He said, I didn’t realize that the past wasn’t just set in stone and was one way. And he said, I didn’t realize that in the United States, we have like a Fox News and an MSNBC, so for right and a left, because I didn’t realize that there’s a, the equivalent of a Fox News version of history and an MSNBC version of history, and one might be the only one that survived. So to be able to try to say, how did the First World War look from the German, I always called the First World War the greatest tragedy that ever happened to Germany.

43:21 If you could turn around, if you’re German and you could turn the clock back, and you could avoid that, you avoid the Second World War. I mean, so imagine how that must have felt. I always, I’m also fascinated with the people that get caught in the gears of history. So we did a show on the Eastern Front, which I just, one of these great tragedies, Ghosts of the Ost Front, we called it. And one of the angles that was mixed into the show was, you know, in the American mind, at least, this is a conflict between two bad guys, right?

43:46 Hitler and Stalin. And there was some American generals used to joke that we should just let them fight and kill each other off. And they helped the side that was losing, right? So that they could do more. But imagine if you’re a German soldier, for example, who’s forced to fight for the Reich, but your family has been persecuted by the Nazis.

44:02 So you actually have to go there and fight for that. And you’re fighting a Russian soldier who maybe is forced to fight because they’ve got a pistol at your back, but your family’s in a gulag somewhere. These are people that could be us, but because of an accident of birth, a time and a place, they’re trapped in the gears of history. Now, that doesn’t mean there weren’t committed Nazi soldiers fighting for the Reich or committed communist guys fighting for, you know what I’m saying?

44:22 But in the millions and millions of people who get trapped in these stories are people that could be anybody that are just wrong time, wrong place. And yet we don’t always have a lot of sympathy. The greatest letter, and I mean, absolutely, by a long margin that I ever got, and I always remember this in the Hardcore History Show, was from a German after that Ghost of the Ost Front show. It was a written letter or email. It was an email.

44:45 And he said he had a grandfather that fought on the Eastern Front. And you know, the one thing, if you talk to combat veterans, it’s almost a truism. The closer they were to combat, the less they’ll talk to you about it. He said the grandfather never said it worked, right? Was in a camp in Russia for years before he came back.

45:00 And he said he had to take him on a very long car trip. He put him in the car, he said he put the podcast on. It was not a word for hours, because it’s a long podcast. He said, we got to the destination, I shut the podcast off. And he turned to me and he just started talking.

45:15 And the difference he said was that his grandfather said, when you are the bad guys, nobody wants to hear that you suffered or what you went through, because there’s this sense of deserving it. But they’re human beings, and it could be us. You know, you were lucky to not be born in that country. That could have happened. If Albert Einstein doesn’t get out of Germany, what happens to Albert Einstein?

45:33 It’s an accident of birth, right? So I mean, and I think that helps touch your soul in a way that creates a connection between you and a person who lived, died, and suffered a long time ago. I mean, you know, we change a lot. And you know, all the world’s a stage and all the people merely players, but there are human emotions that are the same. Pain is pain, right?

45:56 Emotion is emotion, love is love. And those are things that connect us through the eras. And so one of the things I like to bring out are this is us still. We’re wearing different clothes. The sets are different.

46:06 The circumstances we operate in are different. But you can relate to these people because the same things that make us human, this is human history, right? And I think that’s what can take a person that didn’t realize they were interested in history and help them understand that they were. Appetize them as we say. And it makes them understand the presence.

46:24 It does, gives them the context. You know, I know a guy who’s a person who works on Game of Thrones. And so I always say, we went up there, I took my kids up, he invited us to come and watch them shoot for a little bit. So they’re watching one little isolated scene in the middle of the series somewhere. And of course, none of us have any idea what’s happening.

46:41 That’s how history is. If you can go back and watch all the earlier episodes, well, now it all makes sense. You know, they used to say when I was a kid that history teaches lessons. But if you go and you read the historical debates in the journals that historians have with each other, they debate that question a lot. Do we have lessons?

46:56 And people who don’t understand history always love to say, well, history teaches us, you know, you can’t appease dictators or all these kinds of things. History didn’t teach that kind of stuff because the variables are too different every time. You know, I joke it’s like the old line was that it’s like stepping into a river. It’s the same river, but the water is not the same. So what history kind of teaches you though is how things got to here.

47:17 And that’s extremely useful because all of a sudden you understand. And if you can say to me what people are missing out by not understanding history, if we don’t understand what’s going on because we don’t understand how we got here. And so context is the great superpower that history teaches. Math teaches you something important too, but history teaches a context. Context.

47:38 And so just to finish that question, how long would it take to create that monster seed show? Six months, nine months with all of the reading. When they were less intense, we used to be able to get one out every month, month and a half. But you read that many books. Well, but we didn’t back then.

47:57 And that’s really the difference between, you know, I don’t like the old shows. I tend not to like any of the, it’s funny, but you know, yeah, I don’t like any of the stuff we’ve done, but I really don’t like the old shows, but I don’t like them because they don’t match the bar where the bar is today. Those were good shows by the standards of 2006, 2007, but the standards were much lower, right? Today’s standards are much higher, and they should be. The medium has come of age, as they say.

48:23 But that means we have to work a lot harder, right? The expectation level’s higher. And I don’t mind that because I do feel like, I feel like I’m using every brain cell. Does that make sense? I’m fascinated by potential.

48:36 And when you study history, you study these august figures, you think, dang, you know, what’s the difference between potential and success? And the guy told me once, he said, potential’s a devil. He said, because you could become president of the United States and not have lived up to your potential, it could haunt you, right? But I feel sometimes like when these shows are done, especially the recent ones, they’re so intense. And by the end, you’re so spent.

48:58 But I told my wife, I can die happy knowing that we used every brain cell, whatever potential was there, I maximized, and that’s satisfying for me anyway. And you’re proud of these latest episodes? No, I see all the flaws. I’m glad you guys like them, but I just see all the flaws. And how long will it take you to actually record those?

49:17 A long time. Seven days, 10 days in the recording booth. Months. Months, okay. I used to be able to go in and do them all in one shot, straight up.

49:27 But they were, you know. You do the whole four hour piece. They weren’t four hours, that’s why, 45 minutes. And then what ended up happening, I have a person who does all the stuff that I don’t do. And he said to me a long time ago, he goes, why?

49:40 You know, we used to cough. In radio, you have a cough button, right? So if you’re gonna cough, you push this button that kills the audio. And we started running into problems, because in podcasts, you don’t have a cough button. So I mean, I would get in there and I would start ranting and raving like at the 35 minute mark.

49:54 I would cough, or there’d be something, I’d say, stop. And we’d start over. And finally, he looks at me and goes, why are you starting over? He goes, just stop. He goes, pick up where you left off and we’ll cut it and splice it together.

50:07 And I said, I can’t do that. I said, I’ll ruin my chops. I’ll never be able to go back into, you know, that’s again, still hedging your bets, thinking I’ll never be able to go into radio, because then I’ll never be able to do those long monologues. So eventually, at a certain point, pretty early on, I thought, I’m not going back into radio. I don’t know why, this is a new art form.

50:24 Who says we have to do it in a stream of, why can’t we splice things together? There’s no script. So if you’re gonna do a four hour show with no script, there’s gonna be editing. And the funny thing is you do get a little addicted to it, because you sit there and go, I didn’t like yesterday’s version. The energy wasn’t right, so we’ll redo it.

50:40 But it’s different, it turns out it’s funny, because if you compare the two, they’re nothing alike. No two versions I ever do even sound remotely the same. So, but we do a lot of editing now, and several months of reading, note taking, marking passages in the books that you wanna make sure you include, quotes and stuff. And then you get in there and you start the process. And some days are better than others.

50:59 Talk radio’s a little dependent on what side of the bed you wake up in the morning. I did five days a week, three hours a day. And I used to say, I was a pretty good talk show host for two of those days. And the problem was I wasn’t the other ones, because what side of the bed you wake up in? Can I tell or you could tell?

51:15 I think everybody could tell. But the difference is that if I’m crappy that day, you don’t have to hear it in a podcast, right? So you are definitely getting the best of me. We could take a mulligan, as they say, in golf. It’s a bad energy day or you didn’t sleep well.

51:29 We had little kids, if the baby kept you up all night. My wife would say, the baby never kept you up all night. But you know what I mean. So this is, you create a new art form almost because you have to, right? You’re working your way through the practical dilemmas involved in getting the work done.

51:45 So you develop workflow things. And so that’s kinda how it developed organically. We can’t take credit for having thought of any of it. And you probably do that uniquely. I mean, everyone else has probably their own process.

51:56 I think so. Not many people do actually what you do. Well, people tell me that we developed a design that other people do. I mean, there are history shows out there that sound a lot. And there’s also funny, there’s knockoffs.

52:09 I mean, one guy does a Game of Thrones podcast but does it in my, deliberately, my voice and my. And it’s hilarious. He sent me a note and was saying, do you mind? You know, I thought. Do you mind, Wendy?

52:18 No, I said, just make sure that you don’t confuse anybody. But it’s a tribute. I think one of these. I think it’s a form of flatter. And I can only say this now because we’ve done it.

52:28 But you have these moments of growth or where your popularity increases. And one of those moments, somebody called me and said, do you know Stephen Colbert just did an impersonation of you? And I said, what? You know, he’s a, for those of you in London who don’t, he’s just a host in the States who does a TV show. And I listened to, he had a podcast and he was doing impersonations of me.

52:49 And my wife said, well, that’s how you know you’ve arrived but it’s hilarious to hear somebody, you know, because you think you speak absolutely normally and I’m hearing him sort of, you know, how you do imitations, you know, up it a little bit. It was, I laughed my head off. But so you’ve developed this format without even just being yourself. And so, and I’ve heard, you know, there’s other history podcasts that have done the same thing now with their own voices and their own takes.

53:11 Right. When did you know that this was gonna be a business and that you could survive and not have to go back to radio? And again, starting back in 05, I mean, there wasn’t that many people watching or listening. We didn’t know. And we didn’t take money or have any money angle for years actually.

53:28 It was just free and you knew it was okay. Well, we hadn’t thought any farther along than that. You know, you’re so concerned with getting the work done. And then at a certain point, you know, we were saying, can we ask listeners for money, like donations, you know, like a public broadcasting in the United States has donation drives. And we didn’t know.

53:46 And so we said, okay, well, what if we just sort of say, hey, you know, if you want to kind of thing and that started the ball rolling. And so the model of how the show survives has changed over time. We used to have, donations used to be the main reason. We’re not a good venue for advertising because we just don’t get enough programs out. And I have this personal aversion to any more than one advertisement in the show.

54:11 So some people do five or eight advertising. Mid-rolls would not flow with you. No, exactly. Think of how that would screw up the flow of your storytelling in the podcast. And so, and really for us, the listeners donating gave us the freedom to say, oh, we’re not gonna screw up the flow of this, but, and then now it’s changed because the history shows are weird.

54:31 And again, not designed for this, but they’ve turned into something that if you wanted to compare them to something in the analog world, it’s not a magazine subscription or a newspaper subscription, it’s a book, right? And so people say all the time, how many listeners do you have? And I don’t know how many listeners we have. I know how many people have listened to this show or that show as of today. So like if you went and not to compare myself to any of these people, but if you said, how many copies of the Lord of the Rings has J.R.R. Tolkien sold?

54:59 Well, that’s a moving number, isn’t it? In 1970, it’s one number, today it’s another. Three weeks from now, it’ll be a number. So if you say how many people have heard Ghosts of the Osp front, it’s an ever-changing number. I said to somebody the other day, I would love to know on my deathbed or I would love to know at the end of time how many people actually heard all these things, right?

