Why Dan Carlin Believes That The End is Always Near

With the endless talk of COVID-19, many think we are facing an unprecedented threat of the collapse of our civilization. But Dan Carlin, host of Hardcore History, doesn’t believe anything we are facing is unprecedented. He’s spent years looking at apocalyptic moments from the past as a way to understand the challenges of the future.

Dan joins us on today’s episode to discuss some of the biggest questions in history. Do tough times create tougher people? Can humanity handle the power of its weapons without destroying itself? Will human technology or capabilities ever peak or regress? Will our world ever become a ruin for future archaeologists to dig up and explore? The questions themselves are both philosophical and like something out of The Twilight Zone.

We go all over the place in this episode, from the collapse of the Bronze Age to the challenges of the nuclear era the issue, which has hung over humanity like a persistent Sword of Damocles. But just as he does on his own show, Dan manages to make the most complicated stories engaging and entertaining.

Machine-Generated Transcript

Below is an AI-generated transcript complete with timecodes. This transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the podcast episode.

Scott Rank 0:12
History isn’t just a bunch of names and dates and facts. It’s the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explained how and why we got here. Welcome to the history unplugged Podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange, and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is. I’m your host, Scott rank.

If you’re a fan of history podcasts at all, there’s almost a short chance you’ve listened to Dan Carlin’s hardcore history, the original history podcast, Dan has been doing this a long time. He’s famous for his interstate length episodes, it can go on for four hours, six hours. No one really dives in as deep as he does. He is a career broadcaster and He manages to make history digestible, but also isn’t afraid to look at one topic across a swath of thousands and thousands of years and a lot of historians aren’t too comfortable going more beyond a few decades. So Dan does a great job of that. That’s why I’m so pleased to have him on the show. He was actually on it a couple of years ago talking about the differences between Germany’s World War One and World War two armies. But this time he is here to discuss the topic of his new book, the end is always near-apocalyptic moments from the Bronze Age collapse to nuclear near misses. So this is a really fun episode because we buy off a lot. We’ll jump around from Vikings encountering native peoples in the new world, the 1960 presidential election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, where people are focusing on appearances and not nuclear war, the Bronze Age collapse of 1177 BC, where the Assyrian civilization collapse. The Egyptian civilization is mortally wounded Hittites collapse the civilization of Greece that supposedly fought in the Trojan War collapses. And there are questions here that stretch across history like do tough times create tougher people. Can humanity handle the power of its weapons without destroying itself? Will human technology or capabilities ever peak or regress? So this is a big episode that jumps all over the place. And Dan does a fantastic job of explaining all these things, as he always does on his podcast. I really enjoyed this. I hope you do too. So I hope you enjoy this discussion with Dan Carlin. Dan, welcome to the show. Really glad to have you. Thank you so much for having me. Okay. Well, this is something to ask because as of the date of this recording, it’s March 2020 and 98% of news stories are about the Coronavirus and we’re in the pandemic stage as the World Health Organization defines it. Your book before the Coronavirus, and as you’re seeing reactions in the media from the public. Does it remind you at all from Maria’s actions in the past to whatever the Coronavirus threat of their time was?

Dan Carlin 3:05
Oh yeah, if you look at the last error that reminds me of this era a little bit that everybody talks about it, Spanish influenza 1918 1919 1920 in there, and people were doing a lot of the same things. It’s, you know, a lot of things change. But the people in this story are the one variable that sort of remains constant down at base level. And then like I was telling my wife, everybody here, in a way, is just operating on the best common-sense procedures, right? I mean, none of us wants to be silly. And we were, for example, stocking up, just be on the safe side, these all sound like, like logical countermeasures. But eventually, nobody shows up for work and the truckers don’t drive the groceries to the store, the whole supply system breaks down. And so it’s funny that you could kind of be doomed here as a society in your economy anyway, simply following best practices in a nice cautious conservative approach looks like 1919 to me

Scott Rank 4:00
It seems like a feature of it’s hardwired into humanity and something that I like that you do on your episodes that I think academic historians are shy about, for whatever reason is to look at the Matic issues across the sweep of humanity. And what I wonder is just in general, why does this apocalyptic fear seem higher hardwired into humanity, and you can see this in any religion and Ragnarok for the Norse for Armageddon, Shia Islamic belief in the 12th the mom, the Hale Bopp comet, if I’m getting my Doomsday coal from the 90s right, and this is intelligent people to like Sir Isaac Newton claimed that the time would come in 2016 by his study of the book of Revelation, so do you think it’s anthropological or what is this hardwiring into the humanity of any time fear?

