History

Nick Gillespie | 3.22.2024 10:30 AM

Reason's Nick Gillespie talked with one of the great pioneers of podcasting, Dan Carlin, the host of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Carlin has been putting his thoughts out there for all to hear since the aughts. His deeply researched and urgently delivered takes on everything from Julius Caesar's wars on the Celtic tribes of Gaul to 20th century Imperial Japan's horrific conquest of Asia are downloaded by the millions.

They discussed Carlin's upcoming live tour, how he would update his 2019 book The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments From the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses in light of COVID-19, and whether he believes we can really learn meaningful lessons from history.

Previous appearance:
"Hardcore History's Dan Carlin on Why The End Is Always Near," by Nick Gillespie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carlin: That is what everybody wants. Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I think there's a little bit of an axis of two lines crossing. One line is the personality of the people involved, and the other axis are the events, the trends, the forces of the times we live in. When those things intersect, I think that's when you hit that sweet spot where all of a sudden you're looking at some personality and you go, "If not for that person…." I always try to imagine as a way of trying to get some perspective plugging........

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