55:18 Because they’re in digital stone, they’re not going anywhere. And the funny thing is when you think about how much work you put into it, it really makes it worthwhile to think that over the course of human history, a lot of people might hear these kinds of things and it really has become totally unintentionally, you know, your little legacy, your little thing that you’ve left, your graffiti that you’ve written on the wall of our existence, right? I was here. Is that important for you, legacy?

55:43 It wasn’t until I got to be older and now you kind of think, what the hell have I done with my life? Well, I did this. Dolores O’Reardon from the Cranberries who died recently, there was a line in the stories that were summing up her death and she said the first time she ever saw her video playing in a bar, she thought, okay, I’ve checked that off in life. I didn’t realize this was gonna be my check off in life kind of thing, but as you do it more and more, you kind of go, you know, this is better than what I thought it might’ve been 25 years ago, you know?

56:11 Yeah, so you’ve left this piece and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. That’s right, and I still see all the flaws in it, but other people like it, so that’s great. As any kind of artist, you just have to let it go. That’s exactly right. There’s so many people that won’t publish because they’ll always be holding it back to perfect it and then they’ll never learn, they’ll never know.

56:28 I think without those early ones being so incomplete in your mind or unresearched in your mind, you would never have the later ones. I think art is an interesting thing to bring up too because is it? You know, art, what you do. Well, but when we were doing just the political current event show, I didn’t see that as art at all. Talk radio might be an art for the person who does it, but I never saw the finished product as art.

56:51 It’s kind of, we had a conversation and that’s what it is. Somewhere along the line in the history shows, and it may have been because of listener feedback, we started to realize, you know, whatever it is, it’s artistic. And it kind of changed our approach to it, right? Because when you think maybe you’re doing art, well, you kind of approach it a little differently, if that makes sense, right? You start thinking to yourself, is this really artistic enough for us?

57:15 Does this really add value to an audience that’s expecting something that’s kind of artistic? And so again, we talk about that blank, white, creative canvas. That doesn’t mean you have to put art there. But sometimes you draw and you step back a little ways and you go, maybe it is art. And you can’t decide that for somebody else has to walk up and say, oh yeah, it’s art.

57:33 Because I don’t think you can say to yourself it is. It’s just whatever the heck you got done with a lot of caffeine and pizza in a little studio for a long time. And you walk out exhausted and you, what church will say about writing a book first that you’re mistress, then it’s your master, and then you fling it to the public, and that’s kind of how we do it. But that they like it is maybe the greatest, it’s absolutely the greatest work-related success or satisfaction I’ve ever felt, even with all the flaws I see.

57:58 Right, and you felt empowered to be more artistic and give it more individuality, more flair, more that. Yeah, well, and especially because, again, so much of this is based on listener feedback. Because especially if you’re performing on Broadway or the West End and the crowd gets up and claps or whatever, that’s the feedback. You know you did something right, but with what I do, you’re working by yourself. When you put it out on the internet, you don’t know anybody’s even hearing it until you hear it back, right?

58:28 It’s not even sort of real. And so when they’re getting back to you and they’re saying, we like this, we like this, this is great, this is, you kind of go, hmm, well, maybe you don’t have the real capacity as close as you are to it to maybe see it the way the people who are the target audience are seeing it. So really, I mean, everything that people keep giving me credit for, it has a lot to do with the feedback we were hearing from listeners. They give you the freedom and the encouragement to explore this area or explore that area.

58:54 And so there’s a very, it’s an interactivity with a bunch of people I’ve never met who’ve helped me immensely. Do you have a formal way of getting feedback on your shows or is it just listening to the emails that come in? Emails have become the bane of my existence. Do you ever have like, I’m sure you don’t have like a test audience where you watch people on hour three or four. But maybe you should.

59:14 Well, you know, I get really jealous about that sometimes because, you know, when we’ve heard these shows as often as we’ve heard them, you know, and I get to hear all the versions I don’t like, right? So I mean, I throw it out and I go, but you start confusing it. So in your head, by the time we release these shows, we cannot hear them the way a new listener would hear them with Virginieres. But what that means is you don’t know what you have. Yeah, echo chamber in your own head.

59:38 And so there’s a real factor of close your eyes, push the button, and then wait to hear what people say. And of course, no matter what you put out, you get different reactions. In order to be successful, you’ve got to be getting a lot of feedback, right? So when people tell you you have missed millions of listeners, well, then you’re going to get a lot of emails. So they overwhelm us today.

1:00:00 I mean, there’s just no way to even handle it. But it has to be that way, right? I mean, if you wanted to be successful, you’re going to get a lot of emails. But it totally destroys your ability to get feedback from there because you’re getting every single viewpoint you can imagine, right? Do you believe this email or do you believe that?

1:00:15 This guy likes short podcasts, that lady likes long podcasts, you know? So at a certain point, you’re adrift and you’re on your own. But those people years ago, with their help, when there were a lot fewer emails, got me to the point where I could do this. Right, they shaped the show. They did, they shaped the show.

1:00:29 But not so much anymore. You’ll get a general feel for the reaction to the show. Generally, I see some email flow. And then obviously numbers, you’ll see who’s listening and downloading. This was the worst show you’ve ever done, Dan.

1:00:43 But when there’s too much feedback, it’s the equivalent of having no feedback. But early on, when there wasn’t too much feedback, it was extremely helpful. And at the same time, you can’t, I’m not serving the audience. Does that make sense? I mean, because we talked about self-selection earlier.

1:00:59 If I do what they want, they’ll take me into an area where I’m not neither qualified or maybe I don’t have the enthusiasm. One of the biggest compliments I get from those folks is when they’ll say something like, would you please do a show on 17th century India or something? And you go, I can’t, I don’t know enough. I can’t learn everything about these topics that I have to learn in the period that I have to do the show. So every show I’ve ever done is something that there’s at least a foundation before I start.

1:01:24 Right, a passion for. Well, and some knowledge. Once upon a time, I was really into that. And there’s still some residual knowledge of it. And then you can build upon it with new information that’s happened since you were interested in it.

1:01:35 But I can’t start and talk about something that I knew nothing about. I don’t have enough time to really understand it. But again, the audience are the ones that say, God, we really like that. And it helps you understand, okay, they’re into this. I can do this.

1:01:50 But you just can’t take requests, really. Does that make sense? Totally. I was actually interviewing someone here for a role and they said, Brian, how do you choose the guests? And I thought for a second.

1:02:00 And I said, this is the deal I made with myself. When I left banking seven years ago, I said that if I’m ever sitting in this studio with someone in that chair who I don’t wanna spend the next two hours with, I’m going back to earn money the dirty way again. Dirty way. So I have to be actually excited and interested to have that person in the chair. Like I personally, Brian Rose wants to not talk to them.

1:02:24 And two years ago, I might’ve wanted someone on the show. But now I might not want them there anymore. Maybe now my standards have gone up or my interests have changed. So for me, it’s really very selfish. The guests on London Real or people Brian Rose finds really interesting.

1:02:36 And sometimes that’s an MMA fighter that no one knows who it is, but I really like them. Today it’s you, because I really like you. Thomas Friedman from the New York Times. I’ve just been watching him interview Obama and I read his book, The World is Flat a while back. And I’m like, I really wanna talk to him.

1:02:50 And so in a weird way, it’s selfish. But like you said, it’s the reason the audience is there because they’ve followed my last 500 choices. These are people who like what you like. Right, so I need to stay true with what I like as opposed to what they want. For all the listeners out there, one of the real perks of what we do is the ability sometimes to interview your heroes or talk to your heroes.

1:03:10 I mean, I had James Burke who did the Connections series and the day that you, I talked to him a couple of times and I hope the giddiness that I was feeling at the time didn’t come through so much in the voice. But that is, of all the little perks you could have in this business, the ability to call up or have somebody call up somebody you really admire and would have loved to have spoken to and actually get to have a conversation. That’s one of the nice perks I agree with.

1:03:31 Yeah, I used to do this from my flat, right? It started off in my apartment. And I used to say, I did a TED Talk and I told about this TED Talk and I think Neil deGrasse Tyson had come over to my show. And I said, at the end of the day, I’ve tricked these people to come to my house and hang out with them. That’s funny.

1:03:46 That’s what it all is. To you, it looks like a podcast. For me, it’s just me meeting my heroes and having fun. And so I always just think about that. It’s a good analogy you said.

1:03:54 Also, that artistic thing you said, I guess when your audience gives you the license or the feeling that maybe I should make some art and you go with it, that can be really empowering. I still don’t think of it as art because it’s hard for the artist, if you will, to see it as art. But you do realize that it helps you to see it differently, if that makes sense. I mean, there was that TV series, MASH, when we were growing up. Sorry for all the American references to your English.

1:04:22 But they used to call the surgery that they did by the front lines, meatball surgery. So in other words, it’s not the stuff we can do in a wonderful hospital. We’re just patching them up. And I always thought talk radio was like meatball surgery. And now when somebody says, no, no, no, you don’t have to do that.

1:04:34 You take more time. You more lovingly do this. So I mean, we’re crafting something now. And I don’t think we would craft it if the audience had made me think about it as more artistic. It would still be meatball surgery, slap dash, throw it together, get it out in three weeks or whatever.

1:04:52 But now we sit there and go, this is forever, right? And when it’s forever and it’s got your name on it, you begin to really say, no, let’s make something that three generations from now, if they’re listening to this, it’s still good. Or it’s as good as it ever was. Let’s put it that way. I mean, if people like it today, if it’s evergreen, like I said, more like a book, people like Tolkien today and Tolkien’s been dead a long time, not to compare, but it’s that kind of thing.

1:05:17 If we do it right, people long after I’m gone, hopefully, we’ll still be getting something out of this. And that sort of is that legacy empowerment feeling where you feel like, okay, I left some graffiti on the wall and people appreciate it. It was good graffiti, it looked good. It wasn’t covered over, it’s still there and they still like it. Yeah, we’ve had some conversations with individuals that for some reason, everything aligned and I got out of the right side of the bed and the guests got out of the right side of the bed.

1:05:43 And it’s like this weird, almost descriptive, real-time kind of opera and it crescendos and it goes like this and you put it out there and they just go crazy and you just get the right person at the right time. And so last year, we actually went in and we said, you know what, we’re actually gonna try to make like a 90-minute documentary film. And one of my guests invited me to come down to their place in Spain. It was Dorian Yates, a six-time Mr. Olympia and we did yoga and we did all these things together.

1:06:07 And so then we took this artistic license a little further and we’re like, all right, now we’re gonna put something together that really takes the person on a journey because we figured there’s only so much you can get in someone’s head with two guys sitting in leather chairs. And so we’re doing this more and more and more. But again, we get into this echo chamber, like you said, where we live and breathe and eat it for like six months and then you put it out there and you just don’t know what’s gonna happen.

1:06:27 But for us, it’s the same thing. It’s like this is forever and every second is every emotional beat. So we’re playing with that. It makes you try harder, doesn’t it? Oh, yeah.

1:06:37 It’s encouragement. You don’t half-ass it, as we say. It’s not being both surgeries. No, it’s not being both surgeries. You don’t gotta save their life right now.

1:06:42 No. Like for you and me, we gotta have this conversation the next hour when you can actually craft something like you do or we’re doing more now. There’s a lot of decisions. It can be really stressful and anxious. You wanna get it right, but then you know you gotta get it out.

1:06:56 Well, but see, that’s what changed what we do because we used to feel really compelled. Once you develop a listenership, they want the next show. We had to realize somewhere along the line that only part of our responsibility is to those listeners that are waiting on the next show. Part of the responsibility are to the people that haven’t found it yet and won’t find it for a long time. So we have to please both of them, but if you have to choose, there’s gotta be a sweet spot, obviously, because if you don’t put out a show once every five years, people are kinda like, but I don’t think like we’re making these shows for the current listenership.