Dan Carlin 4:46
Yeah, I think we could speculate and have some fun with that, you know, such a dark topic. You could have some fun with it for a while but I mean, think I think about it like at the very base level, let’s talk about people 10,000 years ago living in an extremely precarious environmental situation. And whatever that might mean rival tribes of food supply issues, mortality from disease anything in a very strict sense. I mean, in the same way, a lot of native peoples refer to themselves as simply the people, right? Your world is that world, they did face apocalyptic situations as far as that definition of the word meant to them, probably on a regular basis. Um, so so if we talk about hardwired because it’s been like that generation after generation after generation, maybe you could make a pretty good case that that that it could be hard-wired and that that precarious, always living on the edge of disaster existence from humankind, that that’s only been conquered in some places, and relatively recently. So I think, I don’t know, I’d say the evidence is clear. But I’d say I bet you could make a decent argument that there’s something to that.

Scott Rank 5:49
Yeah. And that’s interesting, where they’re, on the one hand, you have anthropology where this is the default human mode because we did live at the age of starvation for so long. But then there are actual systematic cases of collapse. And one episode that you touch on is the Bronze Age collapse, which I’m really fascinated by because it’s like globalization before globalization and the system breaks down. Walk me through that what happens? And then also how this ties into your bigger look at this theme across history.

Dan Carlin 6:18
All with the best, most accurate answer I could give on what happens is the Bronze Age about the Bronze Age and nobody knows. That’s part of the fun. I mean, what have you had a giant apparent? You know, I was just gonna say systems collapse, but that’s just one of the theories. But when do you have something on that white of a scale that’s that disruptive and obvious? Or maybe not even obvious? It’s so huge, and so long ago that we can still argue about what caused it today, but it really does almost look like a civilization 1.0 or a beta test of our modern sort of interconnected global supply systems and everything else that just almost let me back up. I read a column once and I used it in one of the early history podcasts about the greatest question was from Robert Samuelson, who is an economic writer who writes for the New York Times, I think. And he had talked about how the systems that we used to have before the Great Depression seems so simple to us now, and all the mistakes that those people made seem so silly. And his point was, Don’t get cocky, we’ll make our own new mistakes that will seem silly to someone down the road, and who will learn from them. Maybe the Bronze Age is your first really good example of trying to build this house of cards system and us getting to learn ever since in some way, shape or form, how not to do it, or how to avoid running into the same problem. I mean, some of the theories that I like about it are that if it lacked any sort of flexibility, that was a really rigid dependent system and that when some element of it some major pillar or node or necessary component of it failed, the whole thing went down and there were no backup systems. I don’t know which any of those theories are correct, but I don’t know how you’re not fascinated by something that large that obviously connected in some sort of learning experience to modern times. And that allows you to throw in everything, including the Bronze Age version of like Viking theory, if you want to into the mix, it’s just when you have that much uncertainty, you can project anything onto it, can’t you?

Scott Rank 8:14
Right? Yeah. I mean, we’re basing everything on something and Egyptian hieroglyphs talking about seeds, right? It’s like, okay, who are these people? It’s just

Dan Carlin 8:22
hit tight records disappearing at a certain time. What does that mean? I mean, it’s it. But at the same time, it is fascinating the number of disciplines that are now involved in trying to figure this out. And I mean, you wouldn’t even think of all the specialties that from volcanologists are I mean, everybody’s in on trying to figure this out a little bit. People who study tsunamis, the whole thing is that as an English friend of mine used to say about everything bloody interesting,

Scott Rank 8:46
right? An archaeologist, a friend of mine is looking at climate data to see about the Syrian collapse. And I think there’s some who think that when Homer is talking about the Iliad and discussions of dark clouds gathering, this is an eight Hundred bc a reference to 1200 bc and the claps there from that date at least I guess we’re both fans the ancient world what were statements like that from the period that really jumped out at you that seems sort of timeless and their, their fear of these apocalyptic things?

Dan Carlin 9:14
Well, it’s interesting because there’s been so much work done on the Bronze Age, even over the last 30 or 40 years that things that used to seem much more ominous when written in my older history books maybe seem a lot less ominous now. So like one of the things that used to be and I think when we did our Bronze Age show it was before some of the good modern books have just come out. But like the so-called clay records that were found still baked into the oven on some of these coastal towns that had then been sacked. And these were seen as evidence that these Raiders that had been seen off the coast had come and sack them before they could even be dried and sent these stone equivalent of letters. Well, now it looks like they just might have been buried in that building for a long time. afterward and maybe they had nothing to do with the Bronze Age Vikings or maybe those people that they were worried about sacking their city weren’t Viking types at all from somewhere else, but may have been their own people rebelling or their own pirates preying on their own people. So I mean, those are the kind of things that force you to reevaluate how you thought you saw something like that, ever since. And so when you say which sources do you like the most, tends to vary depending on what I most recently read and what they think of them?

