Dan Carlin: The Good Old Days
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So when people say to me, you know, where do you want to go back in time to tomorrow? You know, when the dentistry is even better because, you know, you might say, oh, God, wouldn't it be great to live when this was going on and fill in the blank on what this is? Yeah. But then you get to go to Doc Holliday to have that tooth removed. And I'm just, you know, we're not going back in time where where surgery involves chloroform and and having your appendix out could be fatal.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Literally. Very excited about this one. I love history. It's so funny because history taught well or explained well, I find to be the most exciting. I mean, they're the real life stories. Talk about, you know, true crime. Hello, history. Hello. Have you heard of me? And we've got the, how would you even describe him? The maven.

of entertaining history in the podcast world. Dan Carlin, amazing book, The End Is Always Near, Apocalyptic Moments from the Bronze Age to the Collapse of Nuclear Near Misses. And of course, his insane podcast, Hardcore History, is just a national treasure. And we have got him coming to us right now.

Nice to virtually meet you. Yeah, you too. Thanks for coming on, man. Oh, thanks for having me. It's a big honor. I'm a big fan. Oh, and vice versa. History is the only subject that I knew in school I was going to be on. I was straight A's in history, loved history. My son is a military history major.

Wow, that's what I was. How funny. Wow, that's cool. Military, it's military, proper military history because that's a whole other branch, right? I mean, obviously. Yes. Well, where I went to school didn't have, like you were a history major and then you worked with your advisor to craft.

the specific courses you took or what. So it's not officially, it doesn't say on the diploma, just says history. But that was always where things tended to sort of draw me. So how old is your son? 30. 30, okay. God, I keep forgetting, you don't look old enough to have a 30-year-old son. I look at him and I go, what happened? How did we get here? I know, I do that with my kids too. Yeah. God, there's so much to talk about. I don't know where to begin with somebody like you that has

such a vast knowledge of stuff. What do you think the most misunderstood, this is a big one, like concept of history is? History is written by the winners, they always say. That's clearly true, correct. But would you have a subheading to that to understand history? I don't know if it's clearly written by the winners. I think it's clearly written by the literate.

right i mean not everybody's literate so take for example uh and we talked about it in a series of shows the mongol conquest right so you have essentially probably by that time call them a pseudo tribal people uh who conquer a bunch of literate societies and then those literate societies end up writing the history of the mongols so i'm not you know there's certain truisms right that's a truism that that's accepted but i don't know that that's true uh i think the idea that um

That history repeats is a truism that's not always true. That you learn from history is a truism that's not always true. So I think a lot of this stuff sounds like it makes sense. But I think a lot of historians, and I am not one of them, let's put that disclaimer out right here. I'm a big admirer, though. I think a lot of them would point out that a lot of these generalized things that we non-historians know,

assume sounds correct when we hear it, probably is not really supportable if you get down in the weeds and start breaking things down. Does that make sense? Yeah, definitely. I mean, just the notion, which is clearly when you think about it, duh, like in the further back in history, the less literate people were.

So, I mean, which, okay, I was going to end with this, but since we brought up literacy, it's on my thing is, okay, I'm going to give you a couple of things. Fire, the wheel, the printing press, the industrial revolution, the internet, the internet.

Is that a fair breakdown of technology that is clearly going to transform the world or did and will? I think all of those examples are things that did that. And I think there's probably more. Oh.

And I'm not in a position to sort of triage that and say, is AI going to be more disruptive than the printing press? And I don't know. In a funny way, when you were mentioning them and I was thinking of them, it almost sounded to me like they all belong in a similar category, right? Super disruptive people

And they almost seem like just, you know, I almost hear this phrase in my head, just when you think it couldn't get any worse or better. And then you think Gutenberg was bad. Wait till you get AI, right? That's right, right. I think, you know, you could almost make a case that that's a theme that you could sort of look at history through, right? The prism of disruptive technologies over the eras.

and how human societies tried to roll with those punches as they came along. And of course, the jury's still out, right? Because we've got to continually roll with the punches off into the distant future, right? Well, and that's the other thing you say is to properly look at history or the future, what would your favorite, most ideal slice of the pie be in terms of years? 60 years, a century, a half century, a decade,

What are we trying to do with it? Whatever we want. If we're looking at any subject, is there a, like you say, I'm not going to give you an idea about AI until it's been around for a decade, two decades, 20 years, 50 years, three generations, a generation. It's that kind of thing. What's, I guess what I'm asking is, what's the sample size you look for on any given subject history-wise in terms of chronology?

Somebody asked me recently, I did a live event, we always do a Q&A afterwards, and they said to me, when do current events become history? Exactly. Where's that blending of the line? And I had to think about this for a long time. You know, there's that old line that journalism is the first draft of history, but at a certain point, you know, the journalists move on to the next story, right? When the O.J. Simpson trial's over and they're moving on to the next thing, the O.J. Simpson trial's put in the archives instead of in the newspaper. And you

And, you know, I had to really think about it at this event. And finally, I said, you know, I feel like current events are anything I lived through. And history was anything that came before my time because there's something about living. And this is why I think we all understand history better as we get older, because we've lived through more of it. Right. So we have this understanding of, OK, so things change.

come out at the time, right? So let's just say, keep it with the OJ theme for a minute, the news breaks and we start trying to adjust ourselves to that information. And then more information tumbles forward over months and months and months. And we keep sort of solidifying and changing and altering this image of the original sculpture that represents the news story. And then over time, people

tell-all books get written, people die, files get released, more information comes out. And after a certain amount of time, and that's a different amount of time for every story, the picture becomes clearer, more 360 degrees. But