1:07:30 I think we’re making, we’re writing a book for everyone who’s gonna read the book down the road, and I always have this philosophy that if you put out a show to get a show out for the current listenership, and it’s not good, they’re gonna savage you, even if you’ve got it out. If it’s really good, they will forgive anything, right? So when trying to make the, I always feel like, err on the side of better, because they’ll cut you some slack if you do, and the people that don’t have to wait for the shows, that’s the only criteria they’re gonna have, right?

1:07:58 They don’t care when it came out. They weren’t in real time waiting for it. But it is, when we’re talking about financial and business side, it does make a difference in terms of, if I could get a show out a month, I mean, I would have rolled up here and the giant rolls are really, it’s a little bit different when you’re getting two out a year. Yeah, that’s the sweet spot. Boris Johnson here in London was running for mayor of London, was probably vying for a being prime minister at some point, and he came out with a book about Churchill, and it was a history book about Churchill.

1:08:30 But it wouldn’t take too many smart people to look through it and say, it wasn’t really a book about history, it was a book about today. And you see this all over the world. You see Putin talking about Stalin, and you see all of these things. What do you see current politicians using when they use history as a tool? And do you have any advice for people or rules of thumb when you see these things happening?

1:08:53 I know you were careful to say, Brian, I’m saying this is like this. Because I think you know that some people say this is this and they use the history as a very, very, very powerful tool for their own agenda. I have a classic example I use, because I’m not gonna mention names, but there was one host on television, you know, the political shows, right? For example, like conservatives in the United States love to use, and I think they do here too, the Munich example, 1938, you know, we have peace in our time, Chamberlain comes up and that’s the roots of appeasement, right, the idea that you’re going to give the dictator what they want and they’re going to be cool because you gave it to them and no problems.

1:09:31 But of course, in the Hitler situation, we all know how that turns out. People who don’t think too deeply about history look at that as a lesson, right? That’s the simplistic lesson. Well, obviously you can’t appease dictators and people who wanna point out, well, in this situation, we can’t possibly talk about compromise because, you know, we learned in 1938, what one of my history teachers told me a long time ago was that all you learned from the 1938 thing is that you can’t appease that dictator in that situation.

1:09:59 But every situation is different and it’s the variables in every situation. Modern historians are having a problem with because you used to be able to say, well, history teaches lessons. Modern historians go, well, those variables kind of throw it out the window because as we said with the river example, the water’s different every time. But history can teach you about things like, for example, we talked about how history can teach you things like how you got a dictator, right?

1:10:25 So you can look at the context and say, wow, if you have a terrible economic depression, you open up the door to people like that because we’ve seen that over and over and over again. Now, each situation is unique but that’s the thing history would teach you is if you have a country where a lot of people are suffering, the longer they suffer, the more you open the door to extremism. Now, history doesn’t tell you what kind of extremism. It’s just, it tells you about us.

1:10:49 It doesn’t tell you about specific circumstances. So how do human beings react in crisis when you have a mass example? If, for example, I remember in the Gulf War, we knew this about Saddam Hussein and it may have been right in Saddam’s situation but they use the Hitler example. Well, Saddam is not Hitler because nobody’s the same, and Kuwait is not the Sudeten land. I mean, so I think simplistically, and I don’t know if they know it’s simplistic, if it just, if they’re shilling the rubes, you don’t know enough about this and I know about it so I’m gonna tell you, history taught us this, but that’s the misuse of history.

1:11:24 And so I think when you say, how do people misuse it? I think they sit there and draw A to B conclusions without understanding that there’s no two situations that are exactly alike. So those are not the kind of conclusions you could draw. You can say if you leave Germany in an economic catastrophic state for too long, bad things are gonna happen because bad things always seem to happen if people suffer long enough, but you can’t say what kind of bad things. You know, here in London recently, we’ve had, you know, what it looked like was maybe a like Kremlin sanctioned assassination of people here.

1:11:58 And it’s not the first time it happened here. It happened again in 06 and it’s like this kind of blatantly obvious, Soviet use of a chemical to like kill a former, whatever spy or former agent of the country. And everyone’s looking at this and there’s the expelling and there’s usual political talk, but I’m just wondering how you see those events and say the relationship of Russia and the UK and this European piece based on all the history you know, when you view this from the outside, do you have a different perspective than other people will?

1:12:28 I think that’s a great question because I was thinking about it and this plays wonderfully into our, what’s the value of history with the context thing? So in the United States right now, there’s a lot of controversy over Putin interfering in US elections, right? And people are up in arms and it’s practically an active war and all these kinds of things. And that’s fine, but what I’d like my countrymen to understand better is that the United States does this too.

1:12:50 And as a matter of fact, a lot of countries do this. There was a wonderful, going from memory here, Time Magazine cover from 92 or 93, whenever Boris Yeltsin got elected, in the now not Soviet Union anymore. And he had like a little American flag on the cover and basically we were full on claiming credit for the fact that we helped influence a democratic change in that country. But if you’re on the other side, it looks no different. In other words, are you really as upset with the Russians if you understand that the country that has done this the most since the Second World War by a lot is our country, the United States.

1:13:28 And if you understand that most major international players try to influence things in other countries for their country’s benefit, if they can, right? Does that make you more understanding? Or conversely, do you go, wow, now I know how that feels, maybe we should do less of that. But when you have this righteous indignation that they did this, you need to understand the context of the fact that we do it too. However, that changes, you was fine with me, but I’d like you to understand, the same talk show host who’s saying, we learned from Hitler, you can’t, are the same people going, oh my God, can you believe we did this?

1:14:02 You’d love to go on the show and say, now, what do you think when we do it? That’s context. It just helps you get, I think, history, a better view of how things really are if you’re reading the right histories. I still think there’s a lot of falsehoods. I was in Westminster Abbey, I spoke to the Westminster School, some people the other day, and I didn’t get paid for it.

1:14:20 The perk was you got to go get the special tour. Right? And he took me up into the room and he was explaining to me how they knew a particular document was falsified from the Middle Ages. He goes, we got the document and there’s this giant, the king’s giant seal is on it. It looks all real official.

1:14:36 He goes, but if you know your history, you know that they weren’t using seals at that point. Right? So you spot the forgery, but if you don’t know that they weren’t using seals at that point, it’s as official as you know, the king’s signature, right? That’s, to me, what that teaches, the context of saying, listen, yes, Putin probably tried to interfere in elections, but it’s not as unusual as you think. In fact, we do this.

1:14:57 Now, should we stop doing it? Cause it sucks when you’re on the opposite side, maybe, or do you then resign yourself to the fact that this is how great powers act? I mean, either one of those is fine, but pretending like they did something that’s this unusual thing, that’s not really intelligent, right? And intelligence is understanding how the world works. History helps teach you a little bit, at least on the surface, cause there’s a lot of stuff behind the scenes, as we all know, at least on the surface more how the world works.

1:15:24 You call yourself a patriot. What does that mean? Oh, this is a, Churchill used to call the United States the great republic. I am a, you know, I believe in something I like to call the myths of America, right? So it’s a recognition that we’ve never quite lived up to the hype.

1:15:42 No country does. Every country has, they’re romantic. I call them the marketing slogans. But the marketing slogans can be a wonderful mirror to hold up to you, and to say, how are you doing, progressing towards these goals, right? This is how you advertise yourself, not just to other people, but to your own people.

1:15:59 How we do it on that front. I’m a patriot in favor of the marketing materials. Not only did I grow up believing them, I want them to be true. And in my opinion, the United States has been moving farther away from the marketing materials all during my lifetime. Now, if you’re a person of color in the United States, for example, you would say that the marketing materials for you were never true.

1:16:23 But in my mind, I think you can chart progress. And if things like, these are buzzwords, and you have to define them, but I mean, if things like liberty, which is what liberty means something to you, the United States has been moving away from that. I think you can actually chart it and say that the time when I was a kid in the 1970s is probably, probably, by my definition, the high water mark of American freedom. Again, if you’re a person of color, it’s not the high water mark, but in terms of what I consider to be, for example, look at the amendments to the US Constitution.

1:16:57 Every one of those things have been Swiss cheesed. I remember a listener to the radio show, when I was screaming about this at 26 years old, when I had a lot more energy and vinegar and all that, he said, I don’t know why you complain about these rights being taken away. He goes, when have we ever repealed? You know, one of the, we’ve repealed a few, but he goes, the fourth amendment, the first amendment, all these things, they’re still on the books. Well, of course, you know, not to jump around, but when Rome went from a republic to an empire, one of the most fascinating things in that story for me was my history professor saying that the average Roman on the street didn’t really know that that’s what, because they kept all the forms.

1:17:38 The senators were still out there taking bribes from constituents to do favors. They were still being elected when you had an emperor. They could pretend, or they could, you know, it was so nicely done that they still had all the Roman marketing slogans, but the reality was different. I feel like that’s what’s happened to my country. And I have a hard time, and this is terrible to say, and I fight with my very patriotic wife about this sometimes, but you know, at the United States at ball games, you have the pledges of allegiance and the national anthems, and then you get to have the marketing slogans, right, resonate.

1:18:10 And it’s almost like they’re rubbing my nose in it, personally, right? Because I’ve- This is what you used to have when you made the slogan stuff, right? And it makes me angry at my countrymen sometimes a little bit, because they don’t understand that our noses are being rubbed in it. Although, this is a tenuous connection here, I hope you’ll forgive me, but things like Donald Trump being elected President of the United States, in my opinion, are wrapped up in all that, because enough Americans are upset in their own way about how they think, and they may have a different version of the marketing slogans than I do, but they feel also that things, they’ve been cheated a little bit.

1:18:41 What’s the old sex pistols line? Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? There’s a little bit of that feeling in America, and because there’s a bipartisan consensus with both our parties, the only way Americans can change things is by having a party say, vote for us and we’ll do it differently, okay? But on foreign policy, both parties in the United States have been in agreement, the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy. It’s called forever.

1:19:00 So you have nobody you can vote for to change it, and the last six presidents or so have promised a different foreign policy, and then reneged. We have no mechanism in the United States to hold anybody to their promise. I always say they ought to sign a contract, we ought to be able to sue them, right? But even Donald Trump, the last thing I read before I came over here, I believe was Secretary of Defense, he’s making John Bolton. There is nobody more different in his foreign policy views from the views Trump ran on than John Bolton.

1:19:30 So once again, we’re getting cheated from what the people who voted for this person were voting for, but we have no mechanism in the country to hold anybody to that, other than saying, we won’t vote for you again, and then at that election, they’ll go, well, do you wanna vote for her though, Hillary Clinton? So I mean, we’re trapped in a feedback loop in the United States, and people’s anger is building more and more about it. The reason we haven’t done a common sense podcast in a while is, I don’t think you can have a decent political discussion right now in the United States.

1:20:01 It goes right to you’re a Nazi, you’re a communist. I mean, there’s no room right now for a conversation where people are going, hmm, I mean, when I was a kid, you used to have those wonderful black and white political talk shows, and everybody would be smoking, and you’d still have disagreement, and you’d be, but it was, you were countrymen still, nobody was a Nazi, nobody was a communist, you were misguided, but in the United States, if you listen to talk radio, there’s been a subtle change, and the subtle change is from saying, I’ll play the conservative role, but the liberal role’s similar, right? Where you say, your liberal beliefs are destroying the country, because of course you wanna heat, they used to say to me, we want more heat on your talk show, more heat, because heat drives radio.

1:20:40 Okay, the liberal ideas are destroying the country. When I was in radio, you’d say that. Now if you’re in radio, you would say, liberals are destroying the country. In other words, it’s gone from your ideas are wrong, to your wrong, and we’re not assuming your ideas will ever change. In other words, if you’re the one hurting the country, if your ideas are hurting the country, we can change those.