Scott Rank 10:28
Yeah, I mean, well, the thing that surprised me the most of 1177 when this happens is that you can see one civilization collapsing for war or raid or people being hauled off into slavery or a localized famine, but for multiple civilizations around it, it’s almost like a 21st century supply chain collapse. And that’s just one idea. But so like an early eastern Mediterranean globalization, it’s so counterintuitive to what people would expect from that period,

Dan Carlin 10:57
you get the cascading effects, right. So so that When it becomes difficult to label any one thing because let’s just faced a single example if you have a climate change problem that causes drought in one area, which causes starvation, the starvation leads to all kinds of disruption because as we all know, most people do not choose to sit there and starve in place, to the last person, they tend to move and movement causes disruption. And so you have this cascading event where people you know, that’s the old theory, right? You have these migrations of full peoples that then bash into settled societies that compete for resources, but the whole point is to show that that then that disruption as you said, causes a supply chain problem which destroys the whole you know, trading economy of the region. I mean, the lesson here, if you want to take it to a modern analogy, is how Reliant in a system everything is on everything else. What I keep telling my wife during the Coronavirus thing is the time to panic is when we start making rules that don’t let truckers deliver things you know from the place to place then, then it does look a little like the Bronze Age to me you start going if there’s nothing on the grocery store shelves, then money means nothing anymore then, you know, the very underpinnings of society start to fall away, and I’m looking for sea peoples on the horizon,

Scott Rank 12:10
Do you know? Yeah, it’s funny you mentioned that because I think it’s Richard Bollea. He’s a Middle Eastern historian and basically credits all of the rises of Middle East civilization with Islam and everything, basically, due to camels and the camel saddle, so they’re like the trekkers of the ancient world and the Silk Road, too. So yeah, I mean, there will make things happen. I want to jump to a thematic issue and then we can jump around all over the place in a lot of your series in the Mongols series and a lot of them you mentioned the quote from Voltaire. Can you remind me it’s the mankind of walks down with silk slippers and goes up in wooden shoes?

Dan Carlin 12:47
The sound of history is the sound for forever wouldn’t shoes going upstairs and silk slippers coming down or some variation of that, you know, basically meaning that the old life cycle of society’s idea that goes back to Forever that, that, you know, the tougher, more hard Scrabble ones are on the rise always. And then there’s some sort of civilizational sweet spot between the Spartan existence that got you to the point where you could have a society with leisure time and plays and music and culture. And then from the sweet spot at the top of the pinnacle, you start the descent and the silk slippers downstairs to decadence and decay and slop and all that and you get overtaken by some other person coming up the stairs in clogs, you know,

Scott Rank 13:28
yeah, I mean, and you mentioned that with the Mongols, where you have hardscrabble Khan’s, who are wearing rat fur versus four generations later, they’re completely synthesized and speaking Chinese and I studied the Ottoman Empire, exact same thing with assault in the early Sultan’s are celebrated as plunderers on horseback and the later ones are just stuffed in their harem and drinking wine and

Dan Carlin 13:48
the old blues, blue Turks back in the day, right.

Scott Rank 13:51
Yeah. And I mean, that’s a tricky concept, but how do you see that play out because that’s used until the 20th century and then modern social historians Don’t like it and you can’t quantify it with data, it’s conjectural, but just based on this theory of collapse and regeneration, everything, how do you take that concept of tough times creating tougher people?

