EP11 Toronto Redux

What this episode is about

The content recounts a memorable promotional event in Toronto featuring the author and Canadian broadcaster Jeff Marek, highlighting their engaging conversation and Marek's insightful questioning during the Q&A session. The author celebrates their connection and suggests a potential collaboration sparked by Marek's interest in conducting interviews that showcase the author's work.

Key takeaways

• Hockey knowledge is essential, but great conversation can transcend sport—just ask Jeff Marek.
• The Doors’ influence proves eternal—brooding music unites literature lovers and history buffs alike.
• Digital glitches are the new norm—welcome to the 'corona-creative' era of remote interviews.
• Complaints about your podcast? Direct them to your host—conveniently leaving you off the hook!
• Brooding and blooming are the creative yin and yang—each writer needs their own musical heartbeat.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Dan Carlin (Host) · 1 h 12 min speaking
• Jeff Marek (Guest) · 48 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: The End is Always Near, Jeff Marek, Jim Morrison, Hardcore History
2. 10:00 – 20:00: 31 Thoughts
3. 20:00 – 30:00: Great Depression, Hardcore History
4. 40:00 – 50:00: Hardcore History
5. 1:20:00 – 1:30:00: Hardcore History
6. 1:40:00 – 1:50:00: Hardcore History
7. 1:50:00 – 1:59:54: Hardcore History, Jeff Marek, The End is Always Near, 31 Thoughts

Notable quotes from "EP11 Toronto Redux"

• Your own you can just crank out really quickly if somebody just interviewed you know maybe on your hardcore history addendum feed or something and I said to him I said listen…

  about Hardcore History · at 1:20

• The title of your book which I love because I was a huge doors fan now true or false the end is always near is a tribute to Jim Morrison in the doors well I think the broad…

  about Jim Morrison · at 2:49

• Mine used to say when we were growing up he said that he was a Pink Floyd fan and he said that there was something about the rhythm of Pink Floyd's music that synced up with…

  about Pink Floyd · at 5:06

• Seeing scenes from history involving suffering why would I enjoy watching Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier at the Thrilla in Manilla come as close to death as Muhammad Ali said as he'd ever been why is that interesting entertaining.

  about Muhammad Ali · at 8:59

• Is joined how everything is linked but again I don't know because here be dragons we did a show long time ago now old-style hardcore history short light bar by modern standards…

  about Great Depression · at 19:51

• Dan we started this conversation by me asking you about the title of your book the end is always near if you release this book now as opposed to last fall would chapter six be…

  about The End is Always Near · at 1:51:50

• What was called the new left back then and what became the edge of the violent left back then The Weather Underground those kind of people SD when STS went to the Weather…

  about The Weather Underground · at 1:55:04

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Jeff Marek — Person · Host / interviewer · 4 mentions · first at 0:20
  He interviews Dan Carlin, frames the discussion (music, media, pandemic effects), and is repeatedly referenced as the on-stage Q&A host from Toronto and as a hockey media figure.
  Things from time to time and most of the events you hear the same questions over and Jeff had just great questions different questions he knew my stuff he done his homework we…
• Jim Morrison — Person · Referenced artist / lyrical source · 3 mentions · first at 2:52
  Referenced as the origin of the phrase inspiring Dan Carlin's book title and as an artistic influence tied to The Doors and a 'brooding' musical aesthetic.
• Muhammad Ali — Person · Referenced athlete / exemplar of extremes · 1 mention · first at 9:02
  Used as an example in a discussion about fascination with human behavior at extremes—specifically boxing and the 'Thrilla in Manila' as near-death exertion.
• Pink Floyd — Person · Referenced band (mis-typed as person) · 1 mention · first at 5:07
  Used to illustrate how certain music 'syncs' with a listener’s internal rhythm/heartbeat, reinforcing the episode’s theme of brooding/darker musical affinity.

Books & papers

• The End is Always Near — Book · Primary recommendation · 5 mentions · first at 0:15
  Dan Carlin's book is discussed in depth, including its themes and the inspiration behind its title.

Companies & orgs

• Rogers Sportsnet — Company · Affiliation · 2 mentions · first at 0:47
  Jeff Marek's employer, mentioned in the context of his professional background and the podcast's production.
  Hockey or being in a country where hockey's important might help Jeff is a host on Rogers Sportsnet he's a co-host of the 31 thoughts podcast and he's just an awesome guy and we hit it off right away and then we went on stage and I do these.

Products & tech

• Hardcore History — Product · Primary recommendation · 8 mentions · first at 0:01
  Dan Carlin's podcast is a central topic, with discussions about its format, audience, and impact.
• 31 Thoughts — Product · Secondary recommendation · 3 mentions · first at 0:50
  Jeff Marek's podcast, mentioned as part of his professional activities.
  Hockey or being in a country where hockey's important might help Jeff is a host on Rogers Sportsnet he's a co-host of the 31 thoughts podcast and he's just an awesome guy and we hit it off right away and then we went on stage and I do these.

Concepts & topics

• The Weather Underground — Concept · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 1:55:06
  Mentioned in passing, possibly as a cultural or historical reference.

Places & events

• COVID-19 pandemic — Event · Core topic · 1 mention · first at 2:02
  The pandemic is a central theme of the episode, influencing the format and content of the discussion.
  Hosting this and beans it's a good guy all the complaint mail goes to you so let me just tell you that this was a coronavirus inspired program meaning we did things a little…
• Great Depression — Event · Historical reference · 2 mentions · first at 20:04
  Used as a historical analogy to discuss current economic and social challenges.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:01 it's hardcore history attention so last October 2019 right around Halloween I was in Toronto to do I a promotional event for the end is always near the book I got out last year and I went to the theatre and I met the guy who was going to be the interviewer it was a Q&A setup which works really well in these kinds of environments and I sat down and and just had the best time for a little while before the actual event getting to know Canadian broadcaster Jeff Marek if you don't know Jeff it's probably because you live in the United States or somewhere where he's not well he's a hockey savant so you know knowing about hockey or being in a country where hockey's important might help Jeff is a host on Rogers Sportsnet he's a co-host of the 31 thoughts podcast and he's just an awesome guy and we hit it off right away and then we went on stage and I do these things from time to time and most of the

1:00 events you hear the same questions over and over and Jeff had just great questions different questions he knew he knew my stuff he done his homework we just had a great time and I said afterwards let's not lose touch and he got ahold of me a couple months later and said you know I've been looking on the Internet at some of the interviews you've done over the years and I just think you have a free show or two of your own you can just crank out really quickly if somebody just interviewed you you know maybe on your hardcore history addendum feed or something and I said to him I said listen it ain't that it ain't always that good it depends on on the questioner and all these kinds of things and and I basically told him you know it was great Toronto though if somebody wanted to do it again and long story short Jeff was willing to get roped into this a second time and long story short again if you don't like this program remember

