"The Past Is There To Teach Us What Can Happen'

Hardcore History's Dan Carlin on hero worship and moral assumptions in the study of the past

-  NICK GILLESPIE

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

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

Carlin: I don’t ask them questions about themselves or delve into who they are or what they make or where they live and how old they are and what their religious beliefs are. But the podcasting tools that are out there now give us more information than they used to. When we started, I feel like it was much more U.S.-centric, and now the international audience is growing more.

To give you a real answer, though, I don’t know a ton about the listeners, and I don’t want to. I feel like their privacy is valuable to them like mine is to me, and what the podcasting services give us is enough.

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