Dan Carlin 14:10
Well, I mean, first of all, let’s examine the obvious point before we even go there. And that’s that there’s so much romanticizing going on here about the mythical pasts of all these people. You know, I had somebody tell me recently that they’re, you know, the I’d said that there weren’t any contemporary sources on Genghis Khan’s features and all that stuff. And they sent me some paintings that show jigs, and I had to say, No, no, that’s not really that’s a romanticized. He was a white guy, by the way, with a nice big old look. And so you turn around, you just go, Okay, we have to understand a little bit like when the Ottomans are tracing their heritage back to the ancient Turks. Were they I mean, it’s like today I’ve often wondered, how much are today’s Italians? The Romans, you know, I don’t know the answer to the question. I don’t know. And I don’t know how you would answer it. But so so I think that’s One question is when we romanticize and this is something that people like you know, a lot better than people like me how often we tend to take an image. Look, we do it today. I think being able to watch figures in your own life have that treatment given to them gives you a good sense of how it used to be. I mean, watch look at how Martin Luther King has been squished into a two-dimensional cardboard cutout caricature of the three-dimensional human being that he was, well, that’s the treatment you give them all. That’s what you give Washington. That’s what you give Jefferson. That’s what you give Genghis Khan, if you’re Mongolian, you know what I’m saying this is so so whatever it is you think you come from is probably a myth, to begin with. And you’ve transformed that myth to meet your current situation somehow, um, in terms of the tough times and tougher people thing. Well, you know, I don’t have the answer that question, but I am forever meditating on it. Because it seems to me and we talked about this a little bit in the book, and I think about it a little like coyote And one of the things human beings always praise coyotes for it in almost grudging fashion, is their adaptability. And the way that they seem to rebound from challenges in a way that even if you want to get rid of coyotes seems admirable in some weird way, but we praise ourselves the same way. We’re an adaptable species. We don’t have long fangs, you don’t have sharp claws. We’re not particularly fast, don’t jump particularly high. We’re adaptable and we’re smart. Um, so does that mean we’re adaptable in a toughness sense? And then I’m going to break that down into two senses. One being an evolutionary question of do you get tougher from living a type tougher lifestyle, but also an intelligent question because if you really are intelligent, and you really have to adapt to something, you’re not just going to wait to grow long claws and sharper teeth. You’re going to push that with your intelligence all you can, so does a for example, if the Spartans decide they have to craft a society which is geared towards creating societal carrots and sticks and sand disincentives towards creating better soldiers for the survival of the state is that your intelligence helping to bolster all of the cultural apparatus that they’ve set up into place to create, you know, almost their own eugenics system? You know, first, we create these diamonds, then we Polish these diamonds. Um, I think there’s an interplay going on there. Right. So, um, you know, if you grow up in a culture where you’re forced to fight a lot, get into physical fistfights. Does that make you a tougher person? Well, it does if you’re going to get into physical fistfights. Right, if that’s going to be part of the criteria you’re going to need in your world, then you’re going to you’re gonna have a few fistfights under your belt is probably a good thing to have. Right? If, however, we’re raising somebody to go to Harvard today and work in a laboratory, I don’t think you have to have those fistfights to adapt and to evolve to this society. This society does not require it. I’m not going to say that level of toughness, I’m going to say that kind of toughness. So if it’s To tie it into now, if we’re going to exist in a situation where we’re going to have viruses like this mutating every 3456 years and playing havoc on our economies, and our personal lives and all these kinds of things, are we going to develop into more flexible people, more adaptable people? I certainly think we’re gonna make some changes to our global medical approaches, after all this in response to it, is that a case of society getting tougher hardening the silos, so to speak? So I mean, I see it may be in a more complex fashion than just tough times tough people. But I do think maybe that’s a general umbrella that all those kinds of questions fit under if that makes sense.

Scott Rank 18:37
Yeah, that does that your grandmother who grew up in the depression, who knows how to repurpose everything and doesn’t throw away bread bags, for example, has incredible resourcefulness, but maybe they don’t have the toughness that a 21st-century high school student would where they can sit for six hours to study for the LSAT and other things for early college entrance exams. So

Dan Carlin 18:56
well, and another example if she can go back my grandmother could go by replacing For that thing that would take her eight hours or nine hours and $4 to rebuild for $2. And it’s right down the street at the store. Does she really need that particular skill at that particular time? See, I mean, so it’s all sort of context-dependent. That’s one of the tough times to make the tough people if they do, yeah.

Scott Rank 19:17
It’s a hard trope to give up too, because oh, it sure is. Yeah, like you said, in every ancient mythological account, there’s this great figure who times of Wayne’s there’s King Arthur, there’s Sultan, oh, smile.

Dan Carlin 19:29
My favorite trope, King Arthur.

Scott Rank 19:31
Yeah, I mean, you can just basically I think it’s a way for a court chronicler, to criticize the current King and whoever Arthur’s enemy is the king and they’re kind of muttering on their breath and hoping he can pull it over the king. That’s so many troops to choose from or just accounts like that of mythological people in the past, Gilgamesh, whoever you want, it’s a huge grab bag. Something else I’m excited to delve into this area because I’m a fan of travelers and explorers. So collapse or the NBA near in terms of the first contact between civilizations. I could see a lot of ways to go after that there’s the epidemic their smallpox, which makes Coronavirus, see mild, but how do you look at this type of thing of some sort of massive shift? If we’re talking about the first contact?