In the case of that story, I lived it when it was happening. So it feels completely different to me than if I'm looking at this from the perspective of my kid who reads about it as a historical event from the get-go and has a lot of that godlike view that it took you and it took me 30 years to get, right? Because, you know, so context, I always say I'm addicted to context, but my problem is, is

is everything is connected to everything else. So I can never figure out where the proper dividing line is. So I always say we tried to do a show on Cleopatra once, and I kept taking it farther and farther back because she's connected to Julius Caesar and Caesar's connected to, you know, blah, blah, blah. And you start taking it back. I ended up doing a whole six-part series on the fall of the Roman Republic just so I could get far enough back

to give you enough context so that Cleopatra made sense at the end of the story. So maybe you're asking the wrong guy. Wow. What's that thing of when you hear, at a certain age, at my age, when I hear, this is the most important election of your lifetime. I heard that at every election. I've heard that at every single election that I've been paying attention to since I was a kid. So what they're really saying is, this is the election that is happening right now.

That's what they're saying. Literally, that is it. Well, coming from a news background as I do, that sort of hype is what gets people to pay attention, right? The scary thing about the way we do elections, and a lot of people do elections like this, we just do it probably more intensely than most people, is that something like that becomes a huge news story. And the way news works is that there's a profit motive involved. And so hyping up an election like a sporting event, right?

may not be really good for the Democratic Republic, what we're talking about, but it's really important and wonderful for the news stations. I mean, isn't this the first presidential debates we're ever going to have where they're having commercial breaks? Well, there's a reason they're having commercial breaks, and that's because, you know,

politics sells. I mean, it's a consumer sport at this point. And so when you say this is the most important election in our lifetime, it's a little like a sporting event where they say this is the biggest game, you know, in so-and-so history. I mean, it's part of the hype. Now, here's the problem with something like that is sometimes that statement's true, right? But good luck trying to parse when it's just marketing materials and when it's really something you should pay attention to. Well, isn't there the thing where there used to be

At the networks, the news division and the entertainment division. And then routinely they, that barrier got broken down and there was one group of executives running both. And the minute that happens, you don't have the,

separation of church and state that's meant to, right? I mean, to keep everybody honest. I'll tell you guys a story. So my roots are in news. So that's where I started off. And I was at KABC in Los Angeles working on the assignment desk, probably 19, let's say it's 1990, 91. But somebody can check this pretty easily because Oprah Winfrey was doing a groundbreaking interview with Michael Jackson on the network.

And we got, and I'm going from memory here, but it was something like we got a corporate, I don't remember if Capital Cities owned KABC at that point, still if it was the successor. But we got a memo at the news division, and KABC is the local version of ABC News in Los Angeles. And so we got the message from on high that the first five stories we did on the local newscast, one of the, you know, LA is the second biggest news market in the country. So New York's bigger, but then you're talking about the second biggest newscast.

in the country. And we got a story that said from corporate that our first five stories were going to be Michael Jackson-Oprah tie-ins, right? Which doesn't sound terrible unless you end up with a really big story, which something like that happened. It wasn't like, you know, a presidential assassination, but it was a pretty big local story. And yet we had to have five Oprah-Michael Jackson tie-ins

before we got to that. And it's very strange because, you know, the way you organize your newscast, the heavier duty stuff should come first. So it's a little weird when you do a bunch of entertainment stuff and then go to the heavy duty stuff. But it is Los Angeles. It was always a heavy duty entertainment division. But I mean, that's 1990, 91, 92. So this has been going on a long time. And Edward R. Murrow, who's a hero to a lot of people like yours truly in journalism. I mean, you go back and look at Murrow's career and we remember, you know, the live reports from the blitz in London in 1940 and all those kinds of stuff.

But Murrow had to do his interviews with the movie stars, no offense. But, you know, he had to do the entertainment stuff, too, even back in the 50s and early 60s. So once again, I'm leery of romanticizing it all because I'm not sure that that wonderful separation of church and state existed like we think it did. But I'll tell you what did exist. And that's things like confirming news stories independently and whatnot, because at KABC, like all the other networks,

The rule was we couldn't use someone else's reporting.

So these days, if NBC, if I'm at ABC and NBC has a great scoop, we can just say NBC News is reporting and nobody cares. But back then, you wouldn't mention the other network because it was a zero sum game in media. You know all about this. You were raised in the same era I was. If you're watching NBC, you're not watching ABC. So we're not going to say anything that has you flip the channel to NBC. But that meant you had to have your own ABC News reporters confirm a news story before you'd run with it.

That's what's gone away more than the entertainment news division sanctity that we were referring to. I think it's this hot take sort of news culture. And it doesn't matter like it used to matter anymore. I don't know. I can't quantify what a big deal that is in terms of how more news stories that aren't vetted the same way impacts the rest of our culture. But that's not the same as it was 30 or 40 years ago. ♪

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The other thing I was wondering is, as people cover military conflicts, whether it's in Gaza or Ukraine, when I was a kid, it was the Ukraine. I know, I know, I know. It's hard to work with, isn't it? What happened there? Why did somebody say the Ukraine? Like, we don't say the France. That's what it was. And then I say it now, and I sound like there's something wrong with me. It's Ukraine. Well, you're right.