1:48 Jeff works at Rogers Sportsnet and there's probably an email you can get in touch with him to complain on their website so Jeff that's my thank you for hosting this and beans it's a good guy all the complaint mail goes to you so let me just tell you that this was a coronavirus inspired program meaning we did things a little differently than normal on both ends of the interview so there are a couple of digital glitches or dropouts I apologize there was no way to fix them so you'll notice them in there also have some conversation for you if you know it's few updates and some teases maybe even at the end of the show so without further ado Jeff Marek returns and hopefully only the second out of many times in the future to discuss whatever the heck he wants to for the next what hour and something so Jeff take it away today you're the host you wouldn't mind talking about to kick it off Dan no I would like to talk about

2:49 the title of your book which I love because I was a huge doors fan now true or false the end is always near is a tribute to Jim Morrison in the doors well I think I think the the broad answer is true I wanted to have I always liked those books that have sort of the in italics a quote or a famous phrase or something to lead off each chapter and so at one point in my book design I was going to have one of those leading off each chapter and I had the Jim Morrison line the future is uncertain in the end is always near before finding out how expensively copy written that whole phrase was but but so so somehow as these things tend to go you know somewhere down the line these things find their way back in in a transmuted form or another and the fact that it became the partial title of the book is a little bit surprising but that that's how it was originally gonna be and so in a roundabout way the answer is yes

3:42 because that was a huge doors fan as well and I think you know for for a period of time there that was pretty much all that I listened to I was fascinated Jim Morrison was an on-ramp to a lot of poetry a lot of literature a lot of brainy geeky kind of stuff and the music was fantastic as well and it made me appreciate something about myself with music perhaps you're similar I'm not sure things that have a brooding undercurrent I find that I really enjoy that type of music you can I've always believed you can write in in two separate moods you can write in either bloom or you can write in brood and for me the doors as far as American bands go whether it's riders on the storm the end or even the end is always near which is just a great bar tune at the end of it as well had that element of brooding and that's why when I first saw the book Dan I said okay this is going to hit me where I live

4:39 Carlin gets it you know this is what I'm flashing back to our conversation in Toronto because you asked the most interesting different questions because normally when you talk to people in they ask questions you get the same ones all the time and turn nobody ever asked me about things like music and stuff but boy I feel exactly like you do and I wouldn't add something it's not even the I'm gonna add a different emotion to the brooding versus the blooming a friend of mine used to say when we were growing up he said that that he was a Pink Floyd fan and he said that there was something about the rhythm of Pink Floyd's music that synced up with his internal heartbeat or his rhythm or something right and I remember thinking that it would had to have been turned up to like 78 speed on my record album to have synced up with mine and so I always gravitated towards something that was Iggy Pop said he had a heart full of

5:30 napalm instead of a heart full of soul and so yes I like the darker stuff but I like I like the stones give me shelter right if you go look at the Rolling Stones I always tell people go online look at him in like 1971-72 live in that era 1970 to me that sounds like a punk band right it's very stripped-down it's very I mean it sounds like it sounds like what it really is what what punk really is to what the doors really were - it's a it's a stripped-down kind of rock-and-roll where the the brooding / edge comes through and there's and I should say this this isn't as much with the Punk stuff as with the the stones and the doors but there's also a little bluesy thing going on there too that I think really ties it together and and so in answer to your question yes when I was a kid there was a lot of music that was popular in the 70s Peter Frampton stuck at foreigner it just it didn't speak to

6:24 me at all and so I went back and listened to the stuff that you're talking about and then when the stuff that was similar in sort of tone feel vibe again with 77 78 79 in the punk in the new wave stuff that spoke to me too the same way that Nirvana and all that grunge stuff spoke to the people who liked the early punk stuff see but I think we're talking about - is is sort of music and you've written about this and you talked about this on various podcasts as well this idea of studying behavior at the extremes when you stretch the elastic to the point at which it can no longer stretch you know what's the behavior around that and I've I've always been fascinated with that as well and and I see that you know this comes out and I think we have a mutual admiration for the sport of boxing for example sports like MMA these types of events where really i've always wondered you know why am i attracted to things

7:18 like boxing why I'm always attracted to Shakespearean slasher place you know Titus Andronicus heads rolling all over the stage blood all over the stage and I am King Curtain and that's a why am i attracted to that like I'm a pretty left left wing leaning kind of guy I mean I'm a stripped rhodium typical Canadian you know always looking to apologize and make accommodations for everybody where does that come from and I find myself in a situation where I think I'm attracted to events and sports and situations that exist without metaphor where everything you say you want to do is what you want to do everything you intend to do like there's no you know and in some sports they'll say oh yeah I really want to kill this guy well no you really don't but then there were sports where you really kind of do like there are sports where that metaphor doesn't exist it is a metaphor 'less environment and I think

8:15 maybe that's why I'm attracted to music that speaks there and sports that speaks there as well there is um I pulled it off of my bookshelf just now there's a Latin phrase I ran and I I hope it's true it's one of those things I've learned in my line of work not to just blithely quote or assume any quote is true so I always a I always disclaim it a little bit but it's an inscription in Latin that says it will give you pleasure to look back on this scene of four ring and it's about sort of the love of history kind of right the fact that isn't it weird that people like you or people like me who are such um you know I like to think of myself as sort of a humanist right why would I enjoy seeing scenes from history involving suffering why would I enjoy watching Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier at the Thrilla in Manilla come as close to death as Muhammad Ali said as he'd ever been why is that interesting

9:13 entertaining why would I go back and watch it again right I mean what is it about our character I had a professor rock the late great Robert poised at the University of Colorado he's famous there they planted a tree after he died he had said almost the same thing you did he said why he called himself a lily hearted bleeding-heart liberal and he said why would a lily hearted bleeding-heart liberal like myself be so fascinated by these right-wing strong man dictatorial he was like a Nazi history professor in terms of what he focused on a Bismarck and those guys and he questioned himself why am i interested in this stuff I don't think we have an answer but I do think there's the wonderful side of it where we can enjoy it like that Latin inscription says look back on this play and not have to be a part of it it's the same sort of vicarious thrill we could have at the time where I wrote my book talking about