Dan Carlin 20:16
You know, it’s funny because I do find it interesting the morality that’s often attached to it, because I keep trying to figure out, you know, I guess the first thing I always try to figure out what I’m looking at those kinds of situations is, what sorts of other ways might it have gone? You know, I mean, could you have had, for example, the first contact happen, and have it be positive in there. I mean, I guess what I’m trying to figure out is, if it had happened the other way around, if the people from the so-called New World had found the people from the so-called Old World first and landed on their beaches, how different is it? Or if it had been and you know, people theorize about this all the time whether or not it happened, but at the people from Asia And places like China had discovered the new world first, in a sense, where it wasn’t like a one time visit, but you establish regular communications, you get that pipeline going between the continents, how different does it turn out then? And all I can figure is, you know, forgetting the good, evil, slavery, religious, all the things that are overtones in that story, I think the disease is going to be the thing that’s going to be there no matter what, and it’s going to be the ultimate tragedy, no matter how the thing plays out. So I mean, you almost have to look at that as the equivalent of an asteroid. That was that had earth on a collision course long before any of us were here. Because unless we can, and I’m trying to think because maybe I’m just not smart enough, but maybe, maybe there is a way you get the first contact and don’t have the disease disaster. But if you do have the disease disaster, well, you’re talking about a Holocaust, no matter what the intentions of the various people in the story, aren’t you?

Scott Rank 21:57
Yeah, I think it’s with Native peoples in the Americas, it’s something like 80 to 90% of death rate if I have my numbers, right.

Dan Carlin 22:05
They fluctuate Different people have different ideas about that. Yeah.

Scott Rank 22:07
And it’s something like 30% with bubonic plague. So you don’t have I mean, that’s what you have whole scale social breakdown compared to tragedy, but the leads to reform, as you would see, they’re thinking about that if you’re looking at first contact where you have something devastated versus something like the black plague. I guess we can get into epidemiology since it’s a big topic right now. Have you seen kind of changes like that on a sliding scale of 30% of people die in this population versus 80%? And how people perceive that and how they reacted to it?

Dan Carlin 22:36
Well, again, maybe I’m talking from ignorance here. But isn’t that the situation with the AIDS virus? I mean, I think you see death rates in some places that don’t even look modern anymore. But once upon a time, they were a lot more equalized. I mean, early on into the AIDS virus. There weren’t huge differences in death rates in different locations. Now, if you look at the survival rate in a place like London, or New York, and then look at A survival place that doesn’t have medical care. That’s very good at all, I think you still get that 30% 80% of the 20% 80% difference in terms of death rates or, or lifestyle differences. I mean, some people in the West hardly ever will I don’t want to say that. But I mean, it’s so different than it was when it was a death sentence everywhere. And the real difference-maker seems to be the level of medical care wherever you happen to be afflicted with it, something that we said in the book, and it’s not exactly on topic, but that I keep thinking about is the particular nature of this epidemic versus other ones because we did have an epidemic in my lifetime. And I think it’s between 34 and 37 million people who died from the AIDS virus. It’s very interesting to see though how the more slow development and progress of that disease change the impact of if you had lost the 34 to 37 million aids victims in a month and a half, or in three months instead of the way and if everyone was affected, and the transmission was through the air And I mean, we already would have seen this movie that we’re going through right now in the early to mid-1980s. Do you know what I’m saying? And I think that, that we dodged that bullet because of the specific nature of that disease. And I think we’re dodging another bullet now because I do think you’re going to get reformed from this. And I do think this has bad as it might turn out to be, is nothing like an Ebola outbreak would be or some hemorrhagic fever or something outrageously awful like that,

Scott Rank 24:28
talking about examples of the first contact that maybe aren’t full scale, social devastation, and I like travelers and explorers. And one that I like is Robin bar sama. He’s a Chinese diplomat. He is also a historian, Bishop who travels to Europe in the 1200s. I think he’s like, reverse Marco Polo, the first person from China, essentially to go to European courts, and no one really knew what a historian was, and they thought he was like this pressure john guy, this mythical figure these Christians out east But when you’re talking about the first contact between civilizations, we think of the Age of Discovery where Conquistadores go to civilization, they introduce smallpox and there are rape and pillage and all havior Old World medieval

Dan Carlin 25:13
values brought to the date.