A Ukrainian will tell me because I get hit with that, too, because, you know, you were raised the Ukraine. Wasn't that wasn't that one of the risk territories on the old risk board? The Ukraine. But but but the way it's explained to me is the Ukraine makes it a region in some other country.

right? So the Ukraine is a region in maybe Russia, whereas Ukraine is a sovereign nation. And so it's almost like it's the same problem you get with, and I'm getting this in the Alexander the Great show we're doing now, whether you call something Macedonia or Macedonia. You might think that's not a big issue, but they've been fighting over that in Greece and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and how you choose to pronounce Macedonia

That C, soft C or hard K sound, that actually sort of implies what side of that debate you're on. So these things might not mean anything to us, but go to a Ukrainian state, the Ukraine, and I guarantee a correction will be forthcoming. Well, it's like, you know, it's a political season when you hear candidates start talking about Missouri. Yes, Missouri. Oh, he's running for president. Yeah, that's right. I was in St. Louis, Missouri.

And, okay, running for president. I can hear that. Okay, so anyway, circling back to the original question. So as conflicts like that are reported on today with, as you say, the hot take style of media, 24-7 news cycles, social media, war's ugly, we should never have wars, terrible, terrible things happen during wars.

We won World War II. By the way, it was not a sure thing at the beginning that we would win World War II. I propose this. In today's world, in today's culture, the way things are covered, we don't win World War II. Hmm.

I mean, I think you go ahead and pick your example, but the firestorm of Dresden, we're done. We're done. We're done. That footage comes out. The eyewitnesses are talking. It's in every paper. It's on everybody's TikTok. It's over. The next thing you know, people are marching in the streets. It's a massacre. Civilians, the generals get their hands tied. Over. What do you think?

And by the way, if it isn't Dresden, then it's the firebombing of Tokyo or whatever. I mean, people still have this, they've always had this conversation about should we have dropped the bomb? Forget that. Even getting to that point, you know, because you're dealing with another side that didn't, you're assuming on the other side, they don't, excuse me, give a fuck. Like they're controlling their media. Nobody gets to march in the public square. They have no first world luxury problems of,

of speech issues. So they're on lockdown. Their people aren't, aren't seeing or have the ability to, if their sensibilities were offended to do anything about it. And here, you know, you drop your kids off at school and you go March. And the next thing you know, the war is over and we've lost. I think what ends up happening is the war itself changes the sensibility. So for example, if you look at the, the various, um,

to control the horrificness of war that started in the late 19th century. The Hague, uh, uh, uh,

The Hague war crimes laws. There are a whole bunch of things in the late 19th, early 20th century that were intended to make the horrificness of war less horrific and to take some of the new technology that was on the horizon and control it. For example, one of the things that all civilized nations basically agreed upon when aircraft first appeared before the First World War is that nobody was going to use this stuff to bomb cities, that that was just wrong.

Right. And there was broad agreement on that. And yet, once the war starts, those things get thrown out the window because you begin you begin amassing. Let's call it amassing a a list of violations by the other side. So they bomb you.

And all of a sudden you start thinking to yourself, well, they started it or whatever you want to say, because here's how you know it's different. If you did a public survey of American attitudes to just pick one country before the Second World War on whether civilians should be bombed in cities and whether cities should be destroyed from the air, you're going to get an overwhelming number of people that say no.

Right? Civilized people don't do that. But if you did that same public relations survey in 1944, when the Second World War had been going for a while, and that was routine, you would see very little pushback. Because people had by then... I mean, you know...

media was, you mentioned controlled, but let's say centralized. You know, our media now is a more diffused kind of white light. Back then, it was much more of a laser beam. And with Life Magazine, Time Magazine, those sorts of venues, for example, showing crying babies after the Japanese bomb cities in China. Slowly but surely, this sort of stuff adds up to a point where

Where when you see Japanese cities getting bombed, instead of saying that's horrible, civilized people shouldn't do that, you start saying things like, well, this is what they deserve. Do you remember that little Chinese baby? In other words, you work up to the point where something that would seem horrific to you just a few years previously seems like justice, payback, or even justice.

a mechanism, a horrible mechanism towards creating a better world and a better future. You go read how these people who came up with these ideas like strategic bombing, right? We did a whole show called Logical Insanity, which was about trying to figure out how these people live with themselves.

who come up with this idea, let's bomb cities and I'm going to go to sleep at night and go to my kid's ballgame and never think about, you know, the German kid going to his soccer game, right? But there is a way human beings compartmentalize that stuff. And the way that they did was by saying, and it starts off with the very early air theorists, this idea that actually the real horrific thing about modern war is the length.

and that every day it goes on, the casualty count gets higher. So that as horrible as it sounds, if you could have one, and this is the actual, what one of the great air theorists said, and it was a theory at the time because no one had ever put it into practice, but he thought if you could just bomb the enemy's capital

In one horrific day, at the very start of the war, the war ends right there. So as bad as that day was, it's better than four or five or six years of grinding, intense, daily horrific casualties. So a lot of this might be framing, right? I mean, how do you morally accept sort of this? Well, it depends on the way we frame it, maybe. And that might describe human beings, news, history, everything. How did we frame it and what direction are we looking from? Why are there such...