10:04 how strange it would be to live in a pandemic and how science-fiction like that might be an can you even imagine and then to have it happen where you kind of go oh yeah I much more liked the theorizing back in the day when this was a theoretical than I do now and and now we find ourselves you know all you know various Edward Hopper paintings or at least that's how we feel right now I mean his bizarre is it's a bizarre it's um and but the interesting thing about it to me and again you know we're all on quarantine you know I'm removed from my job and surrounded by my family 24 hours a day and I love it I'm not so much sure that they do but you know I I look at this and I say is this bizarre is this weird is this freakish or have the last I don't know 150 years been the freak and is this just sort of what reality always has been and now it's caught up to us I don't know the answer to that I think that's exactly

11:07 what I couldn't have phrased it better myself I think that's exactly I think to paraphrase I think it was Samuel Huntington when he said the end of history we've been living in a break a break from a rhythm that our forebears knew so well and here and this is the part that it's hard to get your mind around as crazy as everything's been they never had the luxury of only having one bad disease out there right when they had all the bad diseases you can think of they had all the other bad diseases at the same time so you didn't just have cholera you had smallpox you didn't just have plague you know you had typhus it was all there together and you had measles and mumps and all the childhood diseases that killed you once upon a time so I think about this is the tiniest little taste of what it used to be like and I sit there and shudder because look at what it's done to us with just the tiniest little taste and

11:57 maybe you could say that the reason it's done this much to us is because we haven't been accustomed to feeding on this sort of problem for a while and maybe you but you grow a little bit more calloused and a little bit more resilient or maybe your systems become a little bit less fragile over time if the if the disease rates higher and more lethal than it traditionally is like now on the other hand it is a you know what I said in the book people are saying all the time you need I had an Israeli reporter to me the other day say is this helping book sales as though this is a good thing right we have a pandemic and I was talking about it but you know every major thinker expert I mean heck Bill Gates for the last decades been saying something like this was coming what I think's fascinating from the history side of it though because all I did in the book was pick out these historical situations to show sort of

12:50 how humans have behaved in those circumstances before and that seems remarkably instructive for sort of how we behave today so that's the part that's kind of interesting where you go you know times change medicine evolves but we human beings are about as panicky and predictable as we've always been in groups yeah that's interesting about about that comments you know how is this helping book sales and I think of the old carnie saying what we lose on the swings we gain on the roundabouts yep you uh yeah you mentioned resiliency there a second ago when we were in Toronto together we talked you and I about the difference between you know Canada and the United States and where the United States is more based on an ethic of conquer Canada is traditionally based more on the idea of survival and I do wonder if what we're seeing right now is a clash between business and institution and always the default has been business can

13:54 solve this business can and bloated only necessary things chop it right down to the bone I mean business hates excess it's all about bottom line it has no time for something like institution institution is slow institution is bloated institution is a waste of money but right now we find herself in the situation Dan where it's the institutions that are probably going to get us out of this thing not business and we're starting to see that clash each and every day I wonder how I really do wonder where where this one ends up and if at the end of all of this there's more of a there's more of a premium placed on not chasing speed not chasing a fast dollar but maybe we slow down a little bit maybe we're a little bit more deliberate in what we do maybe we think a little bit more about our choices I mean right now we're looking at I think this battle between efficiency and endurance and right now what we need

15:05 more so than it than efficiency is that type of institutional endurance that business has always had nothing but contempt I think that's a fantastic analysis I said to somebody else recently too we were talking about maybe the way something like the situation we're going through makes us simply reframe the lens through which we view some of this stuff so where as a business institution running a hospital might see a lot of ventilators that no one is using and a lot of hospital beds that are empty as waste at a time like now that looks more like insurance and when you look at the costs of what we're going through now it looks like relatively cheap insurance but that's simply something that comes into play as part of the I would call it the give and take my stepfather's metaphor for it was was a tug of war and there's a tug of war you called it the institutional side that's that's a good way to put it and

16:01 the business side and they're and they're pulling right they're both pulling in opposite directions and sometimes I would argue we've lived through and I don't think I have to make much of a point on this an amazing growth stage in terms of the information revolution the 1990s the 2000s the phones the texting the social media the whole thing right that's a giant huge boon on the business side of things with institutions playing catch-up so imagine that tug of war leaning heavily heavily toward the business side of things for a while and then the realities of existence like plagues coming into play to force some correction on the institutional side of things pulling the rope back towards the center a little bit if only because one is theoretical on the business side of things you can push you can push you can push maximize profits maximize gain maximize stock price until something stops you now that

16:51 could be the market that could be your own business model that could be what it is you sell not being desired anymore or it could be a Black Swan event like what we're going through now right or or a 9/11 attacks or anything like that where all of a sudden okay you have to stop and think for a while your momentum your forward momentum is slowed for a reason and you have to ask yourself whether or not this is a temporary break on things and we can continue to do things just the way we did after a slight pause or whether as you were suggesting this is a lesson right and the lesson is let's not get caught again let's build in some resiliency some redundancy and some ability to counteract what this plague we're going through right now is exposed in terms of our systemic fragility maybe is a good way to put so I think I think I would make the case that there's always the balance between the institutions and the business side

17:41 of things and that it's been slanted toward the business side of things because the pace of change has been such that it would be crazy I think to imagine the institutions keeping up with it you know I mean the the inherent and by the way not just that but they inherently move more slowly because I mean the pace of change on the on the business side slash tech side of things I'm not sure how brick-and-mortar things can keep up with it so I think maybe what you're suggesting makes some sense at least from the vantage point where we can see it here in the midst of it it seems like it's exposed something where you go well let's not get caught without enough ventilators again you know things like that and then what becomes of us at the end of all this is another question you know Elliott Friedman who I do the 31 thoughts podcast with his grandmother always had the best saying you plan God laughs like we all have an idea of what

18:30 this is going to be at the end of all of it but I can't dan help but feeling I guess we all try to you know figure out who we're gonna be when all of this is done I kind of feel like we're all sort of I don't know kittens chasing laser pointers for for information here what are the medieval map makers are always right when they had you know unknown territory here be dragons we we don't know I I just can't help but thinking that there's this area that we're all headed to where here be dragons it's a great question and and what are we when we go through this you know calm waters make poor sailors is this like how is we know we're gonna be different people at the end of all of it we know our technology is gonna be different we know how we consume what we consume how we live is all going to be different how are we going to be different people I don't my gut on it Dan is to say that we'll but we'll all understand how