1:20:56 We can converse, we can, but if you’re unchangeable, and you’re destroying the country, follow the dominoes. What’s the solution to that problem, right? And so that’s where I don’t find any air breathing space to have these discussions anymore. And not just that, because so many people have been conditioned to knee-jerk things that you, if I say certain things, you’re gonna misunderstand me, because we’re almost conditioned now in the United States to misunderstand what you’re saying politically.

1:21:23 The minute I hear some word of yours, that I think, okay, I know what he is now, right? I’m gonna make a snap judgment. The second I heard that buzzword, I know who you are. I mean, when I got into talk radio, I’ve been in a few years, and you always change program director. So you have new bosses coming in, and the first thing they have to do is say, okay, what’s wrong with this station?

1:21:38 Or they wouldn’t have hired me. And I had one call me, and he’d say, listen, let me tell you what the problem with you is. He said, nobody can figure out who you are. He said, I want these people to know your position on every issue within five minutes of tuning in. Well, there’s no way you could tell them.

1:21:52 So they want you to be so predictable that they can say the minute they hear what you think about abortion, they know your views on everything. And my response was, that’s a cartoon character, right? That’s not a human being, except that the people who are successful in this business are following their format. So what does that make them, right? Cartoon character.

1:22:08 They’re not the people smoking, having the wonderful intellectual discussions like William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal. When I was growing up, they are cartoon characters. How does this play out? Badly.

1:22:18 I do think that if we were geographically separated in terms of views like we were in the 1850s, we might have separated now. I read a book a while back from our futurists. He’s the guy who runs Stratfor, which is a, I don’t like him. Yeah, I don’t like him. And I didn’t like, and I did.

1:22:34 George Friedman? Yeah, maybe. I didn’t like the book, but I think there was some. The next hundred years? Yeah, next hundred years.

1:22:39 But there was something in it, I think, where he was suggesting. I like his geopolitics theory. Do you? Okay, but I think there was something in it about how he was saying that he didn’t think the US would be around in a hundred years or something. But if we were geographically separated at the North, one way or the East, then I think we might’ve split up already.

1:22:54 I think the problem we have is that the divisions in the United States are precinct by precinct. So like we have a sanctuary city question now. So when Donald Trump says he’s gonna go after illegal aliens more, there’s part of the country that goes rah-rah, there’s part of the country that goes, that’s the worst thing in the world. So parts of the country are opting out. Same thing with the marijuana laws, right?

1:23:10 The West Coast is a completely marijuana legal part of the country, but not by federal law. The states have legalized it, but theoretically that’s still illegal. If the feds wanna crack down, they can. What if they try? Well, they haven’t tried on the marijuana thing other than Jeff Sessions, our attorney general, making some noise about it.

1:23:26 But they are cracking down on the illegal aliens thing. So cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, states like California are saying, we’re not doing it, right? We’re opting out. But Orange County, which is a precinct in California, has said, well, we’re opting out of the opt out, right? So in other words, if at the Civil War you had slaves mixed up all over the country, how would you have divided the country?

1:23:49 So maybe in a weird way, something that’s keeping the United States together is the fact that there’s no good way to divide us. I mean, how would you separate? And what I try to tell a conservative, because if you go read, and I love doing this, but it’s horrifying, the comments that people make in the comments section after news stories, I keep trying to tell myself, are these people representative, or is this like 5% of the weirdos making us look like this?

1:24:11 Or the Russians. Yeah, yeah, or the Russians. But what they’re doing is they’re saying things that we’re ready to leave right now and to create our own conservative or our own liberal state. And what I said to one guy was, yeah, but how are you gonna keep your kids from reading books on liberal ideas? You might separate based on opinion, and then a generation from now, because the pen is mightier than the sword, find yourself in the same situation you’re in now.

1:24:35 So if it’s an intellectual problem, you’re gonna grow right back into that problem. But if that was an easier situation to solve, if you could separate the United States more easily, I think you’d be seeing more of that. And truthfully, that is such a weird, mind-blowing thing to you. I mean, you’re about my age, you’re from the same place, how strange not to turn the tables on you, but how strange is that to think about? Yeah.

1:25:02 And you think it’s all because we have lost our liberties, and that slowly taking away from those is embodied in frustration, and then that’s become divisive, and people are picking sides. And if we can actually go back and really look and say, okay, maybe we should get these liberties back, you think that is a way forward? I think that’s, don’t take it the wrong way, I think that’s too simplistic, because I think nothing’s that simple. I do think that if you look at the American design, the way that the founding fathers, who were obviously, for the most part, Englishmen, the way that they sort of envisioned it was, they knew that people were different, and even then they were different region to region.

1:25:38 So that’s why the idea of federalism was important, the idea that, listen, we’re gonna have some overriding things that we all agree on, the Constitution, for example, but we understand that the people who live in Georgia are different than the people who live in Boston. So you allow enough local differences so that those people can be different, right? And that’s a safety valve, it’s a steam pressure release, right? But, as we all know, people abuse that right.

1:26:01 That’s what the whole slavery issue was, right? They said, well, we’re different than you, we wanna have slaves, okay, but you can’t have a country with the overarching liberty idea and continue to be that way. So it was like segregation, they called it states’ rights in the 1950s, where we’re gonna have states’ rights. But you can’t have states’ rights that keep people in separate hotels and separate drinking fountains, you’ve abused that right. The problem is that the answer to abusing that right is to say, hey, you can’t do that anymore, okay?

1:26:26 Well, on the racial issue, it was absolutely justified. But on a lot of other issues, people are, it becomes oppressive. So if you make the people in the very conservative, very Bible belt South, for example, live by California’s standards, they’re gonna chafe. And if you make the Californians live by that, they’re gonna chafe too. There’s no way to, so basically it’s a pressure cooker.

1:26:48 We’re being forced, you read it online, liberals in California, same sex marriage, very important on the West Coast of the United States, very controversial in Alabama, right? But if they all have to live like that, then it becomes life or death. You can’t say, those crazy Californians, glad I don’t live there, because their views are impacted on you, your views are impacted on them. I think that’s the problem, is that we can’t get any space from each other and you’re forced to live with, I mean, look at the voting results.

1:27:17 Go look at the maps of who voted for whom, where. I mean, I think that’s what makes it so pressure-filled and makes it life or death. Political struggles are life and death now. What’s the future of this business of independent media? Where is it going in the next 25 years?

1:27:34 I wish I could say it, that’s George Friedman. I will say though that it’s never going back. I do think that there’s been an enormous amount of power and money lost with the gatekeeper role going away and when you had started this interview and we talked about me going around getting venture capital money, and that’s what I used, and I will say in my defense, we were going around in 1995 and 1996 and 97, going to these people talking about what we call then amateur content, and I would go in there and it was my job to sell them on the idea, and I created some versions of it that were me.

1:28:09 So here’s what might happen, right? And there was not one, I probably visited 50, not one who saw the potential, and they basically said no one will ever watch this stuff because if they were any good, they’d be getting paid for it. My answer to them was a variation of the old line, quantity has a quality all its own. I said yeah, most of it will suck, but there’s gonna be a ton of it, and if only 1% or .5% is really spectacular stuff, I said there’s gonna be a lot of spectacular stuff out there, and I also said you’re also gonna get content created for people that have never had content done well for them before.

1:28:48 So I use this example, I have a 13 year old daughter when she was 11, two years ago. She was watching something on YouTube that had two girls who were also 11 years old, doing nothing but creating weird food combinations and then eating them in front of you on YouTube. Every release that they did had a million views. I’m sure their parents helped them or whatnot, but I did a TEDx talk too where I basically had said, when I was a kid I wanted to start a magazine, and my father let me play around with it with the neighborhood kids for a little while before he sat me down and said listen kid, distribution networks, printing costs, and the whole thing, but if my kid wanted to start a magazine today, I would say okay, what kind of magazine are we talking about?

1:29:27 And we’ll sit there. I don’t think you could ever put that genie back in the bottle, but the difference is, is the people who used to be able to control whether or not you had access to the media in the old days were very powerful, and it was more powerful than money. Harvey Weinstein and the casting couch is an example of the power that the people who controlled, hey, I can make you a star or I can leave you out here, you’ll never, that’s over. You can get an end around on them now.

1:29:52 And I always use people that were awesome talents as an example, so let’s take an Eddie Murphy or a Richard Pryor. If Eddie Murphy was coming around today, or Richard Pryor was coming around today, and they simply did a podcast or a YouTube video, it wouldn’t matter. There was nothing you could do to hold them back because the quality of the work spoke for itself, and the gatekeeper has been bypassed, right? Because they used to control whether or not an audience got to decide if they liked your work.

1:30:24 That’s done. Now does that mean Eddie Murphy, if he was coming up today, would not take a Saturday Night Live job? No, he certainly would, it’d be a great opportunity. But back then he had to. That was the only thing he could do.

1:30:34 Now people can show, if you’re talented, you can show off your work to the rest of the world, and word of mouth, it will go viral. I mean, so I mean, to me, I don’t think there are ever, unless they control the internet through the net neutrality stuff and all this, and they make it impossible for you to have a highway where people can see, and they might, because people want that power back, believe me. If it doesn’t go that route, no, I don’t think you can put the genie back in the model.

1:30:58 Are you worried about it going that route? I am. And I heard from a lot of people, says you’re so stupid and wrong about your views on net neutrality, but I don’t know why you would mess with something that’s working, and jump off that cliff based on the possibility that it won’t be bad. I mean, I think currently it’s okay, right? Currently it’s working.

1:31:17 Why mess with this? It’s here, it’s okay. I don’t feel like I want to take a chance and go, well, maybe net neutrality, maybe let the other company, it won’t affect us. So we’re the winners because we’re independent media. But we’re also the people that are doing something that other people can do too.

1:31:30 You know, I mean, there are kids who are two years old today that if this continues the way it is now, we’ll be able to exploit it too. I hate to think of this as pathfinders and trendsetters, but we’re a generation, you know, you and I are of an interesting generation because I talk to my kids about it all the time. We’re the people that started off in the analog world that at some point, and believe me, it was stressful to the other, it was stressful that at some point, oh my God, you’re gonna have to sit down and learn to use computers.

1:31:55 In 1990, it was a huge thing where you knew you were gonna have to because it was obvious, but I mean, it was DOS. It was, you know, it was, the generation coming up now can exploit this right away. I mean, the 11 year olds who are making content that a million people are watching. If that doesn’t go away to me, that changes the, not just the world of media, but the world of art, the world of communication. It’s why, I mentioned to you earlier, I was in a country yesterday that traditionally had been quite insular and was difficult to deal with, and the younger people there are not that way anymore, and I think it might be because we’re connected in ways.

1:32:32 They’re interacting with people all over the world every day online, and it’s making us more able to interact with each other in person when we finally meet. Yeah, you mentioned Harvey Weinstein, me too. We’ve seen all of this happen. Is that a bit of a carryover from these old gatekeeper days? Is that something that will make you- And you know what, that’s what you’re seeing here.

1:32:52 Yeah, this is, and as a matter of fact, I think you might be able to draw a line and say that the whole new media thing has helped open that up. I mean, my dad was a film producer. He was not a big film producer. He was a little film producer, but my sister had wanted to go into that business, and my father had said, because he had friends. I mean, he was hanging out with the Polanski’s, and all the, I mean, he knew what these people were.

1:33:18 He knew what it was like, and he didn’t want his daughter doing that. So when my daughters both wanna do this, my first thought is, oh, no, you don’t. And so when this movement started happening, I thought, this is a necessary corrective that should have happened a long time ago that will make something like that. Look, you’re never gonna get rid of, you’re never gonna get rid of those dynamics. We all understand that.