The same hotspots over and over and over and over and over again. Is it just as simple as they've changed hands since the beginning of time because there's always been a mix of religions or worldviews? Is it just that simple that, you know, the sort of the Baltics changed?

is always a hot spot. The Ukraine. I put them all together. It's not that much of a stretch to say that's in the Baltic general area, Bosnia, all that. Middle East, I think it's pretty clear why, but it is, it is, it does seem to be that way, doesn't it? Yeah. The,

The Balkans are an interesting example because, I mean, this is why history to me is so important because the Balkans are a perfect example of a place that makes no sense unless you really start rolling the clock back and say, well, how the heck did these people get to the point where they've got these long hatreds and outside influences from Turkey when the Turks were an empire and controlled that whole area? I would suggest that the two things that go into this the most are

are stability, right? These places don't have strong governments in a lot of cases. And sometimes that's by design because a lot of these places, and this is the second element, have things that other people want, resources, geographical importance. Maybe they're on a highway, you know, a road. Afghanistan was always that, right? So when you had something called the great game, they called it,

played in the 19th century between mostly Britain and Russia. It was over a place like Afghanistan, which independently wasn't all that important to either one of those places, except it was a bridgehead to a place like India, which was important.

So some of these places just happen to be in the unfortunate position of being on the road to somewhere important. But there are out-of-the-way, and we both know this, but there are out-of-the-way places that have no significant resources that we know of right now, which have been

horrific places to live forever and yet don't get the same attention as places that have oil or lithium or some of these other things. I mean, how long have they been dealing with famine and governmental problems and stability and everything else in Northeastern Africa, right? Somalia, Ethiopia, all those areas, right? I mean, we got Houthis in the Red Sea now. That's that same general area too. So, um,

So if you had, this is the old line about Saddam Hussein, right? Those of us who lived through the original Iraq war. And you had people say, yes, Saddam Hussein's terrible, but nobody's going to be able to hold a country like that together with at least three and really more like five or six groups in that country who,

who, if they voted, might not want to be in the same country. And so they would say things like, well, you've got to have this brutal strongman to hold these people together. And then you ask yourself, well, would it be better to have them break apart? Well, that's where the oil wealth comes into play. And that's also where this idea of other powers coming in and maybe keeping things destabilized because it's in their best interest.

If they're going to stay, for example, if Saddam Hussein is going to stabilize a country, but then he's going to associate himself with Russia. Well, then maybe it's better for us if it was, you know, if the choice is a stable Iraq associated with Russia or an unstable Iraq where we've got some friends over there, maybe the latter is the way we would choose. So I think sometimes the great powers are.

for lack of a better word, interfere to keep these places in whatever circumstance is best for them. And we care about them based on whether or not they have anything we want. If you're in Somalia and there's nothing we want, you might starve and have out-of-control governments and interfaction warfare for a long time before anybody pays attention. Yeah, and it's been that way forever. Yeah, decades at least.

You said earlier that obviously we look at history from the perspective of whether we lived through it and that changes things. Do you think every generation thinks that theirs was the best? Like it's that Carly Simon thing about these are the good old days, right? Because I would posit this to you. The best time to be alive, best time to be alive, I'm going with...

I want to hear yours, but if it has to be a decade, if it has to be a 10-year chunk, I'm picking 1976 to 1986. And I have my reasons why, which we could go into, but...

do you have what what would be yours you can you can live in any 10-year period in in all of history i always i keep the criteria very basic for me because you always say you know based on what what are we hoping for yeah uh and of course you pick the same years i would have picked in terms of nostalgia right those are our growing up years right um i and that's true but i but i didn't

it just so happens that it's nostalgic. When I go through my litmus test, which I will in a minute, there's a reason why it's not 1956 or whatever. But yes, what do you think, what is your litmus test for your decade? Well,

Well, I like what you chose only because to me, that's the last analog generation, right? The last generation that grew up the way human beings grew up for thousands of years, right? With no cell phones, none of that kind of stuff. But...

I always keep it really basic. I think of dentistry. I don't want to go to a dentist with any less technology than the dentist has today. So when people say to me, when do you want to go back in time to tomorrow when the dentistry is even better? Because you might say, oh God, wouldn't it be great to live when this was going on and fill in the blank on what this is? Yeah, but then you get to go to Doc Holliday to have that tooth removed.

And I'm just, you know, so as selfish as that is, I'm not going back in time where surgery involves chloroform and having your appendix out could be fatal. We're lucky people. We're living in the, we lived through, but I noticed I said, I about said we are living and I changed to lived, which gets me to my next question is, so the fall of the Roman Empire was what? It took 250 years for it to fall. Would you say, is that about right?

No. So the Republic probably dies around, let's figure, 50.

50, it takes a little while. So let's just say zero. So in the Western calendar, you think before Christ, after Christ, zero, right? Zero is a good time to think, okay, Roman Empire is probably in full swing to zero. And then the latest way to phrase it is it sort of retreats or pulls back from the West rather than falls is what they like now. But that happens in the four and five hundreds.