19:30 interrelated we all are from person to person and also person to nature you know you look at the the tree outside your window and you realize oh hang on a second here now that I really had to think about my health for the last 12 months maybe now I do understand that half my lungs are hanging in that tree I'm guessing that we have more of an appreciation how everything is joined how everything is linked but again I don't know because here be dragons uh we did a show long time ago now old-style hardcore history short light bar by modern standards where we talked about the Great Depression and there was a quote that we used by new york times economic writer Robert Samuelson and the gist of it was that we make fun these days or economic experts make fun these days of the stupid silly mistakes that the money experts back in the great before the Great Depression era made right we laugh at their stupidity and their naivete of

20:31 markets and all that kind of stuff but his point was before you get too haughty about it realize they were doing the best that they could with what they knew at the time and they got blindsided by something they didn't see or know about and that can always happen again and of course before Samuel Sam after Samuel said it we got hit by the dot-com crash and all that kind of stuff the point being that it's always something that you can't see coming that's going to get you because if you can see it coming then you could plan for it you know it's a lot less likely to hurt you but those things are reliably out there that's the black swan idea right that you don't know that something's out there but you can imagine that something out there that you can't plan for is going to hit you so like you said and God laughs right so you see that's what your idea about the fragility and all that sort of

21:18 stuff comes into play also when you're talking about excess hospital beds the excess hospital beds are not there for no reason they're there in case so when you say changing us that right there might be an example of how it changes us in the same way that the headstrong rush towards a business moving forward might get slowed by the reality of something like a plague people's forward thinking and continual momentum toward the next goal I think takes a hit here where everybody is just forced my kids are at home my kids have no they can't do anything but just think about kind of and try not to think about what's going on here I would make the case that there is some value in thinking about things like this and especially if you want to get into stereotypes about generations you know always looking at their phone five seconds of of attention span never thinking about deep subjects well they're thinking about deep

22:13 subjects now if only because it's affecting their day-to-day existence in a way that just it preempts thinking about other things is they would I have wished this on us in order to get that benefit of course not I'm gonna give the commencement speech at my alma mater in in like a couple of weeks and the whole point of it is to try to point out that there might be some good sides to this but I'm not saying I wanted it right I'm not I'm not glad your commencement was canceled don't get me wrong kids but if it's going to be canceled anyway maybe there are some side benefits and to answer your question sort of at the end of it a little bit about you know does it change us there's there's a chapter in the book and we did a podcast so I do tough times make tough people it sounds like an MMA style phrase doesn't it but I don't mean it it literally is just the same thing one would wonder about seeing

23:00 in the animal kingdom or the plant kingdom or any sort of like life's reaction to adversity and and I mean if we're this adaptable species right if that's the number one thing we bring to the table we don't have sharp teeth we don't have long claws right whether we're the smart ones who can adapt like coyotes um does adaptation require adversity like you said if it does then this is a this is gonna be something that helps create a more formidable generation down the road yeah you know there's um to extend that you know there's that there is that feeling that at the end of all of this we're going to see in this tough situation who got tough and who cut the laces on their shoes when the fight was about to start you know there's we talked about you know why are we so attracted to these these brutal dictators why are you so attracted to you know the macaw why he's so attracted you know to behavior at the

23:58 fringes of the extremes you know when you're you know a pretty middle-of-the-road kind of person maybe left-leaning maybe a little bit of a humanist and the more understanding someone looks for difference Ted of differences you know just because you're a pacifist does it mean you don't appreciate the value of passing the fist is something that I've always maintained and I think in this situation here you know and other generations have gone through it before and you're right about you laughing it these you know kids playing for tonight all the time and you're the closest thing to a to a fistfight is as a nasty tweet that they send to someone in anonymity and a egg shelled Twitter feed but I think at the end of this we're gonna we're gonna find out you know who's whose spine got hardened through all of this and you know you're gonna find out I think through all of this who can endure so I

24:56 know I keep coming back this the Margaret Atwood survival issue or the Margaret Atwood you know survival aesthetic here but you know we're going through something that is not just physical but is mental as well and already we're seeing people that have you know completely abandoned themselves and everything they believed in or perhaps prepared for because they want to get back to normal quickly and there's an attractiveness to getting back to normal quickly and I all understand I understand that all too well you walk into the front door of my house there's a two kanji so that's a Japanese saying sad I was saying it says unlearn something daily and I really feel that that has that one saying Dan more than anything else has helped me in my life at every single stage unlearn something daily and I think if we're gonna survive through all of this and if anyone's gonna survive through all this I think

25:52 we need to unlearn things from the past because this is all going to be different as we mentioned the media is gonna be different the way we go shopping is gonna be different the way we greet each other is added for handshakes everything is going to be different and I really think that one of the keys to survival with all of this if we're gonna get tough and not cut the laces is to start on learning things as quickly as possible being the cynic that I am I want to know what you mean when you say the people that are going to survive this the people I mean let's let's define the term what what is a person who doesn't define this or survive this or a society that doesn't survive this in your mind what does that mean that's a great question I think people that can come out at the end of this and can still have how do I say this properly here I don't want to offend anybody surviving both literally

26:53 and I also think surviving and still being able to work within a society still work within a group of people and that doesn't just have to be immediate that can also be online but still you know what did--what the ditch I always say when you fight the monster it's important not to become the monster at the same time at the end of it not become the monster what's a great Twilight Zone episode the monsters would do on Maple Street you know where it's never about the monsters it's about how we treat each other I love that it's always been a big lesson for me it's my favorite Twilight episode dan and when I say survive all of this you know survive in the sense that we don't turn on one another you know we have this ritual in my family now after the day is done our three year old goes to bed and I stay up with I my 10 year old of my 8 year old and we watch Walking Dead I've never seen The Walking Dead series before us

27:49 we've started an episode 1 and we're now plowing through the the fifth season I don't know if I should be showing my 10 and eight-year-olds The Walking Dead I'm not sure I'm going to be on the cover of next month's edition of today's parent magazine Dan but it's a nice tradition that we have and the one thing that I've learned through all of it is the lesson from that Twilight Zone episode which is it's not about the zombies it's about us and the greatest threat comes from us if we can come out and survive this by that I mean if we can still not turn on one another on the last common-sense podcast we talked a lot about partisanship and what partisanship is doing to us and I couldn't agree more with the points that you were making because at the end of this if we can't get along if we can't all survive with one another or come up with some and it doesn't have to be like yes Matthew Arnold idea of you know

28:42 Elizabethan England is the absolute you know model of how things have to be we have to come up with this idea we have to come up with a way that we can all get along with one another and not let this tear us apart not let that monster separate us from one another I hope that makes sense it does and I think I think tough times are are points of a fracture in other words one of two things happens they bring you closer together and heal some of those things I mean you have a war and everybody unites you know in a common cause and forgets their partisan differences for example or crisis can make the fault lines larger and fracture them more I mean we see that too so so this could go things like now could break in a number of different fashions when I have conversations with people people get angry with me after the last common sense shows a perfect example and for those in the history audience you