1:33:36 But if you could make the casting couch something if an actress got threatened with that, she could turn around Twitter, Harvey Weinstein just tried to rape me. That’s a change for the better. And have other options for a career. Yeah, and I said to my kids, I got one that’s so committed to this role that there is no plan B. And I said to her, what’s the plan B?

1:33:56 There is no plan B. I’m gonna do this. Okay, but in the old days, if somebody didn’t give you a chance, you’re out of luck. If you don’t get that chance that you’re shooting for, we have other ways, right? You have other ways that you can demonstrate your capabilities.

1:34:09 And this is something that’s helped me immensely. I’m not a broadcaster, I’m a narrow caster. I appeal to a very specific small slice of the overall pie. But the pie is so huge now, right? I don’t have to appeal to a huge chunk of it for that to be a lot of human beings.

1:34:26 I used to compare myself to one of those people who goes to a street corner and plays the violin and they have the hat out on the street, right? They want you to throw them a few coins. But I joke, I work a really busy street corner, right? And so that’s the other element that’s changed. The scale of this has made it possible for you to not have to appeal to a broad section of people with something that everybody likes or most.

1:34:49 You can get real, I mean, there’s like five Harry Potter podcasts. If you’re into Harry Potter, what are the TV networks giving you? But you got five podcasts or something you can do. That’s a little narrow niche, but it’s hundreds of millions of people, maybe. I mean, I don’t know how many, but enough for you to get a few coins in your hat while you’re playing violin on the street corner.

1:35:08 You mentioned social media. What’s your read on the explosion of it and how it’s gonna change future history when we look back on this? I don’t know. I think it’s very interesting. I think this is an experiment, I think, because that is something that’s never been available and I don’t know what it’s gonna mean.

1:35:26 I do think we’re a little like guinea pigs in this time period. I tell my kids all the time, this is what’s so different, is that I got one who’s 16 and one who’s 13 and I try to tell my 16-year-old, this texting stuff really started around the time you were born. And she can’t get a reminder on that because it is so bedrock to her reality. She can’t imagine what it was like before that was there. But I keep saying, so we’re trying to figure out how you navigate.

1:35:49 How old do I have to be before I get an Instagram account? And I try to say, we don’t know. My parents didn’t have to wrestle with that problem. We are the guinea pig generation as parents. You are the guinea pig generation as children.

1:35:58 What do you do as a parent? Well, fake it a little bit. I’m a little bit of a helicopter parent, my kids would say, and I’m a little bit conservative. I’m conservative with them because I think I was out there at their age realizing what was out there and I’m a little bit more scared. And their generation, by the way, you and I were having this conversation off air before.

1:36:18 It’s interesting, but they’re not as wild. I mean, they’re a little bit more conservative. Maybe they’re able to get something from the social media that satisfies urges that you and I had to go out on the street, hang out nighttime. Yeah, we were talking about that earlier. It’s funny, back in our day when there was the kid that smoked, the kid that we heard had a bottle of whiskey in his trunk, it was like, oh, he’s a rebel.

1:36:39 These days, I asked my daughter, you know, do you wanna smoke? And she’s like, no, everyone knows that’s for losers. Yeah, they’re losers, where we get to. Yeah, they’re all losers. Oh, drunken people, they’re losers.

1:36:48 And it’s weird, there’s almost this conservative edge. I don’t even know if it’s, to me, conservative sort of implies politics, but I know what you mean. Again, as a guinea pig, you would love to see how that plays out 10, 20 years from now. What kind of parents does that make them? And I tend to think, and I remember my dad telling me this was so funny to do it.

1:37:07 I used to think when I was a kid, wait till I have kids, I’m really gonna know how to explain things to them in a way where they’ll get it and it’d be helpful in a way my parents couldn’t deal with me. Well, now that I’m a parent, I realize that nature has some veil that it puts up between parents and children, not always, there’s some parents who have these wonderful relationships, normally a veil, where there’s just no way to overcome the fact that dad, you’re an idiot. And so the advice I thought would be so useful and so helpful is old fashioned.

1:37:36 Well, also we live in an age where my advice is analog, their advice is digital. And so I think that that’s almost like nature’s way of separating the generations. Therefore, in 20 years, when my kids are trying to teach their kids what age you get an Instagram account or whatever passes for that in the future, are they gonna be cool and listen, this is really good information or are they gonna be idiots too? I think they’re likely to be idiots, but so I don’t know what age they should get an Instagram account and I don’t know how it’s gonna work out if they got one at 14.

1:38:06 I mean, younger kids always get what the older kid had earlier. It’s gonna be very interesting to see what sort of adults come out of this absolutely brand new human experiment that we’re going through worldwide right now with what’s a generation that grows up with social media like. Yeah, not to mention mobile devices that buzz in your pocket all the time. Well, and that you constantly are looking down. My brother had a great life.

1:38:29 He thinks they’re all gonna get hunchbacks because they never look up. Could be. Future of independent media, there’s rumors, you got VR plans and all sorts of other crazy things. What is that realistic future? Because you are kind of like an old school radio guy.

1:38:46 And you make this beautiful art. I had a guy named Max Keiser here who does a show on Russia Today. And he actually also used to do a radio show here in London. I said, Max, what are you doing a radio show? Your Russia Today is watched by 40 million people or something.

1:38:59 And he said, Brian, there’s a beauty. I have more latitude to create with audio only. And it was an interesting perspective. So that’s kind of a question. But then also, is the future some crazy virtual reality system where you’re in there, you’re talking to me, you’re in my presence when you’re narrating.

1:39:18 Or what is the future? I know you can’t only say so much. Well, it’s interesting you say that though because you get so many opportunities. Once you have enough listeners, you have value to other people. And so I get a lot of offers to do these kind of TV things.

1:39:34 And I only pursued a couple of them because it seems stupid, right? To say no to every opportunity. But I’ve been in television, which is nice, because it takes the excitement of it. I mean, you really have an understanding of what it really is. But you feel like you have to follow these opportunities.

1:39:48 So I really laid down a thousand ground rules and I said, I’m gonna tell you this one, you’re gonna let me do it by way. So I’ll tell this story because it’s kind of funny. It’s recent. A couple years ago. So I finally found one that swore you did.

1:40:00 We want exactly what you wanna do, total creative freedom, the whole thing. So I went and we created a sizzle reel where you go and you create something for the network so they can see an idea of what it is. And I said, now you really want hardcore. Yeah, we really want hardcore. So it was going to be on the new left.

1:40:15 So the bombings in the 1960s, the really, not hippies, but the really radicals who were bombing the weathermen and all those kinds of things. But we were gonna do flashback scenes because me, I have to mix things. So I thought, what if we had today’s anti-terror laws and all that stuff in force then? So we created scenes of Abby Hoffman with his American flag shirt being waterboarded by the CIA. So this wonderful hardcore histories kind of thing.

1:40:43 And so they came back to me and said, oh God, they couldn’t deal with it. They said the whole South wouldn’t watch that. It was too controversial, right? And so when I look at television, all I can think of is, damn, I have to worry about what my hands are doing. You know, when I was a TV reporter, there’s so many little things.

1:41:00 What’s my eye look like? I always looked like my hair needed to be combed. I mean, when I had it, it was all so very different. With radio, all I have to focus on is the quality of the material and how it’s coming. So for me, it’s more, at this point in my life, I’m pure.

1:41:18 If I hadn’t done all those other things, I would feel the need. And maybe that’s the gift of, you’re on TV at 26 and it’s so glamorous, I was on TV in a small town, and I would go to a restaurant when I got off the air and you’re making nothing, right? I mean, it’s not glamorous at all. But you think, well, I’m on the air. So you go to this restaurant and people are staring at you and you don’t know if they’re staring at you because they just saw you on the news or if you got a piece of spaghetti hanging out of your mouth.

1:41:41 And I found it uncomfortable. I thought, you know, the anonymity of radio is nice because I compared it to Batman. I can be Batman when I wanna be Batman, but then I’m Bruce Wayne and I’m walking with it because I don’t wanna be recognized. So you are what you wanna be when you’re there and when you’re not there, you’re whoever you wanna be out of there. And so not having to worry about what I’m doing with my hands right now or how I look or anything like that, that’s a plus to me.

1:42:04 So television doesn’t have that much of an attraction. And the more you go and do it, the more, at least in my case, it’s in the States, especially, it seems superficial. It seems lowest common denominator. I have no interest in that. I don’t have to anymore because the freedom of the creative whiteboard that’s totally free and I can do whatever I want is so addicting that when I go into a place where I have constraints again, you know, you have millions of listeners, so you don’t need it.

1:42:28 You know, why do I need that? At 52 years old, I don’t need it anymore. Yeah, and that’s a beautiful thing. It’s a beautiful thing. I wish everybody could have this.

1:42:36 I really do. Steve Jobs said you can connect the dots in reverse. So you having that previous experience doesn’t make it this wonderful mystery because TV, people still, it’s almost like this kind of like slave or slave owner mentality is like, we still think the TV makes you special. You’re on TV. Some new media people feel that way, but you know it’s not.

1:42:57 Yeah, and you know, listen, I think maybe you have to get that out of your system and maybe it’s a personality thing. Maybe different personality types get different things out of it. For me, though, maybe once you taste what we’re doing now, I find it hard to go back. If I hadn’t done this, it might feel different, but having done what we do now, I find it hard to find a better creative situation for at least me, the way my makeup is, than what we have now.

1:43:22 It’s like I tell people all the time. You know what I always ask people to, because I think it’s a good question, when we talk about getting into podcasting, the first thing I always ask everyone is, how many listeners would you have to have for you to consider it worthwhile?

1:44:03 And I heard great advice from a guy named Ben, who may or may not exist, who said a great line to me one day, when we were very, I mean, I started with zero listeners and there were milestones. 500 was huge. He said to me, it’s not always how many people are listening. Sometimes it’s who those people are. So you can’t judge your success on a straight up numbers basis.

1:44:23 But like, we have a statistics in the podcasting industry, a big statistics scandal not that long ago, where we found out, I found out my numbers were inflated. And we knew they seemed big. I wasn’t the only one affected, obviously. But when we got the correction, still not right, but my numbers were quite a bit inflated. And so the numbers that you got that were correct are still great numbers, right?

1:44:47 I mean, but when you thought you had those kind of numbers, it always looks small. So I said to somebody, if you have no listeners now, and in a year and a half, you have 1500 listeners, is that enough? I said, if they were all in a room live with you, would that be enough? And so you start to try to adjust their ideas of, okay, is this stuff you’re telling me to do, Dan, worth it? Well, what’s worth it, right?

1:45:10 And if you say, well, how am I gonna make money off that? Well, gee, I don’t know. If my grandmother had access to 1500 people, she’d figure out a way to make money out of them, right? How many people do you have to have? When we got a million listeners, I remember saying, if you can’t make some money off a million listeners, you’re an idiot.

1:45:23 And if I told my listeners I needed money, one of the great things about the new media is a million listeners, you say, I need money. They’ll give you some, which is incredible, by the way. There are multiple moments in this whole process that have blown my mind, and that’s one of them. When you opened the donations, you were surprised by it. I didn’t think it, I tell you what, I went to five, professional people that I really respect before we did it.

1:45:46 And I said, what do you think of this? And all five of them, really successful, really smart people, said nobody will give anything. What do you do when the best people out there, of course, this is 2008, so how do they know? But when the best people out there tell you that, what do you do? And like an idiot, we did it anyway.

1:46:02 I don’t know what that says about me, but I think we got lucky. But at the same time, I mean, there’s a lesson there in life, too. You should listen to experts, you should solicit their response, but sometimes you just have to try it anyway, especially if it’s a calculated risk, and you won’t end up homeless on the street if you do it. But I do think things like, I mean, times change, and assumptions change, and information that was good, and advice that was good during one time period may not be good when circumstances are very different.