Scott Rank 25:15
Exactly. And, and before we started, you mentioned with Mongol conquest. For Europeans that’s a different type of the first contact because I’m sure they would have had almost no knowledge of the Mongols even though they share the Eurasian continent, but this wipes out their civilization as well. Basically, what are other examples when you were doing this that you thought of the first contact that isn’t necessarily like when natives been wiped out whether it’s Mongols or whether it’s travelers and explorers encountering native peoples for the first time like a Captain Cook or a Marco Polo or others?

Dan Carlin 25:46
Well, not to be cynical, but sometimes it’s not all about having a better attitude towards them or being more peaceful. Sometimes, the first contact does not equal wiping out because one side doesn’t have the power to wipe the other side out, yet. I mean, what about the Viking settlements in the new world and you go and if the sagas are to be believed, and if you’re going to extrapolate, like some people do from some of those things they supposedly had contact, what they call the natives they called scalings or screenings, and they would fight the head. Of course in my mind, the idea of Viking warriors fighting Native American type warriors is an intoxicating clash of cultures. I love that Blizzard for that kind of stuff. But you think about that you think okay, there is is not the keys to door a convert and die to make slaves of the natives. It’s not that kind of thing. But it’s also not the benign like we hear some of the stories of you mentioned one of the Chinese explorers to the new world. And there are all these stories about Chinese trees that have been found on the coastline that

Scott Rank 26:46
there’s a lot of that stuff has been going on a long time

Dan Carlin 26:48
and I’m inclined to believe it. And those Chinese ships from the Middle Ages which would grow its own food in the sunlight way. I love all that stuff. But if it happens, one wonders why you don’t keep coming back. You know, so I do know that there were changes in Chinese emperors and that their outlook would change from a more internal focus and sometimes a more external focus. And sometimes that would happen right when the new big fleet was just finished to go to explore the Pacific Coast, maybe. But I guess what I’m saying is, is if you’re going to have the disease Holocaust Anyway, um, then you’re going to have the majority of deaths and sadness, I think, anyway, then you’re going to have, even if you have the Viking types that show up. I think that that only stays peaceful until there’s an equilibrium between the two sides. And then I think you see the natural things that well, I don’t want to say the natural things that always happen. But I think for people who have a pessimistic outlook, it’s always a lot easier to find evidence to back up your case if you want to say that people are naturally going to start whacking on each other after a while for one reason or another. And as evidence for that, it’s that the natives weren’t exactly living in peaceful harmony all the time with each other right there. Human beings just like everyone else, add new human beings to the mix. And I just think you add new contestants to the giant New World gladiatorial games. It might not be as one-sided though, because, to me, a battle between Vikings and Native American peoples looks a hell of a lot more equal than a bunch of keys to door raise in their native allies against Aztecs.

Scott Rank 28:22
Yeah, I haven’t thought about that Viking’s verse of NATO’s but yeah, now My name is spinning. And when you mentioned Chinese explorers, I don’t know if you’ve ever come across the book. I think it’s Gavin Menzies about he thinks Zhang he discovered the new world in the 1430s and circumnavigated Greenland’s. And no way that’s true, but I think it’s a fun theory. And if you’ve ever come across that guy,

Dan Carlin 28:43
you know, I like all those stories. See, here’s the thing about you know, I always describe myself as a fan of history, but there are some areas which I know less about, so I’m more of a fan than anything else. And one of them is the wonderfulness of Chinese history because it is so long-lasting as you know, well and so very Read that you almost feel like you can find anything in Chinese history as something happened once, always. So when you look at how close they came at times, to discovering and interacting with the world of the Romans, For example, during the Imperial times, and how close at one point there was a Chinese famous Chinese General, and they always keep changing the Chinese pronunciation these people, I mean, we used to say was panned, Chow. Now it’s more bang, Chow. And he’s one of these great generals that lead sort of a reconnaissance in force to go punish all these native tribes to their West, where a lot of the Uyghurs problems are right now in the western part of China. And he goes and he’s on this mission and he subduing all these tribes way out where there are the there are these deteriorating Chinese fortresses, even now on the old Silk Road. And while this was happening, the Romans happened to be advancing in that same direction from the other side. It was quite a bit of the stuff that they were dealing with against the Parthians. It would have been the sun it’s probably by now. And, and so there was a moment that all of the history geeks like yours truly love to play around with. And it’s almost like when the Russians and the Allied forces meet up and shake hands in the Second World War, you have this meeting of the Imperial Romans and the Han Chinese meeting over somewhere in Central Asia. But but but to me, that would be an example of an interesting first contact, because unlike the Mongol version of it, which wasn’t really the first contact, but we know what we mean, or the new world one, a Han China and Imperial Rome at that time period. Those are that’s not a mismatch. You know, that would be an interesting and interesting sort of balance of power question right there. Right? So that’s two heavy, undefeated heavyweight champions from other divisions finding each other. So now I’m geeking out over that, in my mind,

Scott Rank 30:47
it’s amazing how trade networks cause things to happen and bring things in places you would never expect like Roman jewelry ended up in Japanese gravesites and burials and there’s a village in I think Western China that claims its some of its inhabitants are descended from Roman soldiers. Roman areas. Yeah.