So you're talking about four or five centuries of continuing. And then what the fans of the Byzantines will always point out is that the Roman Empire in the East never fell until the Turks in, God, what, the 1500s, late 1400s, early 1500s. I mean, that's when the Turks take Byzantium or destroy that army. And that's really the end of Rome. So like when you go get the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, you're

um the the famous uh uh work by ed edward gibbon that we that was around forever um i remember opening it up and it's at the end it's in the middle ages i mean it's talking about the holy roman empire and the pope and all this and you're thinking to yourself what does this have to do with julius caesar and all those kind of guys but if you take the idea that byzantium was really the rest of the roman empire

Well, then Rome goes from, you know, basically Alexander the Great's time all the way until the 1500s, almost the Renaissance. And so when you say the Roman Empire fell,

We may have to say what that means, but I think four or five hundred years is probably, at least for the Western Roman Empire, not a bad lifespan to denote it having. What was the question again? I'm getting to the question. No, no, you're helping me reframe. You didn't even get to the question. That's looking at what I did to you. No, no, but no, you're helping me reframe it. Okay, so you're a middle-class Roman.

average Roman, and by the way, you can pick what that means. Do they actually live in Rome proper or do they live in a subjugated country? Whatever. But you're living a good life in Rome. When do you start to see things go to shit in this process of the Roman? Like, is it affecting your daily life as a Roman in the first hundred years of this process we're talking about? Or does it have to be in the Middle Ages before you feel it?

I think it depends on where you live, right? So, for example, if you think about Rome like this epicenter of an earthquake, the farther away from the epicenter of the earthquake may be the less you feel the shaking. It's the reverse of that, right? Maybe in Rome you feel the shaking less, but if you're living in Roman Britain, for example, it impacts you more quickly. And, you know, there's an interesting...

About every 15 or 20 years, historians take a look at the same history we've learned forever. And sometimes...

chelted on its head. New evidence, new approaches, new peer-reviewed studies. And some of the stuff that came out over the last 20 years on the so-called fall of the Roman Empire in the West takes a really different approach because we think of, it's like you said, we're biased towards the way we live today. So the way we live today would suggest that the more advanced that Rome is,

the better it is, right? And that when it loses some of the advancement, obviously it's sliding backwards on some sort of scale.

But over the last 20 years, some of these historians point out that that may be a very corrupted modern way of looking at this. It would depend on things on the ground. And so they were saying, for example, let's say you're living in Roman Gaul, which is France today. And let's say the Romans are doing less and less for you in terms of services, but raising your taxes more and more, right? Because they've got all kinds of, you know, it's a giant empire and has lots of money needs. And barbarians,

barbarians in air quotes, right? Tribal peoples not under Roman control are causing more and more trouble. The state that you're paying taxes to to protect you isn't protecting you. And so some of these more modern historians are saying that there might have been relief and welcoming on the part of some of these areas when the so-called barbarians show up

and either tax you the same but protect you or don't tax you as bad at all and protect you. In other words, what looks bad to us because it looks like you're basically unhooking a lot of the Roman Empire from the ancient version of the internet back then. They may have had good reasons for saying, well, that might suck the way you see it, but for me, my life on the ground is better.

I don't know. I just, but that's a wonderful way of saying that when you talk about when do you notice that life is bad for you, we may have a very modern bias trying to determine what constitutes good and bad. Right. Right. So, so I would say the truthfully though, if we were living in Rome in the Roman empire, when things got squeegee,

I think it would be different things. It would be like noticing your business maybe can't get raw materials from someplace that's vital. Taxes going up, harder access to raw materials, land prices going up. I mean, things that maybe we would be able to relate to a lot today.

might have been more your average Roman's concern than what the history books seem to focus on. Because the history books focus on, you know, the giant huge events. Meanwhile, you know, a person like yours truly is worried about what sort of anesthetic my dentist is going to have. So sometimes the real world concerns get a lot more down to the ground level, you know? Well, that leads me to the actual question, which is, when would we know if we were living in the beginning of the fall of

the American experiment. We've been doing this, what, 250 years officially? And Rome was centuries and centuries. You know, we had a long way to go to even compete with it, but people will tell you that we're way more sophisticated and have accomplished more and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We can debate. But

Look, man, I look around. I don't think things are great. How and when will we know? Or is it like being like the frog that's boiled alive incrementally and never jumps out of the water because they just – it's such a slow process? I think something like that. I mean, I think that's – this goes back to your first question, right? I mean, this is a little bit of one of those things that's hard to notice while you're living in it. Right.

Right. And I also think that if you went back and interviewed people from earlier eras, including earlier eras of the U.S., there would be other time periods where perhaps their answers to the questions might be pretty similar to our own for just the reasons you mentioned. Right. But people don't know how it's going to turn out and things. You know, I compare it to different levels of warfare. If you're in the trench.

Right. With the bayonet dealing with what's right in front of you. You can see 250 yards, maybe that's your entire world. But that doesn't give you any impression about what the entire battlefront looks like to the general in the back looking at a giant mass.

right? He's got a more godlike perspective than you on the ground. Although you may know more about what life is really like in this war than that general on the ground, he may have a wider, expansive vision of what's really going on. And it's people looking at the past that have this more wide, expansive vision because they know how things turn out. They know what was going on on the other side. Whereas, you know, we're stuck in the fog here, right? The fog of reality, which keeps us from trying to figure out what's really going on. I mean, go look back at the

50s and how terrified Americans were. And you can see it in the news magazines and the newspapers of the time period and sort of the literature and everything coming out. They were afraid of nuclear war. They were afraid of communist subversion, all kinds of things. And yet you look back

on it now and you go, God, we romanticized the 1950s as this wonderful thing. It's happy days. It's Fonzie. It's the Lords of Flatbush. Right. I mean, it's something that we're nostalgic for, but that's because we know that everybody survived, well, everybody, you know,

There's lots of places where people didn't survive. But in the United States, that turns out to have been a good time. But it's not something that you would have known in 1955. And I can hear voices in my head that says it was a good time for some people. I mean, would you have loved to be living in the Jim Crow South as an African-American in the 1950s? And the answer is no. So, you know, it's the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Well, that applies to history, I think, also. ♪