29:35 don't know I've done a current events podcast for longer than they've been podcast I was doing it when it was a radio show Dean used to be as hard as it is now because everybody is so angry that trying to find this ground that Jeff's talking about where you can actually try to talk to people who disagree strongly about things with each other and speak to both of them tends to get the same treatment that a police officer showing up at a domestic violence quarrel with a drunk couple runs into where they might have been trying to kill each other five seconds ago but the minute the cop tries to come in and bring peace to the situation they both turn on him so that's I kind of feel like the cop in the domestic violence situation sometimes but moments like now or tests and so when you say we have to be able to get along because I keep asking myself what's the alternative I mean if you tell everybody

30:18 regardless of where you are in the political spectrum you're not going to win now what and that's where we are if you can't think of the now what then you're planning for some I I don't even know if you're planning for a perpetual political war that will continue long after you're gone and what did it get you maybe maybe that's short-sighted and you know but but at the same time I'm looking at it now going I'd like to save reality a little bit because when you jump off the edge in terms of of going off the deep end with say political realities I mean it's funny we have a plague now in a sense that we haven't seen in a very long time what if started to see political outcomes of the sort that seemed to be the things that are consigned to your history books right what if all of a sudden those didn't seem so strange and abnormal and out of the blue let's try to avoid that shall we at least that's kind of how I try to

31:10 think about it and that sounds like you and I think a lot of people who form what I would consider to be sort of the ballast of society these people that might want reform might want change might disagree with each other over specifics but sure as hell want to keep the boat in tact what do you what do you think happens with technology and all of this you know last time we were together in Toronto we talked a lot about Marshall McLuhan and the idea that you know technologies have these hidden agendas you know they shaped the way though they shape the user in ways that the user never would have imagined you know we see major events you know dictating you know what type of media gets consumed and how it gets consumed not that I want to couch this in wins and losses but I do wonder what type of media wins here you know we think of the Vietnam War and we think of television you know we think of you know the the

32:07 first Iraq war and we think of cable news in this situation Dan what wins what comes out of it in yura and your estimation I obviously think a lot about this III and I consider myself to have a tiny little bit of responsibility in making it worse maybe because in in the 1990s late 1990s I was working in a company I started with some friends and one of the things we were pushing was amateur content and one of the ideas behind this was some of how the idea of how it was gonna change news and I thought it was going to be something for the better it was going to be opening up news to all sorts of views and opinions and journalists and reporters on the ground and you didn't have to be you know I was a reporter and I was saying you didn't have to be a reporter to report on a news story you just all you have to do is at the time I was saying have a tape recorder or a camcorder and take it out there and record what what's

33:01 going on around you and I thought this is going to democratize news but you know it's funny it's got me thinking about a lot of in in including something that I'm uncomfortable with I was thinking the other day not to jump around but but it's such a multi-faceted issue I was wondering about the value of a shared view of reality even if the shared view of reality wasn't true right is there a vet so like if you're having the water cooler discussions and it's 1975 and you're in an office in Los Angeles discussing what you read in the news that day about 85 to 90 percent of the people around that water cooler are going to accept the same facts from the New York Times and The Washington Post and the and the nightly newscasts and Walter Cronkite or whatever at all those people not in 75 but you know what I'm saying maybe in 75 um but but but now a person today might say well you know those a bunch of BS and they didn't know

33:59 what was really going on here and there and they might be right but there was a shared idea that about 85 to 90 percent of the people had on reality which allowed them everything from the ability to debate things to have I mean it was something that passed for truth it's like the Fiat money people always tell me you know the money you hold in your hands just paper the only thing that matters is how much stock people actually put into it right could you believe it well the same thing was true of reality it always is true of reality you believe it but if 85 or 90% of the people believe on the same reality you can kind of work it's a fiat currency of its own right it's information fiat currency what we have now though is nobody believes the same reality we're into these camps were all read and different stuff and the first thing you say in a discussion with anyone is you question their sources um

34:45 this is a democratized news environment but it's also a democratized truth environment and I'm finding that this is a situation that um I'm not finding good historical analogies to use as as guideposts on how something like this might go it's a fascinating human experiment I don't know how to navigate through it myself yeah I remember Jello Biafra once said don't fear the media be the media and that's always stuck with me and I think that that hits where you live when you're talking about am creating amateur content and democratizing yeah you know it said to when you talk about you know look okay so what you know where are you for are you left-wing are you right-wing you know what are your media biases you know what's the old what's the old journalists saying if your mother says she loves you get confirmation it kind of feels like we're we're we're at that point now with all of it I I'm curious because you know

35:40 that point about having a you know if 80 percent of people are on the same page about history about current events and there's an accepted media that there's an accepted version of the news that we all agree upon then we can have the conversation you know I think that that has that has really done a disservice to television now because it is demonstrated the limits of that of that formats and by how an hour is divided in in in TV time because as you well know in every segment you have between 6 to 8 minutes to speak and unless you go along the same lines as those that have come before with all the basic assumptions if you try to paint outside the lines a little bit you spend the entire segment trying to explain the premise of your point without actually ever getting there and that's why I think honestly and I know that I'm saying this on a podcast we know that I have a podcast myself as well but honestly I I see as

36:40 far as the the big winners through all this I think this is going to be because I still believe we live in the golden age of audio I think the big winners of all this is going to be podcasts I really do I think at the end of this this is where ideas can get can you know like a symphony you know the melody can can rise and can fall and can come back again and can turn into something else and you aren't limited by the authority of time or you aren't limited by a certain programming formats I think you know really at the at the to be self serving here considering I do you have a pod I think that this is going to be yet another moment where podcasts demonstrates that this is the ultimate media to consume right now and of course not all podcasts are created equal not all podcasts are the same and yes I do understand that you know right now we look for and we have these these biases we only want to

37:40 what's the line nobody wants to hear other people's opinion they just want to hear their opinion in different sounding voices that's kind of kind of kind of where we're at right now but I do think that this is the place where you know the revolution will not be televised right the revolution is on podcasts and I really do believe that this is going to be another brick in that wall for pods I hope this is the hope I hope that um deep conversation and in-depth looking at things the way you know a lot of podcasters like to do it by the way I mean when you have a three-hour podcast you have time to go into depth on issues right I think that it's a little like vegetables even to some kids where if you give them cake long enough even some of the most anti broccoli oriented kids start going you know a few carrots might be okay right now I mean maybe maybe maybe it's like it's it's there's a pendulum swinging back and forth or