1:46:29 Learn that from history. Didn’t we? Yes. If you’re right. By the way, I’m sending the link to this, and making every one of my students watch this right afterwards, because everything you’re talking about is what we teach, the micro-niche, the narrow casting thing.

1:46:42 There’s a guy named Kevin Kelly, who founded Wired Magazine. He has an article called Your 1000 True Fans. Yeah, good idea. Amazing article, and if you read it. I haven’t, but that’s a great title.

1:46:51 Yeah, he says that basically, if you can get 1000 true fans, a true fan by definition, is someone who will buy every product you sell, who will drive two hours to pay for the ticket, to listen to you talk, then each fan will probably spend maybe up to $100 a year with you. That gives you $100,000. That should be enough for any artist, or whatever person, to make that their livelihood and build. So he says focus on the thousand people. Don’t focus on a million, or you’ll water it down, you’ll please other people.

1:47:18 Satisfy those people first. Build that beachhead, and then expand, expand, expand. There’s something I call the 100 Thompson dynamic. 100 Thompson’s a writer. But you see this dynamic in a lot of different artists and performers over time, where they do their best work sometimes before they’re popular or being compensated for it all.

1:47:38 So Thompson’s best work was done really before he was super cultish and super large. So then by the time he’s passed his prime and he’s sort of milking it and just phoning it in and stuff like that, he’s got this huge group of people that will buy anything he does. And so in a funny way, he’s finally being paid what he deserved to be paid all those years ago when he wasn’t compensated for the stuff he’s just… And so in a funny way, I’m hoping that when I’m doing really terrible hardcore history shows 10 years from now, it doesn’t matter anymore.

1:48:07 People are still buying the old ones. It’s interesting what you said about the inflated numbers because we’re big on YouTube and we’ve always put our videos there from the beginning. And for me, it’s a medium I concentrate on much more. I don’t know why than even the audio stuff. But you know- Because you’re visual.

1:48:22 Yeah, we’re visual. Yeah. But in YouTube, you kind of get this, what’s a view? A view is a view is a view. But I can put out a two and a half hour show that someone will watch for two and a half hours or a one minute video and it’s still both one view.

1:48:35 And so you get in this way and a Facebook view is I think if it’s a second, it’s been watched on the news. And what if two people were watching at the same time? Or what if the same guys, somebody once said to me, when I thought I had 20 million listeners, she’s, come on, Dan, it’s your mother watching 20 million times. So I mean, there’s that too. What screwed us up too with that stats problem is we should have seen it coming, but I was considering that to be one of the perks of the new media because when I was in the old media, nobody even promised that they could give you real numbers.

1:49:01 I mean, when you had Arbitron or Nielsen, the rating system, all they promised was that they would show you the trends. So they would say, oh, you have more than you used to. But they couldn’t say, well, here’s how many you have. So when download numbers were initially the way we did this, you’d think, God, what a great thing. I know exactly how many downloads we’ve had.

1:49:18 Well, of course, turns out you don’t. But you don’t know how many people are like sending your, or here, listen to this. I mean, there’s- And it can do unique, so it can estimate unique. Yeah, but you know, I no longer trust it. I did, I did up until recently.

1:49:33 Now my attitude is, are you getting enough emails to show you? I mean, somebody else who shall be nameless had figured out that there was a stats problem already, and they figured it out because there was a disparity between their YouTube numbers and their podcast numbers. And they realized, I had like a gut feeling that it couldn’t be right based on the number of emails. 20 million, you would just be crazily overwhelmed. And so I couldn’t, but he was going, wait a minute, okay, YouTube numbers are this.

1:49:59 And he knew, he said something’s wrong. But of course, and it’s a great story, I had just been the headliner to podcasting convention. And I never talked about numbers ever, just for general principles, but it was a Q&A afterwards. And somebody said, how many listeners do you have? And so normally I would, you know, funny joke and not answer the question, but something stupid in me said, oh, I’ll just say the last, I said, I don’t.

1:50:20 And I said, luckily there was a disclaimer. I said, I don’t know if I believe it, but I said 20 million. So then that night I had a dinner set up with somebody from one of these companies. And we sat down at the dinner and he said, you know why I call, you know why I set up this dinner? I go, no, he goes, about that 20 million number you just mentioned, he said, that’s not right.

1:50:38 I said, how wrong is it? He goes, does the word exponential mean anything to you? And apparently the problem was connected to, you know, I have these long podcasts, right? So people don’t listen all in one gulp. Well, the stats were counting every time those people would, okay, hit the play button, exactly.

1:50:57 So you went, so, and normally it wouldn’t take very long to correct the numbers because you put out a few shows and you know, they fixed the problem. But I put out two shows a year. So it’s taking a long time for me to, all we can confidently say is millions. But how many do you need, right? And then like, what is the impact?

1:51:13 That’s the thing. Because you could argue if you have someone hitting play on your podcast 10 times and that’s an impact on their lives 10 times. And so again, what does it all come down to? Well, what about intensity, right? I mean, are they, oh, oh yeah, I listened to him and I liked it versus, oh my God, I love that.

1:51:28 Okay, well, would you rather have 10,000 people who adore your work or 100,000 people who, yeah, I could take it or leave it, but I listened. I don’t know. It may depend on your personality, but I think if you have people that just adore your work, you’re always gonna be able to sell something to them. Or if you’re out on the street corner, they’ll throw money in the old violin hat or whatever. Yeah, which is what you saw.

1:51:50 I sell violins. It makes me wonder about the views thing. I had a guy on recently who was, he basically came out and said he’s Vladimir Putin’s public enemy number one and he probably wants him dead. And I never said. I don’t think that’s smart.

1:52:01 Yeah, probably not smart at all. He actually wouldn’t accept a drink from me or anything here. I think he’s really worried. But it was funny how all of a sudden on an episode with not that many views, there were tons of comments and this and pro Putin. It was like we had said something about Mother Teresa.

1:52:15 And so it was like, okay, are these bots? And this is what I’m talking about here. This is like a little kind of a YouTube propaganda engine thrown at this. And it was really blatantly obvious. I mean, we published a lot of video here and after 500 guests, I can tell them something a little bit hey, why?

1:52:28 And so it was like, oh, okay, well, if that’s that, then what is a view? And if you base your whole thing assumption around, I have 56 million views on YouTube, what if it’s five million? And so it’s like, you have to start saying, what is the reality? And then the reality is, okay, donations, revenues do tell you something about your fan base if they’re invested in you. If you get stopped on the street and people say, thank you very much, I appreciate it.

1:52:49 Like those are real touch points. The rest of it, even comments on social media, we don’t know if it’s true. Yeah, the bot thing, I haven’t even been able still to get my mind around what that means. So we talked about how things have changed. The bot thing is a perfect example.

1:53:04 I never saw it coming, first of all, but at the same time, don’t know how to quantify it. It was what I said to you earlier about those comments after news stories. How representative are those, right? Is this 5% of people trolling the entire United States, including bots, or is this a representative sample of the country? I will say this, it has an effect on the country.

1:53:22 It does. Yeah, because- And fake news, all that stuff. Or just hating your country. I don’t know how many folks in the UK understand. We have an issue in our country, people hating their countrymen.

1:53:32 How long, I keep trying to think of, if you’re trying, if there’s an inertia to this, what has to happen, I always say, if things continue the way they’re going, because when people say, how do you see the future? Well, we all know 9-11’s gonna happen. Things can knock you off the path. But if things go the way they’re going, what solves this problem? I mean, does it have to be war where we all unify?

1:53:56 Which I’m not even sure in the modern world you could have that kind of a war anymore, or that it would have that effect. I don’t know if things continue the way they’re going, what the solution is to that. I don’t know what reunifies a bunch of people who are starting to hate each other. And I don’t know how much that hate is even real. Because we’re trying to, what are we seeing, right?

1:54:17 And how do you take three steps back and say, okay, this is what I’m seeing. So that’s why I’m not doing the political show actively anymore. Because I said to the listeners, I mean, once upon a time I felt like I could give you good information, even just analysis, right? We’re in uncharted waters here, and I think it would be a terrible thing if like a bunch of people who make a living during this, that I had to be on the air at six o’clock tonight with something to say, because I feel like an observer all of a sudden.

1:54:42 And I used to consider myself a very well-informed political analyst. I don’t know how you could consider yourself a well-informed, because no, I mean, who knows, right? And I base everything on history, but we’re in uncharted water, right? Yeah, and like you said, you don’t know what’s happening out there, especially since most of our content is being consumed in social media. So you don’t know, is there that much hate?

1:55:01 Is it manufactured? I’m not pointing my fingers at the Russian, but I’m saying it’s just an entity that could be controlled by anybody that is maybe fomenting it. I mean, when Rwanda and the genocide, it was that radio station that kicked it off, right? And it was that radio station broadcasting every day, again, old media, that I think they pretty much pointed to that really started. And once it started, the genocide was hard to stop.

1:55:22 So, you know, is that one of these things where our buttons are being pushed? And I’m still trying to figure out, you know, it’s funny because when we come from the new media, we can’t help but see all the advantages of it, but I can’t quantify yet, and I don’t think anybody else can either, how much the fact that we’re in our own bubbles is making a difference now. You know, there was some value to the fact that, you know, when I came to England in 1971, I think there was BBC One and BBC Two.

1:55:47 Well, no matter what you were doing, even if it was propaganda, everybody was getting the same stuff to talk about. Now, people don’t even interact. You have no, there’s no necessary reason to hear the justifications behind anyone else’s viewpoint, right? What are the long-term ramifications of that? I mean, again, we get back to the idea of us all being guinea pigs in a brand new era in human history.

1:56:09 It’s weird to think that more communication could have downsides, and the democratization of communication could have downsides, because especially people who do what we do are so enamored with the fact that we can do it, and we would never wanna go back, and there were so many downsides to being propagandized by the networks. At the same time, we may have lost something, and there may be, as long as governments are still around, they may turn around at some point, and I think you see this with China, Russia, Iran, places that are creating their own internets, and having corporations in the UK and the United States helping them to wall off opinions they don’t want. This is destabilizing, sometimes in a good way.

1:56:49 I mean, if I’m living in Putin’s Russia, I want it to be destabilizing, right? If you’re in Nazi Germany and we could podcast, we want it to be destabilizing. At the same time, you know, if in 20 years we’re all in some kind of hell situation, because would you have wanted them to shut down, bring the gatekeeper role back? See what I’m saying? Uncharted water, it can go in any direction.

1:57:10 Yeah, you know, Thomas Friedman from The New York Times was here recently, and you know, with the Facebook kind of scandal with the Russian news and stuff, he was just saying, you know, we were the old news, old media, you know, your time is over, guys, for the last 10 years, you know, and their revenue stream, their views were being taken by the Facebook and the social media organizations. He says now, he said there seems to be a place for a trusted source of curation, someone who’s been there for 20 years. I think it’s interesting, he thinks that’s the trusted source, because there’s a lot of Americans that would say exactly not the trusted source, I mean, yeah.

1:57:42 It’s been The New York Times, I agree. The whole concept of, but also a place that maybe has a history of, okay, we fact check it, there’s a reputation, there’s the this, there’s the that, and yeah, I can say good about things about The New York Times, but that he said, at the very end, he said something funny to me. He said, Brian, things that are old and slow could be the things that are coming back. Conversations between two people, will you actually listen and talk?

1:58:06 Something written, you know, something read, and it was just, you know, interesting perspective to have. I remember a famous foreign correspondent once was telling me what was happening. When you’re in the news business, you understand how news gets to you, right? And people don’t understand well enough how their sources get. So if you have a foreign correspondent in another country, when I was growing up, the three major networks in the United States and The New York Times, and there were a bunch of different papers, they would all have their own people, and like if there was a problem in Lebanon, for example.