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All set for your flight? Yep. I've got everything I need. Eye mask, neck pillow, T-Mobile, headphones. Wait, T-Mobile? You bet. Free in-flight Wi-Fi. 15% off all Hilton brands. I never go anywhere without T-Mobile. Same goes for my water bottle, chewing gum, nail clippers. Okay, I'm going to leave you to it. Find out how you can experience travel better at T-Mobile.com slash travel. ♪

Qualifying plan required. Wi-Fi were available on select U.S. airlines. Deposit and Hilton honors membership required for 15% discount terms and conditions apply. Quick question. I debate this all the time with people. You have to be in the worst conditions in World War II on the Eastern Front or the worst conditions in the Pacific Theater. Where,

where do you want to be? This is going to sound like the dentistry answer, I'm afraid. But, you know, do you want to be fighting and dying and suffering in the Pacific? You know, maybe on some island? Or do you want to be in Stalingrad when it's

50 below zero, ruined buildings. And I think I'm romanticizing the Pacific here. I mean, Guadalcanal is not Fiji or Tahiti or Hawaii. But I think if I have to choose, I think I'm going for the Pacific. And if I have to choose a service, I'm going for the Navy, even though that was a horrific...

war for the Navy. But my dad served on a carrier in the Korean War, and I asked him for some war experience. And he said, well, you know, I ate ice cream. We sunned ourselves out on the flight deck. And I mean, I just remember I was being so disappointed as a child. I wanted combat stories. But now as I look at it as an adult, I'm going, no, no, no. If I had to serve in the war, that's what I want. But in the Pacific, you know, in the Second World War, the Navy was a rough place.

But still, I'm not choosing Stalingrad in the Eastern Front. Okay. I mean, I think...

that's probably what everybody would say, including me. Let's talk about Gobekli Tepe and the new, it feels like every day there's a new, I don't want to say civilization, but there's a new archaeological event that is pushing our timelines back farther and farther and farther of the

everything we know. What are your thoughts on all of it? Because this is one of the things for history for me now because there's so much knowledge and it's moving so quickly that the minute I pick up a book to read, I almost assume it's outdated already. Hmm.

That's why I listen to podcasts like yours, because I know it's not outdated. Well, listen, my podcasts are outdated. I mean, I've been doing this now almost 20 years, and you go back and look at some of the earlier stuff, and you go, well, I would redo that today, right? I would do that in the same way that if you have a history book from 30 years ago, it's time for an update, right? And it's no fault of the people who wrote them. It was the best information at the time, but

But there's this misunderstanding amongst people who are not really into history that history is a stable thing. And that what we know, especially what we know about long time ago, things doesn't change because it happened so long ago, right? What's going to change? But what they don't realize is that

There's always new evidence arising, right? First of all, sorry, I don't mean to stop you, but how do you know that it's not revisionist history, though? How do you know it's not some agenda of the month, cultural prism, and it's just time to now infuse that?

into history as opposed to this is new empirical evidence peer-reviewed and we've rediscovered this that of the how do you how do you tell the difference well i think it's funny because there are certain hot button words and revisionist history is one of them uh and and use the way you used it right this idea that that somebody with an agenda is rewriting the past what's that old line right he who controls the past controls the present controls the future uh but

History is always being revised. That's the dirty little secret there, right? So, for example, one of the wonderful things about history today, because a historian in the old days was someone who focused on texts, written material mostly, right? Whereas nowadays, historians, of course, work hand in hand with archaeologists, but also with bioarchaeologists, with DNA specialists, people who are using radiocarbon.

isotope information. It's much more 360 degrees now in an attempt to get a handle on the past. And so you would expect to have history changing and not changing so much as more clarity and more information coming to light. So let me give you an example. I am absolutely enthralled with these scrolls that they found in Pompeii's sister city, right? The other city that was buried when Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii

But it covered in, you know, Pompeii was mostly buried in ash. The sister city was literally like in like encased lava. And they're like chipping the city out now. And they found a villa, for example. And there's tons of the city yet to be excavated. But they found a villa. The current thinking is it may have belonged to an in-law, like a father-in-law, someone of Julius Caesar. Right.

And this person owned a vast library, scrolls, right? And they found the scrolls and the scrolls are all burned, as you might imagine, from the eruption. But because they're wrapped up tightly like a bunch of paper towels,

The stuff on the interior is readable, but how you can read it is very difficult. And they held a cash prize contest, I think it was last year, for anybody who could figure out how to read the scrolls because you can't unwrap them because they just turn to dust.

And they figured out how to do this. And now they are essentially starting to decode and read these scrolls. And this would provide information about that era that we don't have today. So when you write the history book 20 years from now, incorporating that information is that great.

revisionist history like you have an agenda? Or is that saying, wow, we know a lot more about that era from new information. And so we're going to write a new history book that incorporates that thinking. And you say that in the, you say that in the new, in the advertising, in the title, in the,

so you know it. That would be easy. But it wouldn't even be... I mean, see, so here's the thing. So there's two levels of this, and this is how every expert discipline works, right? The first level is the people in the discipline. So they're writing their peer-reviewed studies that they read in their technical journals that most of us never see.