38:40 there is always a segment of humanity that craves this is the other possibility that we're all created differently and there's always a segment of humanity that craves looking at things through a different lens a higher zoom perspective or a more granular one you know it's a personality question and so something like that rather than the five-second quick hit appeals to them I always said one of the great things about podcasting is it is a giant pie of listening audience size and if you appeal to just a tiny little sliver of it that can still be a heck of a lot of human beings and that allows you to pick some topic that might be extremely narrow that 90% or neither Mexican science fiction comic books from the 1950s or something right but the the small segments of that slice of the pie that finds you may be a huge number of people and they're all gonna be fanatically cult driven like folk

39:31 because they've been waiting for someone like you their whole lives you know I think podcasting has innate advantages over that I also think and this is just I find this all the time you know all about this to Jeff and and by the way that your insider stuff on the industry's absolutely dead on and we can go there if you want I'm sure there's there's a lot of people in the audience who are actually in the industry so they would understand it too but I would I would like to point out that it is there is a huge difference between creativity with a large group of people and creativity with a small group of people or a single individual you and I were talking before we started here about how interesting it is to watch all the late-night talk-show hosts do their coronavirus at-home versions of their shows without the lights and the and the camera angles and the glitz and the band and the audience

40:13 and the whole thing and they look remarkably like the rest of us which makes some of the better podcasters who do similar stuff to them look that much better by comparison right when you take away all the lights and everybody's equal those guys might be funnier so so I think maybe your point is well-taken I think there last time I heard there were 750,000 podcast so there's really something for everybody and what I do love about it it is is a natural place for genius talent to be found Eddie Murphy Richard Pryor any any people who are like great talon williams none of those people today would have had anywhere near as tough of a struggle as they did in their day cuz they would just have to have a podcast and everything else would take care of itself from there the time the talent would would move mountains you don't know you know a lot of it is to I think Dan Oh first of all there's gonna be a

41:02 whole new star system that's created through all of this you know once everything is equal then okay it's the best ideas it's you know the best shows it's the most creative people it's the most engaging thoughtful people those are gonna be the ones that end up coming out shining at the end of all of this I think one of the failings of of media right now is this idea that everything needs to be multi-platform well you know we'd love to on-ramp this television show how can we repurpose it as well how can we repurpose it as well for radio or for podcast and you could tell the difference I mean I know you of all people specifically know the difference when you are listening to a radio show that's been podcasted versus doing a pod cast and even though it's subtle the difference is huge radio and you talked about this on the last common sense and your bang on this idea of heat heat heat heat heat and yell and scream and

41:59 choose you know confrontation over conversation that's gonna get those people but generally on their radio will only be listening you know what's the average TSL for that time spent listening for radio listener like if you're lucky six to eight minutes while they're in their car before they get out of the car they do something else you just want to capture that one slice that doesn't work for a podcast that doesn't work at all one of the things that I think a lot of people have always appreciated about their common sense or hardcore history and I try to do on every podcast that I'm part of is the respect and acknowledgement that you're broadcasting generally when you're doing a podcast right into someone's ears and the last thing that people want to hear in their ears is screaming and yelling and that's why I think as far as you know what's going to be that media that helps to define this generation after

42:50 this pandemic is is all done I think it's going to be the medium that chooses conversation and is easy to listen to and to the earlier point has the best ideas has the most you know interesting observations and is easy to listen to and doesn't scream at the at the listener you know radio is generally broadcast into a car so you're still broadcasting to the backseat television is broadcast into a living room right there's still that old theater idea of talk to the person in the last row podcasts go right into your brain they should be listened about and quiet and not jarring that's where I've always believed Jeff I'm gonna try to not assume that this is some sort of passive aggressive attack on me personally because I am well known for going in a nice low tone of voice and then all of a sudden screaming in the ear of the listener that is almost like one of my known traditional-style so I'm

43:54 gonna take this as a personal slam against me and my approach fantastic because that's I'm known for doing that and just and listen this is a good time to address the issue because I did I did a virtual-reality thing a World War one exhibit in Skywalker Sound George Lucas's company did the sound and they were nice enough to have me up to their facilities in Northern California gave me the Grand Tour I got to meet the staff and when I met the staff one of their real fantastic great sound engineers comes up to me says I'm this big fan I really want to take how much I love the show blah blah blah blah blah blah have you ever thought about using any compression on your voice though cuz it just kidding and I got how I came back and if there's a band I told him I said well everybody's still talking about the compression issue and just so everyone knows in radio when you're on the air at a traditional station they

44:40 have compression which is you know it squashes your voice between the highs and the lows they have it for all sorts of reasons built right into the sound board so it's not it's nothing you think about when we got off radio and we got the freedom of podcasting it became like nuke and Jeff you'll understand this it became like new audio colors to paint with all of a sudden yes you know and I was always in the vu meter red anyway right so I was never I was never a good boy anyway but all of a sudden I had these you know that with the compression giving me sort of a light pink aura or a pale blue all of a sudden I had dark angry blues and bright reds and now the the downside of that is you could clip a little bit with the software you could bother people's hearing or whatnot but the the ability to go soft and low and high and loud and mix it all together those are the tools of a traditional or

45:34 oral storyteller in any society around the world and so we do some compression but every time people want to push for more I keep thinking I become the The Selfish Peavy artist who doesn't want you messing with my most extreme colors in any direction you know what I mean it wasn't a slight first of all because one of the great things about what you do and how you couch all of your podcasts is you do all that my main point was this wall of sound and radio that we normally get which is you know scream at people for five or six minutes to capture their attention and ignore something which I think is perhaps one of the most important things in either radio or podcast and that's silence you know what's one of the great things that can get people to lean forward right silence oh yeah silence is a note right that's a great Wow order that's a great way to free it is a note and I know me I didn't make it up I think that's a

46:29 musician thing I did not mean I'm not taking credit for that that is that's a wonderful guy to write that down silence is a note but I mean it's like when I listen to your podcasts the one thing that I appreciate is that you use all those different paints and all those different brushes but it's not overwhelming you know it's well placed like listen there's nothing wrong with a great scream that's fantastic I don't know that I can take five minutes of it when I'm trying to listen to someone's point or trying to learn something here but again this goes back to part of the earlier conversation we had to talk about you know blooming and brooding you know these two things were the Daoists say they arise mutually that which is explicitly - is implicitly one they go together so you need both I think where a lot of radio tends to go wrong and certainly talk radio which is the background that I'm from and you're from