1:58:37 He was one of them. Right, so what would happen is, The New York Times would have a view from one reporter, the NBC News would have a view from another reporter, and you could kind of, you know, when I was first broken in news, of course there was no internet, so we would get 20 newspapers. We’d have all the TVs or the bank of televisions, and you could really compare and contrast. I was an assignment editor, or an assignment editor’s assistant, but I was shipped with no assignment editor.

1:59:00 And so my job was to see, okay, did they get something we didn’t, did we get something they didn’t? But you really start comparing and contrasting, okay, both of these reporters were at the same news story, but how interesting it is to hear, well now, because of cutbacks and stuff, a lot, they pool the reporter. So a lot of the stuff you’re getting from a place like Lebanon today might be the same reporter giving it to everybody. But what you lose, obviously, from that is, that person has a ton of power.

1:59:25 By themselves, they’re able to shave the narrative, or shape it. And so those are the kind of things where you don’t realize how news comes to you, and you don’t realize what you lose by not having multiple perspectives at the ground level. Now, one would argue that you could have 20 people who are there on Twitter sharing it with you also. Do they have any responsibility to the fact? And if one of those 20 people is a Russian agent trying to muddy the waters, so I think we’re so new into this that we’re still trying to figure out how you even, we used to say, roll with the punches.

2:00:01 How you roll with the punches in this new digital age, and trying to figure out what’s real, because if you can’t get what’s real from ground level, then all of your manifestations and how you process it are wrong. Garbage in, garbage out, right? Yeah, you have to be much more careful as a consumer. And look, this is what gets back to history and people who don’t read and all these things. In an era where we have to be far more savvy, either we’re less savvy than we used to be, or we’re just as savvy as we used to be in a time that requires more of that, how are we handling that?

2:00:35 And how are we gonna handle it? And how are my kids gonna handle it when they’re older? Yeah, yeah. Tell me a bit about what Dan does when he’s not reading history, talking about history. What do you do for fun?

2:00:46 What are you doing in your spare time? Oh, man. I used to have spare time. You know, it’s funny. There’s a line that when you’re doing a job you love, it’s not really work.

2:00:58 At this point in my life, and I don’t share this with many people, because who cares, I mean, everybody’s working hard, but by the time we’re in the last two or three months of the production process, isn’t that crazy to sound like twice a year I get a show out so there’s two or three months when it’s intense, it’s seven days a week. On the weekends it doesn’t have to be all day, because I only have, there’s only a certain number of hours in the day I’m any good in terms of on the air, right? You have a certain number of energy, we all have our rhythms of the day, so I can knock off around two in the afternoon sometimes.

2:01:26 But it doesn’t, it’s stressful and it beats me up and my wife doesn’t have me around very much, but I don’t feel like I’m digging ditches. So I don’t do as much for fun as you would think, but I don’t miss it like I would have missed it if I was digging ditches, where you live for your time off. It’s easier when you’re the small business owner and you love your work to do it, and when you realize what you’re doing in terms of, I’m making some money, I’m able to put my kids into school, I’m able to, there’s a satisfaction as a father there, and I think as you get older, at least in my case, I don’t need the other things as much as I used to.

2:02:05 I mean, I’m a war gamer, for example, I always have been, I haven’t done that in forever. I miss it, I think, God, I’d love to get back to that someday, but if I was 20 and I hadn’t done it as long as I had, I would really, really feel the loss. Is war gaming, do you meet with friends for war gaming? Oh, listen, no, no, no, no, no, I’m old school, would paint miniature figures and do it Winston Churchill style on the table and the whole thing, with my arthritis, I don’t even think if I retired someday, I don’t even think I could, but like I said, I would feel like I was missing a huge chunk of my life earlier on.

2:02:39 Now, there’s enough, I don’t know if it’s satisfaction or if you just become boring and one-dimensional, but I don’t do as much for fun as you would think, and when I do read for fun, I’m reading history anyway, because that’s what I was doing before. Are you gonna do this till you die? I see no reason to stop, in terms, you don’t feel like God, I talked to a friend of mine, I grew up with, hadn’t seen a long time, and he took over his parents auto parts business, it was very successful, and I went down and saw him, I said, so what are you thinking about?

2:03:07 He goes, retirement, as soon as I can get out of here, talk to another guy who worked at the news station, I used to work, he’s a very big, big muck at EMUCC now, and I said, so how are you doing? He goes, frantically contributing to my pension fund, because I can get out of here, I don’t think like that at all. Now, I do worry that I will run out of things to talk about or run out of things, or that the audience will have had it with me at some point, but in terms of me, as long as the energy holds, I’m cool with this, if I can do it.

2:03:32 What’s your obituary, Reed? What did Dan Carlin do? Oh, let me stop you there, because somebody gave me a great line once, and it’s one of those self-help guru kind of things, he was trying to help you clarify your goals in life, and how close you were to achieving them, and he said, go home and write your obituary now, and then look at it and say, how close are you to getting to there? You know, it’s silly, I was just at Westminster Abbey, and looking around, because it’s one of my favorite places to go, and if you’ve never been there, there’s all these statues, and they always have inscriptions underneath them, and some of the inscriptions are so beautiful, and they will say things like, he was a conscientious, I mean, just he was a great figure who always took into account the feelings of others, whatever it might be, I would like it to say something about, he tried really hard to be a good human being, I know that sounds like trite, but I mean, you just wanna be able to say, he didn’t hurt anybody, he made things a little better, I mean, silly things like that, but I mean, when I was a kid, it would be much more grandiose, and at this point, you just wanna be able to say, he did some good, raised some good kids, helped some people, nothing grandiose even seems in place to me anymore, now he just cremated with no tombstone, maybe.

2:04:52 What was the best day of your life and worst? I had a bad decade, tough decade, jobs weren’t where you wanted to go, and I lost a loved one, we all lose loved ones, and sometimes you lose them in rather quick succession, and over a decade, I lost most of the people close to me, when one passed away, the other was already, you could see it on the horizon, right? The 1990s, and it was very difficult, and I was by myself, living alone, single, toiling at a job I didn’t like, and I look back on that now, and I know other people that had good times then who are going through things like that now, so I mean, you get your bad decades, it wasn’t a bad day, it was a series of bad days for a very long time, when you sit there and go, okay, my job is to get out of bed in the morning, put one foot in front of the other, and just get past this.

2:05:48 I had that decade, and I remember it, and I look at it because it helps you really, appreciate the now. Until you’ve had that, it’s hard to know how good you have it. Good days, oh my God, it’s stereotypes, kids born, marry your wife, stereotypical things, the things that when they sum up your life in five or six bullet points, mine are gonna probably be the standard ones, although I will say the satisfaction of, I don’t feel satisfied like I’ve accomplished anything, I feel great that I didn’t fail to live up to some potential, I mean, all of us have gifts, and there are different areas, and you feel like, God, I don’t wanna waste whatever I’ve been given, but you don’t know how to exploit it.

2:06:31 It’s not clear always, and how could it have been clear in 1980 that podcasting and new media, you don’t know, right? My father had a great mind to me, he said, if you try to trace your life like a connect the dots at the end of your life, he goes, you can’t. There’s too many right hand turns and strange twists, and so I guess my big fear was at the end of your life going, what the hell did I do with whatever gifts I had? And like the Dolores O’Reardon from the Cranberry thing, you feel like, okay, worst case scenario, I did a little of it.

2:07:05 Does that make sense? I don’t know where it’s going, but you feel like, okay, worst case scenario, I didn’t totally fail. You’ve got that show out there. Didn’t totally fail. Right.

2:07:12 What is the show you’re most proud of? The last one, but I still have problems with it. I would say the next one. But you could tick the box on that. I think I can tick the box.

2:07:21 Dan Carlin contributed to the world. Something, a little bit. My little thing, my little graffiti on the wall. What scares you? Everything we talked about here.

2:07:30 I mean, we talked, it’s not scary, well, certainly, I mean, you get scared of your kids. Like any parent, you always think, please let them turn out okay, no disasters, and no health disasters for anybody. But the things we talked about now, where the hell’s the country going? My country, your country, our country, the states in the UK are connected at the hip anyway. But that bothers you more than other people.

2:07:52 Yeah, but I think about it more than other people, and it’s partly because it’s always been that way for me, but also my job. I mean, people who think about politics and current events, who do that for a living, I mean, they think about it too. I don’t know how you, look, the future’s always scary. Sometimes it’s scarier than others. In 1938, it’s scarier than it was in 19, I was gonna say 1952, but you had worries about nuclear war.

2:08:15 I mean, it’s always scary, the future’s always scary. I feel like you can kind of, if you’re in touch, feel pressure building up, if that makes sense. And I feel like there’s pressure building up. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know how it manifests.

2:08:28 But if you’re pretty comfortable with the way things are, the last thing you wanna have happen is something go bizzarely in a different direction. And so with the pressure building up, with no idea when anything would blow, or if it even will blow, or if something will come to diffuse tension, I think that’s what worries me. I mean, I think things could go in any direction right now. They always can, but I mean, the pressure’s higher than normal. Yeah, my mom lives in San Diego, and she’s come over the last year, year and a half, and I can see it in her eyes, you know, the divisiveness.

2:08:57 And I hear it in her tone of voice, and quite honestly, it’s hard to get that feeling here. Like, it’s hard to know what it’s really like on the ground there. And so I can feel when you talk about it and when she talks about it. When I talk to those little, the history majors at the Westminster School, we had a question, Q and A afterwards, and I was talking about American politics and all this, because they told me they were interested in that, and they don’t know a lot about it.

2:09:17 And the one girl came up to me afterwards, and you know, they’re dressed in, we would say in the States like Hogwarts suits. I mean, they all look at, it’s a stereotype, wonderful. But she said, you know, I didn’t, I had said that there was this disconnect between the American people and the government in terms of things like, you know, going over to Iraq and being in Afghanistan and all these things, and the American people for a long time have been voting for less of that, right, they don’t wanna be the policeman of the world in general.

2:09:40 But the government has all kinds of reasons why that’s important, including maybe some very good ones. But she said, I didn’t realize that the American people didn’t like that. I thought they liked to flex their power, and it made them all feel good to go to. And so, I mean, that’s what you were saying about the inability, even with all the connectivity that we have now where they can go to American news websites and read comments, that still you could have these misunderstandings about what, you know, your little lens, right, that shows you your window of the world, still doesn’t show you as much as we think it should.

2:10:11 And so I do think your inability to feel what’s going on in San Diego, even with the fact that you can somehow be in touch with San Diego so much more than you used to be, is interesting, you know, because you would think, it’s just like being there, right, but it isn’t still, is it? The Atlantic especially is a nice big pond that keeps some of that from coming over. It is, and you need those old school conversations to kind of feel what’s happening. I would love to think, because I think it’s a great, I do think that that’s a bit of a lost art, and I personally love that kind of stuff, and so, and I used to say, as I fiddle with the mic and make your sound people go crazy, I used to say that I was able, and this is just a stupid thing to say, so apologies in a bit, I always found it easier to talk to Europeans about that deep stuff, and it may be because they do more of that, I don’t know, but I can still have those deep discussions with some people, but I find it difficult in my homeland with a lot of people to have it, because there’s no, like I said, there’s no breathing space, and no one’s cutting anybody some slack, and we go from cordial to angry in the blink of an eye, and if you do that, and if you believe that kind of conversation is sort of built into the success of a political system on the macro scale, the kinds of talks we have, that everybody are having at the same time, assuming they are, that’s built into the system,

2:11:29 What happens if you’re not having those conversations, and what happens if the technology forces you to do it at 140 characters at a time, instead of being able to explore nuance. This anonymity on the internet, I don’t know, I don’t know if it’s a boon or a bust, or if it makes a huge difference, but we’ve lost something with the ability to stand up there and have deep discussions, and I think there’s a macro result that’s going to be negative about that, because it’s only in the deep discussions that we’re able to explore the reality of situations, which are always gray, right? Twitter lets you deal with black and white, but reality’s gray, and it’s possible that if you don’t play around in the gray and learn to discuss things in the gray, you don’t know how to operate in it, and since you vote, in our country I always say, these people vote, right?