And then when that stuff filters down to the popular histories, which is usually, you know, 10, 12 years later, then your average idiot like yours truly gets a chance to read that sort of stuff that they've been talking about for years. But this isn't something that's a bug. This is a feature. This is how history works.

works. I mean, I have a huge library of books I've been collecting since I was a kid. You go back and you pick up the books that were considered gospel when I was a kid, and they're outdated now because we know so much more, right? But somebody who liked that story that we grew up with might say, well, they've completely ruined, you know, the Roman Empire as I grew up with it, but they didn't ruin it. They

clarified it. Now, does that mean that there aren't people changing the past for their own purposes? Absolutely not. I mean, you brought up Ukraine earlier. Believe me, this whole question of Ukrainian history and its connection to Russian history is a huge affair now that determines political and life and death struggles going on there. So history is a battleground and blood is shed even today over one's conception of what really happened and what it means.

I remember growing up, I'm a big JFK fan of that time. It was just before I was born. And I got to play JFK eventually. It was an amazing experience. But the Cuban Missile Crisis is, and I know you've spent some time on that as well. Up until recently, it was sort of, Khrushchev was this

insane bully and JFK stood up to him. And that's still really true. But the notion of the two different letters that they received, that was, what was that, like 10 or 15 years ago we discovered that or that was released, which changes, for me, changes the whole tenor

of the Cuban. It makes it way more interesting, actually makes it every bit as dramatic. But the notion that Kennedy, we discovered that Kennedy got two letters from Khrushchev, one basically saying, you know, fuck off. It's on. And the other one saying, let's, let's figure out a way out of this. And he just chose to ignore the fuck it one and, and, and, and pretend like he never got it. I mean, that's a generalized version of it, but that's not outside the realm of what it was. Correct. Well,

Well, that wonderful note that says from Khrushchev, this is we too should not pull on the rope of war or whatever, and we'll get a knot that we can't cut. You know, my revisionist view of all that, because I'm about your age and we grew up in the fumes of that era.

And Kennedy was to the Democrats a little like Reagan was to the Republicans in terms of there's a lot of myth-making and a lot of symbolism. And, you know, whenever we take heroes, we turn them into the cardboard cutouts that you see at the convenience store over by the beer, right? So you have like, you know, some Formula One racer standing there, a life-size cardboard cutout. Well, that's what we do to all of our heroes, right? Take a guy like Martin Luther King, right?

If I bring up Martin Luther King to somebody who doesn't like Martin Luther King, they'll bring up all these things that show that he was a human being, right? But the problem is when we make heroes, we squash them down into two-dimensional figures because that serves our purpose, right? Heroes serve a purpose. But the...

untidy loose ends in any human being's life get in the way of that. So when we squash them down, we turn them into icons. And when you turn people into icons, you're setting people up to be disillusioned when the truth comes out and you find out, well, you know, they're flawed people just like the rest of us. To me, that makes history more exciting because they overcame their flaws. But Kennedy's a perfect example. When you and I were growing up, the

Don't you remember they had commemorative coins with Kennedy's face on them? And there was just this, you know, when you have a young, handsome, well-loved president who's killed in the primal. I mean, all this stuff plays into the Camelot sort of theme. But I have to say, when you look back, and for those who don't know amongst the listenership out there, there are public records. They're called the XCOM tapes. We used some of them in the show we did on the Cuban Missile Crisis campaign.

Kennedy, in a very almost proto-Nixonian way, taped what was going on in these rooms when the country faced nuclear war. And the only people that knew that the tape player was running was John F. Kennedy and his brother, the Attorney General Robert.

And so you have tapes. You can go listen to them. They're on government websites. You paid for them. They're available. And you can hear the internal deliberations as these people in the Kennedy administration were calling their wives at home to tell them to grab the kids, get the dog in the car, get out of town. I love you. And I may never see you again tomorrow morning. You know, I mean, literally thinking that they might not wake up the next morning. And I think we said in the show that, you know, you are a different person.

for simply considering that as a realistic possibility. I won't see you tomorrow because there's going to be a nuclear war. Get out of town. Even if there isn't a nuclear war, I think that changes you forever just to have had that thought. It's like almost being executed as a criminal. Even if you're not executed, it changes you forever to think you were going to be. The one thing that Kennedy really deserves, forget everything else, is I think Kennedy got us out of a nuclear war. And I think you can hear it on those tapes because...

because John F. Kennedy, at the time, I'm not sure if he is, but at the time, the youngest president in U.S. history, who'd already had the Bay of Pigs fiasco the year before, where he listened to his military advisors, who are these scary, august people who fought in the Second World War, guys like Curtis LeMay, right, the Air Force general? And to give you an idea of what characters these people are, Curtis LeMay, I hope this is true because I've repeated it and I've read it elsewhere, Curtis LeMay is a sign of

of how much respect he had for this, you know, or lack thereof of this young Greenhorn president would go in with the door open and use the bathroom while the meetings were happening with the president. So the president listened to all these August guys who were older than he was, more experienced than he was, didn't have a whole lot of respect for him during the Bay of Pigs.

And then said, I'm never trusting the brass hats again after that went wrong. And it's only a year later that he's put in the position of having the brass hats. Every single one of them tell him you have to take out those missile sites in Cuba.

And you can hear it on the XCOM tapes. And what's amazing is these people are talking about unleashing a conflict that will kill hundreds of millions of human beings. And they sound like they're having a budget meeting when you listen to the actual tapes. Nobody's voices sound cracked. I mean, these are the people that called their wives and said, I might not be home tomorrow. And you cannot hear it in their voices at all. But

What Kennedy did was decide not to strike those areas. You mentioned the Khrushchev letters that were going back and forth. Well, you mentioned revisionist history earlier. We now know what they did not know then, right? This is the godlike 360-degree view of history. Those missiles in Cuba were armed. They didn't think those missiles in Cuba were armed.