47:27 as well there's this idea that we only have them for four minutes make it loud make it aggressive really grab their attention because they're not going to be in the car long enough to hear you and oh yeah we've got to get the traffic and we've got to get to weather and we've got to get to the stop sets I mean no argument there as I said I don't really even hold I don't hold anybody accountable for that that's the format and within the format as you said you've got you know this is what was I always when people ask me about podcasting I always talk about how attractive all the creative white space was because when you come from radio or television as you said at the beginning of our conversation you have these little blocks where you can be creative and there's six minutes or four minutes or eight minutes and then somebody gives you a podcast and you open up and you look and it's just a giant big complete

48:18 white space and and my whole early career was listeners helping me to understand that that white space was even less constrained than I thought it was I mean I always say that we we issued an apology to hardcore history listeners on the show the first time we went over an hour long because it just seemed like some horrible transgression you know on their time and they would write back and say and obviously this is the very early years uh but but they would write back and say we have pause buttons and this became a way for them to teach me the unlimited size and scope of this white space that we were working with there's there's no limits at all and so once you do that I told years ago I mean we were probably into podcasting only about a year and a half before I turn to somebody and I said I can never go back to radio again I said I can never go back to radio again because one I lose this white space and two how will you

49:07 know you know this - Jeff every radio station I've ever worked in you have a map and on that map is a is a bunch of cos concentric circles emanating from your transmitter showing you how far the broadcast signal reaches on a map um podcasting is global I mean it reaching North Korea may not hear us but I mean if I do a show about Iran I'm gonna get letters from Iranians and emails from Iran is I mean it's it's I could go to New York which is the number one radio station market in America and it would be like a downgrade in terms of who could hear me so when we talk about podcasting being the better medium in terms of format and what it gives you in creativity and depth and all those things we talked about how about just the old fashioned metrics you can reach more people which is what the advertisers in the radio station owners and the broadcaster's always cared about the most - you know it's funny I was

49:58 making that point on a previous podcast a few years ago and someone sent me in and Edward our Murrow quote and it was it was perfect I always loved these moments where I get grounded from listeners and she said what was the quote Edward because your voice goes across the world now doesn't mean you're any wiser than when it only went to the end of the bar such a wonderful like oh wow good for you you've got a podcast who people are texting in and emailing in from Australia and all over the place and Sweden let's not forget this doesn't make you any smarter it just means your reach is that much longer do me the only other big event sort of historical dividing of dan that this generation has gone through was 9/11 and and and couched in the area of of media and what we're watching and what we're consuming I can recall you know September 10th the headline stories were still up shark attacks and then 9/11 happened and

51:04 somehow sharks stopped attacking people but do you remember what the big television shows were pre 9/11 was travel shows everywhere you every every time he turned on the television it was travel go here go there this phantom you know this wonderful voyage this exotic play was all trapped and even on radio you know a lot of travel shows all you know sponsored in order to sell you various trips but it was travel shows and then after 9/11 it seemed as if Dan that entire industry that travel show industry was over and it all became about home improvement people stayed home people nested people feathered their nest that's what they wanted to do that's how they felt I'm too scared to go anywhere right now I'm gonna take care of this little plot of land and this pile of sticks that I've sort of cobbled together here and call a home and try to make it as nice as possible because the world out there

52:02 is really scary again I'm gonna ask a question I have no even remote clue what the answer might be but what do you think we'll be interested in at the end of this pandemic whether it's six months 12 months 18 months from now and I think programmers are all asking themselves the exact same question I I mean I I'm pretty sure we'll all take more of an interest in our own health but I I wonder what what we're gonna be consuming like as far as you know people that watch television listen to podcasts what do you think people are gonna want I mean they wanted travel show was pre 9/11 but after 9/11 the last thing they wanted was to travel well in in you know I might not be a historian but I can sure hedge like one let me give you some examples of how it might go so it kind of depends the first big variable is how quickly does this thing go away right so if if this if this coronavirus is significantly better in two-and-a-half

53:05 months then this chance of simply trying to bounce back and return to some level of normalcy seems more likely to me I think that's the natural human desire is just to get back to the way things were and forget this ever happened but well one obviously that's gonna be hard to do for people who've lost their jobs and businesses that have gone under and all that kind of stuff right but if it doesn't go away like that if it goes away more slowly or if there are several reoccurrences and Reese Pike say when the weather gets cold in the Western Hemisphere again things like that well then this is going to be more of a scattered thing more of a no you're not going to be allowed to just pretend this never happens you're gonna really have to make this part of your long-term you have to build this into your thinking long-term you know you don't my family is so beset the news that it's funny with the bet not to change the subject

53:56 but the bad news itself begins to get to people after a while and the way that the media sort of is always weighted towards whatever is going to get the most eyeballs extra extra read all about it the bad news right now is what people are interested in so you're seeing a predominance of disaster and it doesn't mean it's not out there but but it's what people are getting and so I think there's this desire for bounce-back I don't know if the the nature of this virus is going to allow for that and I think if it doesn't that's when you're going to see the changes that you were talking about more because we're living in a new world and that you just have to write so like the media thing we were talking before we turned on the recorder about your new reality which is like my old reality you're all just podcasters to me now all you professional guys you don't know what you were missing being able to work from home in your sweats

54:46 and now you'll never go back you'll never have you back they don't have to pay for those frequent sand Donuts anymore no insurance no liability you just work from home Jeff and uh and I'm gonna make you work twice as hard um but I think that this is this is going to be heavily dependent on the way we come out of this um I do think and I always feel this way but this is sort of I'm I'm a devil's advocate person so when things are good I'm always a doom caster when I'm always a silver lining guy but this has always been the idea behind the the the there's a capitalistic idea that when times get crappy like this there's a you remember ray R sell the boxing the great boxing trainer and he had a line he he said hard times make monkeys eat red peppers and it's it was a basically cuz monkeys won't eat red peppers unless they have to because they're starving so the idea here being that there are going

55:41 to be a bunch of people that will find and I don't mean to sound unicorns and rainbows about it but this is true there's going to be a bunch of people that find their path to success in life right now because they have to because something that might have been comfortable and easy is no longer comfortable and easy and they have mouths to feed at home or whatever it might be this does not legitimize or make okay or ameliorate the suffering of all the other people that don't do that but I'm suggesting that this is all part of how people individually are going to respond to their own circumstances and how we respond as a society is going to depend in large part about how how all of us as individuals do and that's gonna depend in large part about how this damn virus leaves us or doesn't leave us does that make sense it does and I wonder if too if we start to see and not this you know we've you know Shakespeare for example