2:12:20 If you can’t acknowledge the gray, and you vote black and white, you’re gonna get black and white results, and the only kind of results that are worth living in are the gray ones, to be honest, because black and white are the extremes. Well, I always say what we’re doing here is reteaching the art of listening, and I think these long-form podcasts and audio form or video form, it’s almost like a forced time where if someone’s listening, they actually are quieting down and opening up to someone else’s point of view, and so it’s, I don’t know, maybe some hope. Well, and think about it, you couldn’t do that anywhere else because the airtime’s too expensive.

2:12:53 I was just gonna let you have three hours of network airtime to have these kinds of discussions, especially if you were a Kardashian, it might work, right? So yes, so when you say, do you go to bed at night hopeful ever, when I’m in the right mood, I think that that’s the way I look at it, that I say, you know what, maybe the fact that we have the ability to circumnavigate the constraints that are made by money and ratings and all those other things allow us to do this, but then, of course, the devil on this shoulder as opposed to the angel on this shoulder says, yes, but are the people that listen to what we do in this kind of situation the people that needed it, or the people that sought it out they’re the people that still gravitate toward that. I mean, there’s always this belief that the people that are taking their medicine are not necessarily the ones that need it, and then you have to back up and say, well, who elected me to say that anybody needed to take their medicine?

2:13:45 Who says the medicine I’m prescribing is the right medicine? But that, to me, is the gray, right? I feel like that’s what’s lost, this ability to say, well, maybe I’m not right, right? I don’t think we see a lot of that in my country where people say, well, the word, this is my opinion has disappeared, right? But to say this is my opinion opens the door to saying, but maybe I’m wrong, convince me I’m wrong, let’s have a discussion about it.

2:14:07 In my opinion is gone right now, and that’s why there’s no Common Sense podcast, because Common Sense was my opinion, and I’m not sure how many people care about that anymore. Well, I hope it comes back. Because it’ll be the opposite of the canary in the coal mine when it comes back. Because it means maybe there’s some time for the gray. Okay, well, then don’t get the false hopes if it does.

2:14:27 Dan, I always ask everyone here a few questions at the end. I’m gonna ask you if you could pick up the phone and call the 20-year-old Dan, and give that young man a bit of advice. What would you tell him? Oh, I’ve actually thought about this, and it’s a catch-22, because I would love to call myself and say, don’t freak out as much, right? Don’t worry about it, don’t pull your hair out about this, it’s gonna be okay.

2:14:51 But if I knew it was gonna be okay, would it have ruined the outcome that we have? I mean, in other words, how much was the anxiety and all that, and the pulling your hair out, and the desperation at times, how much was that a motivating factor that got you to here? So I’d be afraid to do that.

2:15:08 I don’t think I would tell myself any, because I think I would ruin, if I wasn’t happy with where I am now, then I think I’d have some advice to myself. I think I would be too afraid of screwing up the chance to get to where I am now if I messed with anything. Stepping on the butterfly, changing the whole world. On that same note, best advice you ever received could have come in broadcasting for you in television or radio, or who knows, from some random person.

2:15:34 Oh boy, you know, I’ve been really lucky. I’ve always wondered, you know, about how a system or a society compensates for the individuals who aren’t lucky enough to have the kind of individuals I’ve had in my life to give me advice. I mean, if you have just, you know, it’s the luck of your birth, right? I had a stepfather who taught me so many things, and I had a real father who was this amazing example to me, and a mother who backed me unconditionally whenever I wanted to do.

2:16:07 These are the kind of things where you go, okay, so what if people don’t have that? And so I have so many sayings, and I put them up on my wall. Things when my stepfather died, I tried to remember all of the pieces of advice that he gave me, and I wrote them down. He was a natural born teacher, and the things that those teachers do, like Vince Lombardi, the football coaches, they say the same thing a thousand times exactly the same way, and after he died, I remember his voice would just come to me sometimes in the right circumstance, because I’d heard that same stupid line 10,000 times, and when he was alive, I’d be tired of hearing about it, and it was like a gift when it would come to me later.

2:16:43 So in answer to your question, I couldn’t possibly pick one of them, because in certain circumstances, I hear his voice in my head, and it’s just the right thing to say at the right time. He implanted it there by never changing a word of it. I mean, you know, the phrase will just pop into your head, and so I couldn’t boil it down to one thing. And in a world with so many variables and so many different things, I’m not sure a piece of advice would ever satisfy, but having people who could impart that when you need it, I mean, if you don’t have that, how do you help a poor child with awful parents in a horrible situation, how do you compensate for him not having that, or her not having that?

2:17:22 So I mean, when I feel lucky and fortunate, I think about that, that I had those kind of folk helping me. So bad answer to your good question. That’s right, and it’s funny, when you think about those one-liners, I’m guessing that even the meaning of those changed over time to you, and maybe when you were older, you’re like, oh, that’s what he meant. Absolutely, I think that’s totally true. Totally. Oh, he meant that.

2:17:42 It’s a nuanced part of that. And the same advice can seem, you know, you might think to yourself, okay, this advice is specifically tailored to this situation, but then if you apply it to a different situation, it means something different, but it’s just as valuable. So I mean, yeah, I think about that all the time. I think about those, and these are the people I lost in the 1990s that I was talking about, these people that so, you would not be here but for them.

2:18:04 And what’s kind of sad is that they never got to see you get here, you know? But they wouldn’t be there enough for them. Yeah, and they’re a part of you being grateful about your situation. Absolutely. Which probably means you create better content because you’re grateful for being here, and it lets you flow with the art, as opposed to being like, when am I gonna get off this podcasting gig?

2:18:22 And get back to the good times. I don’t think about that at all. Yeah, which is good. Last part of that question, to that 20 year old that’s watching us, listening to us right now, what advice do you give to them based on everything we’ve said here about a way that they can, I don’t know, filter what comes into their mind, educate themselves, steps that they should take? I remember trying to time success, where I would sit there and go, all right, here I am at 26.

2:18:49 If you wanna be over here, how long is that going to take? And you go, God, at the current pace, I’m going blah, blah, blah. But what you don’t realize is things don’t go at a current pace, right? So I mean, I have this interesting dynamic in my life where I would be behind all my peers, and then I would leapfrog them, and all of a sudden I’m a talk show host at way too young of an age, but then all of a sudden I’m behind again. But you can make these giant leaps sometimes, right?

2:19:13 And make up for years of seemingly stuck in neutral in a very short time, and then you’d be stuck in neutral again for a while. So I mean, and maybe that’s what you wanna tell yourself too, to your question about your 20 year old self, that the changes and progress in your life are not at a constant speed, and you can make up a lot of lost ground a lot faster than you think you can. So you can toil for a long time, I think you’re making no progress, and then make a ton of progress very quickly.

2:19:43 The other thing that’s really valuable, and it’s a stupid thing, but it’s one of the few things in life that I can literally point to my life and go, oh my God, this really makes… And very quickly, like once I became a television reporter, when I sent out, I didn’t wanna be a television reporter, but I was being pressured by people who were my peers, going, you need to really get out of here. So send out some broadcast tapes, and nobody was getting hired.

2:20:05 So I thought, okay, what’s the problem? They’re expensive to make, they were hard to make, so I really was careful about doing them out. So I called this one station and they said, do not send a tape. We have no jobs and we have no turnover, you’ll be wasting your money on your tape. And my same stepfather said, send it anyway.

2:20:20 And I said, what? How much I paid for it? Blah, blah, blah, send it anyway. They called me three days later, oh, we had massive quits, when can you get up here? You don’t send that tape, my whole life’s different.

2:20:31 I was a news reporter, I covered a story at a talk radio station. When I was done, I thought, should I send a note to the program director I just met? And I literally did this with a letter, send it, don’t send it. Dropped it and walked away, called me two days later, you wanna get on the radio? You don’t put that note in there, that doesn’t happen.

2:20:47 My wife, I met her, she was a talk radio, she was a radio show host too. I put a note on her car once and I went like this, put the note in the car, put the, don’t put the note in the car, I don’t have these kids now. The silly little things like that, that impact everything. You couldn’t possibly predict them, you can’t say, okay, Dan told me, I’ll put a note on something. You can’t, that advice is not really applicable that way, but there’s a lesson there.

2:21:10 I mean, I went from a guy who was on the assignment desk at ABC, I loved that job, it was fine, to a television reporter in the blink of an eye. I went from a television reporter to a talk radio show host in the blink of an eye. So you make these huge leaps where you think, God, I’m really falling behind, and then you leapfrog everybody else in a very short period of time. So the progress in your life is not a constant thing. Sometimes it’s fits and starts, go real fast, go real, it’s like gears in a car, right?

2:21:35 And you’re stuck in first gear a lot, but sometimes you get in fourth gear, and when you’re in fourth gear, you make a lot of progress. So keep showing up, keep putting one foot in front of the other, and go ahead and take those chances, put those notes out. Listen, as a desperate human being might say, what other choices do you have? I mean, unless you wanna stay where you are, what other choices do you have? My grandmother had a great lunch.

2:21:55 She said, make sure to give fate an opportunity to intervene, right? And in order to do that, sometimes you have to drop that note in the letterbox, put the note on the car, send the tape out to the news director, even when he tells you not to. Dan, you’re a tough guy to get a hold of. I’m glad we waited the years. I’m tough to interview, huh?

2:22:16 Tough to have a long conversation. That was great to have a great conversation. Tough to get you in the chair. You know, little do you know, but I think hardcore history helped inspire not only London Real, but so many podcasts back in the day, in the early days, when there was no beacon of hope of whether there were businesses at the other end or even a reason we should be doing this. When I started doing this, I was convinced that all my banker buddies were just laughing at me.

2:22:44 Like, what is this guy doing? He’s talking to these cameras. And every year I would look in the mirror and say, what are you doing? This is going nowhere. I don’t know why I’m doing it.

2:22:53 I’m just having conversations. But every year I was like, but I’m a better person. I’m gonna keep doing this. And I really believe having people like you and Joe Rogan that were just out there doing it, somehow implicitly told me that there is a light at the end of this tunnel. So thank you for being a pioneer in that sense, let alone, I know you don’t like compliments.

2:23:11 I’m gonna get it. I was gonna say, it’s an amazing thing to tell somebody. I know. But let alone your content. And your content, it does something emotionally.

2:23:19 And I think you said something earlier. People will say, you know, once you make someone feel something, they’ll forgive everything else. And like that moment in the barbecue and my whole team here is lined up to get selfies with you. And that doesn’t always happen. Because you’ve stirred something emotionally in these people by the art that you do and the way you present this.

2:23:39 And you tone a voice and how hard you work about getting those things so perfect. And they are, whether you wanna hear it or not, these emotional pieces. You’re basically selling human energy or transmitting it through this medium. And it’s really powerful. And so thanks for doing what you do.

2:23:56 I hope everybody gets a chance in their life to be sitting here and having somebody say such nice things. And thank you. No, thank you very much. And on London Real we say it’s about the journey. I hope you do this for the rest of your life.

2:24:07 I plan on it and come back and see us again sometime. Thank you so much. All right, thank you. Appreciate it.