Dan Carlin 31:06
From the crisis of tobacco right. When did that I think it was the Parthian Crassus, tobacco, the loss Legion or something, the last cohort, right?

Scott Rank 31:13
And then there, we have our Western features. So that definitely proves it because we’re undiluted for 2000 years.

Dan Carlin 31:19
Well, I’d like that whole area hasn’t had

a ton of blond-haired, blue-eyed, redheaded, green-eyed people forever going back to the first Chinese records about the place and the tea and the rum. Who were the Protoss get them in people’s before there were horses in the region? Were supposed to the Koreans and all those other light. I mean, remember the Chinese had a problem not that long ago with a Caucasian mummy that was in that was a rather unfortunate place from the standpoint of their ideology because it’s supposed to be Chinese territory. And then you find these, these mummies from people who had very a Western-looking skin but once upon a time, I always tell my listeners once upon a time, people were all spread out and pockets and all kinds of fun places for a long time, and you can find out that was what made Genghis Khan such a fun person to try to reconstruct, construct his features, because there’s not a lot of descriptions. But when you add, you know this when you’re talking about even the Ottomans, I mean, they would run in, you had your occasional Turk that shows up with the red hair and the green eyes again, you know, I always like that woman. And I’m old enough to remember this, there was a famous cover from the National Geographic and it showed a woman from like Afghanistan or something, and she has the traditional features that you would associate with the region, but she’s got these incredible, bright blue or bright green eyes. And it was always such a reminder to all of us, that people get around right or that these kinds, of physical features, have been mixed with people that we don’t even associate with them being mixed with now. And with Genghis Khan, you could mix features of a person who looks East Asian with green eyes, with a beard color that looks more like what a Russian would have in the West I mean any kind of ethnic combination becomes possible. And so I mean, I love that whole idea of how everyone moves around like, I don’t even remember the point. I love the idea so much.

Scott Rank 33:06
Well, I like that too, because it’s the cracks in official histories, especially national histories that we’re all monolithically this way. But you’ll always find exceptions and always find cracks and people who are there who shouldn’t be there. And yeah, I love seeing those things too. Absolutely.

Dan Carlin 33:21
I have a counter-question for you. Don’t you think it’s intriguing to watch something that I would have thought was going the way of the dinosaur that whole like you were saying the nationalistic sort of histories because it’s on a resurgence in many places all over the world? I mean, just watching the Russians both reclaim their legitimate history, but also Davy Crockett of phi it also just like, Well, you know, I mean, it’s, I mean, all these countries that are rewriting their histories with a more nationalistic flair, it almost seems like they’re going back to a way we did history 40 or 50 or 60 years ago, in like the 1950s High School textbook version of it, just their country’s version of that

Scott Rank 33:59
you It’s funny when you’re looking through the looking glass and you see on the other side, it can look silly. I mean, I spent a lot of years in Turkey and they have very nationalist historiography and yeah, my period is around the era of the Armenian genocide and probably Oh, yeah, probably gonna lose, you’re lucky to be here. Probably gonna lose some Turkish listeners just by saying that, but hey, it is what it is. But it does, you know, make a question, you know what we have in our system too. But yeah, it’s sort of like a bizarre 1950s version in some areas. Something I was thinking of, that kind of got me thinking when you mentioned the Mongols, something you did really well in the series on the Mongols, and then all your series on the ancient world is you’ll talk about these factors that hold true along long periods of history. you’d mentioned the physics of the battlefield that really until the 20th century, what it was like to be a soldier in combat could be very comparable to the ancient world when you don’t have modern weapons, and getting into the shoes of the people who were there on the ground. And when he specifically talked about the Mongol slaughter of I think it was Kyiv or some city in Russia or not really sure. I can’t remember. But that if you were in a helicopter, a news helicopter going overhead, what would it be like to see that? And what’s your sense kind of evoking that of if you’re on the ground, you have witnessed some type of total collapse, whether it’s Mongols coming through and completely slaughtering almost everybody in a town, any type of devastating battle after Siege of Constantinople 1453, take your pick, whatever, is there anything that comes back to you and recurs to you, wow, and get this sense of what it would be like to just stand there and see all this.