So had they been struck in order to keep them from ever being armed, we would have found out that they were. And there's a line in nuclear theory that's called use it or lose it. And that's when your nuclear missiles might get hit by other nuclear missiles. It's better to launch your nuclear missiles than to fool around and wait. And in a use it or lose it situation, if we launched an attack on Cuba the way that the brass hats had told Kennedy to do,

I'm going to say 80% chance you have a nuclear exchange with missiles right off the American coast that could have struck Florida and the eastern coast of the United States. No problem.

If John F. Kennedy, if, big if, if John F. Kennedy prevented a nuclear war by himself like that, he might be one of the most important people in history, no matter what else he ever did or didn't do. That's what keeps me coming back for more history, because to me, that is an absolutely fascinating thing to contemplate.

That's a great, that's a great way to leave it. What a, what a, what a great conversation. I didn't even get to half my notes, but I'm just glad you had me on. Thank you. I appreciate that. Oh, well, listen, I love what you do. Uh, keep it up. Um,

Matthew Lowe, my son and I are keeping history alive and listening to you. This was a lot for everybody out there. There's a lot to contemplate. But listen, I can't wait. Where were those tapes when I needed it, when I was trying to figure out how to speak like JFK?

Those are, Oh, go, go find me. It's less JFK than it is everyone else at the meeting. But when you listen to them, they draw you in. I mean, we did on the show, we did a, I pretended to be a fly on the wall in the room because you can hear background noise and everything. It's very atmospheric.

Wow. Amazing. They're called the XCOM tapes. You can go listen whenever you want. All right. I know what I'm doing on my summer driving for sure. Oh, man. Thank you, man. Dan, this is great. Thanks for coming. Great meeting you. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Man, I didn't even get to half my notes. Damn. We didn't get to Quebecly Tepe. I brought it up. We didn't get there. I didn't get to Ancient Aliens. That didn't, I mean, I didn't get to talk about that.

But we did get some, we did get some good JFK. By God, we did. Might be the worst, might be the worst version of JFK anyone's ever. I did a good one, okay? I did. You have to watch Killing Kennedy. I did a good one there. It's bad now. What do you want from my life? Anyway, thank you for listening, y'all. You got questions? I got answers. Let's hit the lowdown line. Hello, you've reached literally in our lowdown line.

where you can get the lowdown on all things about me, Rob Lowe. 323-570-4551. So have at it. Here's the beep.

Hey, Rob. Mark from Somerville, Massachusetts here. My oldest son is heading off to college in the fall, and it's been many years since I've been inside a dorm room. So looking to get any advice from you and Cheryl about what I should be getting my son for his dorm room. So any advice would be much appreciated. Thank you. Wow. Oh, hey, that's a really good question. And you had it right. You mentioned Cheryl, my wife.

She literally is the expert. People, friends beg her to come and help set up their kids at college. She really has it down to a science. So let's see if I can remember. I mean, the number one thing is a comfy mattress. Make sure you got a comfy mattress. Make sure you've got enough storage. Oh, a shower caddy, which I didn't even know that was. A shower caddy is a thing you hang in the shower, as it turns out.

I remember a shower caddy. I remember sheets, towels. I mean, listen, all I know is you're going to be at Walmart. Walmart for sure is where you're going to be. Go to Walmart and just run amok at the sort of furnishing department and deodorant department, cleaning supplies. It's that kind of stuff. And then get some tissue for you because it's going to be sad.

when you say goodbye and they start their life at college. Thanks for the call. This is super fun. And I will see you next week right here. Don't forget on Literally.

You've been listening to Literally with Rob Lowe, produced by me, Sean Doherty, with help from associate producer Sarah Begar and research by Alyssa Grau. Engineering and mixing by Joanna Samuel. Our executive producers are Rob Lowe for Low Profile, Nick Liao, Adam Sachs, and Jeff Ross for Team Coco, and Colin Anderson for Stitcher. Booking by Deirdre Dodd. Music by Devin Bryant.

Special thanks to Hidden City Studios. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on Literally.

This episode of The Lowdown Line was sponsored by Walmart. Today's episode was brought to you by Walmart, your one-stop shop for the hottest trends from cool clothes to the latest fandoms. Walmart has items that might surprise you, like the hottest denim, the latest lip oil trend, and even big brand names like Apple and Dyson. However you like to express yourself, from personal fashion to home decor, Walmart makes it possible.

At Ashley, you'll find colorful furniture that brings your home to life. Ashley makes it easier than ever to express your personal style with an array of looks in fun trending hues to choose from, from earth tones to vibrant colors to calming blues and greens. Ashley has pieces for every room in the house in the season's most sought after shades. A more colorful life starts at Ashley. Shop in store online today. Ashley, for the love of home.

All set for your flight? Yep. I've got everything I need. Eye mask, neck pillow, T-Mobile, headphones. Wait, T-Mobile? You bet. Free in-flight Wi-Fi. 15% off all Hilton brands. I never go anywhere without T-Mobile. Same goes for my water bottle, chewing gum, nail clippers, passport. Okay, I'm going to leave you to it. Find out how you can experience travel better at T-Mobile.com slash travel. ♪

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