Dan Carlin 35:38
I feel like you have to read different kinds of things to get that sense that you’re talking about and then apply those things to the stories in the past. So I’ll give you an example. If you read the various chroniclers in Goa, talk about the Mongols coming in and creating devastation or whatever they do. Maybe talking about You know the fall of Baghdad and Islamic chroniclers would bemoan all the things that were happening and you read this stuff and there’s, there’s a disconnect. And the disconnect is what goes away in time are these people in the store you can, you can in one sort of way a feel for them you know because that’s what makes the story compelling right you’re you’re feeling the emotions that connected with the story and the lives lost and all this stuff. But that’s on one level. I’m saying this now is it history fan? I think some other people don’t like history because they connect with it on a more visceral level. I think maybe the fact that I’m able to divorce myself is what makes the story interesting, right? If it were to really, I might not want to be so interested. But now let me take it to the real area for a minute. As a journalist, I always wanted to be a war correspondent until I wised up and realized how stupid that would be. Um, so I realized how stupid it would be because some of my heroes were war correspondents and I would read what they wrote some of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read in my life. For those who One of them is a perfect example. It’s called the Great War for Civilization by Robert Fisk, who is a war correspondent, a modern war correspondent. This stuff that is in Robert Fisk’s memory banks in his brain is horrific. And when he writes this stuff in the book, it’s a guy who reads Mongol conquest stories for fun at bedtime and never thinks twice about it. This was one of the few books I had to put down and make sure that I had some mental sorbet to cleanse my palate before bed because I could not get it out of my brain because what he was essentially doing was giving you the kind of reporting you would have had on the scene at a conquest like oh, I don’t know Baghdad or a tiny little sliver of a slice of one out of the way corner of Baghdad. And it is so visceral and it is so real, it makes you sick. It gives you a sick to your stomach feel. And that’s the feeling you would have if you could get closer to those historical events and that’s what leeches out. So that when we read it later, it’s compelling reading and interesting read, I always say, I wonder how the people at the time period would feel about finding out that we’re interested in those horrible moments in their lives in an almost entertainment like fashion. And the only thing that makes me feel okay about it is that I realized that they enjoy stories from the past just like I do, and it seems to be a guilty pleasure. We all share and now with our modern Coronavirus, we’re getting a chance to pay a little bit for how much we’ve enjoyed that kind of

Scott Rank 38:35
stories in the past by providing some for future generations that hopefully will arrive sometime to read about it later. I definitely don’t want anything bad to happen here with Coronavirus. I wish the best for everyone. So I need to get that disclaimer having said that what this process will do is I think to connect us with our ancestors in a way that it’d be impossible to imagine otherwise since legs are such a common reoccurring thing that happens over and over again. So now we get a little taste of what that’s like.

Dan Carlin 39:02
I’m actually having that exact same emotion. And I was trying to cut a show this morning. One of my political shows I haven’t done a lot I’ve been trying to do it. And this is one of the thoughts that came out, which is, in a funny way, this allows us to have a little bit of an understanding of what it’s like you had mentioned the diseased part. But for me, I’m feeling like we’re getting a chance. Let me back up, this is the best way to do it. I did a show once on the second Red Scare, you know, the communist era 50 scares and the whole thing. And I talked about how when I was a kid growing up in the 1970s, and we studied that period. It just looked insane. It didn’t make any sense. You couldn’t write about it in a history book in a way where we would sit there and go, Oh, yeah, I see why it was that way. And it’s because there are lots of periods in history where you get to call it a mass psychosis is not the right word, but it generates the right sort of image in your head where it’s almost like a crazy period, but you can understand it from outside the period. We said Wouldn’t it be nice if you had like a potion that you could drink that would allow you to have the same fears, the same level of uncertainty, all that thing of the period that you wanted to study. And then you drink it. And then all of a sudden you go, Oh, I see why they felt this way. Well, I feel like going through what we’re going through now, and it’s much bigger than the Coronavirus thing. It’s everything we’ve been dealing with for the last couple of years. I feel like you’re getting a chance to drink that potion. You’re going, Oh, I see what this feels like to live in an irrational era where everything seems little nuts, and where your kids or grandchildren are going to read the history books about the 2020s and think, why were they so crazy? I don’t understand that period. But that happens over and over again. So So when you say this is sort of like the devil’s advocate, looking at the bright side of the things we’re going through, but I do feel like it’s helped me on a personal level, understand a few things about the past

Transcribed by https://otter.ai