56:35 you know wrote King Lear during a pandemic you know a pox on both your houses Romeo and Juliet I mean all this type of speak is all of something that William Shakespeare was what was going through and a lot of this great you know a lot of a lot of Shakespearean tragedy was you know written in the time of a plague but I wonder if at the end of this to or through this to your point about people finding out what they should do and charting a new path and discovering more about about themselves and figuring out where they should be going and solving that finally considering that there are you know you can you know there are ways that we live and then there are reasons why we live and now that we're all in quarantine it's a lot more about music and art and books and paintings and poems like we're learning a lot about the arts and perhaps were retd we're realizing too that as much as you know we don't chase

57:41 the dollar every day chase the dollar every day you can't live without the arts and I think people are realizing that this is you know one of the reasons why you stay alive more so more so than ever so I do wonder if at the end of all of this there will be some type of creative Renaissance because this is not normally happened dan when we're all asked to look inside as opposed to just chasing something externally when we look inside of ourselves and you know realize you know what's in our hearts and what's in our minds and how do we want to express ourselves and now we have the time to do it doesn't that generally lead to some type of artistic Renaissance oh my answer on this is going to be multi-pronged because the first thing is is yes I absolutely think that I think it's a great thing I'm a pretty you know I'm a art is one of those things that some people are born appreciating and some people really

58:37 learn to appreciate as they grow older and and I fall into that category more and more and really understanding well first of all the timeless nature of it I mean Cicero I think it was who said you know writing is the only true form of immortality art is a form of chasing immortality of having a piece of you the artists live on in some way beyond your mortal existence right but but let me this is why it's it's a complicated answer because I don't want us to to smudge or besmirched the purity of creative art with money and finances and personal gain and all that but I'd like to point out and this is something that I tell college students I have two children who lean toward the creative rather than the engineering side of the temperament also and what I try to point out is when I was a kid everybody would try to talk you out of the creative pursuits because they thought you were gonna be waiting tables at some

59:35 restaurant and that was gonna be the end of your life and you were gonna you know you'd be a welfare cuz you spend all your time with a theater degree from some school but but I try to explain to my kids now look at the enormous amounts of money that people who create in the entertainment world get I mean I was a JK Rowling look at how's that for a good idea how many people have made the living of their entire lives off her idea right so that's the power I mean Tolkien look at all this now I'm peaking individual but but this is what I say if you are creative that is ground zero for everything everybody else in the entertainment world does all the lawyers all the attorneys all the agents all the cameraman you know and and it's funny I had um there was a South Park episode once I'm going from memory here so I hope your forgive me it's not a South Park episode was it was the making of South Park and they showed you how they

1:00:31 made it and they showed the facilities and they have this place where all the artists who do it and everything are playing ping-pong and they have a greenroom and they're all but there's only one guy it's one of the it's it's stone or Parker that comes up with the actual ideas and because they're on a tight schedule and because it's all out of his head nobody can work until he comes up with the idea and so the camera follows him around the hallway and you can just see this look on his face like I've got to have an idea I've got a company everybody's waiting for an idea and as he passes by the greenroom everybody in the greenroom stops and looks out in the hallway to go you know has he got an idea yet because nobody can do anything but play ping-pong until the guy who is creative gets the engine humming with the ideas and so what I point out is yes we can all be unpublished poets in our house with the

1:01:16 coronavirus going on and be inspired and that's fabulous and we need it and it's beautiful and its artistic and it many of the greatest artists of all time fall into that category at the same time let's not pretend that it's not a great way to get ahead in life these days the people that make the really big money are the showrunners you know those are basically the writers the people who come up with these ideas the people that have I'm gonna use the term IP the intellectual property come up with intellectual property who comes up with intellectual property do lawyers come up with an electro property do agents come up with intellectual property duque I mean you need all those people and they're all creative and they're all wonderful their jobs but nobody works until the South Park guy comes up with the idea and so what I always say is the creative people are the genesis of the entire entertainment industry and so to think

1:02:03 about it as some job where you're going to be waiting tables and wasting your college degree to me seems ridiculous you're gonna be out there JK Rowling you know jr. R Tolkien hang up the place right and and so in my mind this is a great opportunity for a bunch of people who because of their jobs never had time to sit at home and work on their poetry or their music or their play that their writing or their YouTube videos play on that I mean do it now right it's great opportunity what are you doing take advantage might change your life you know I can recall very specifically remember a cab the name of Jim rose then yeah vaguely who was he again was he like okay so jabil gosh Jim wrote Jim rose circus the Jim Rose circus was that that then I'm not thinking us and I know so Jim so Jim Rose was the was the architect of something called the Jim Rose circus toured with Lola Palooza grunge circus

1:02:58 crazy things guys getting darts thrown into their backs you know various piercings lifting weights from different body parts it was like a chaotic circus that you would imagine traveling around with you know Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails and so when I first started my career 1994 it was me and my buddies Bob Mac Woodson George Stroumboulopoulos and we're doing a late night show on Friday nights in sports radio which had nothing to do with sports and we got to spend an entire afternoon with Jim Rose did an interview with him 1 1/2 hour then Jim and I went out for lunch it's big fan of Jim Rose still AM and he said something to me that always stuck with me and there's no right answer to it but it's a place that everybody sort of comes into into conflict there's that that choice moment there's two paths which way you're gonna go we're having lunch we're having a cup of coffee and he said to me

1:03:50 see you're just starting your career right and like yeah but I'm not sure about David's if it's gonna work out you know I still have these you know dreams of going back to university chasing a PhD who knows and he said well if you decide to chase this if you decide to go this media route or whatever route you take for that matter realize one thing is you begin there's going to be a place in your career where you're gonna get to a crossroad so we all get there but just be aware that it's coming and here's the crossroads you're gonna have to make a decision whether you need to quit or work harder and there's no right answer and there's no obvious answer and you won't know if it's the right answer until many years later should you quit or should you work harder and I wondered now in this situation where people are forced away from their natural existences and their natural to further to your point this is

1:04:46 your opportunity to do this this is a chance where you don't have to face this dilemma right there's two types of freedoms in the world there's a freedom you know there's a freedom to do anything and there's a freedom from having to choose to do anything and right now we have more of freedom from having to choose to go out and and do work I wonder if through all of this right now to your last point Dan this is the opportunity where you don't have to face this dilemma of quitting or working harder it is wide open for you to your point go for it now this might be your best opportunity well and I can say from a personal side the hardest thing for me young as a younger guy was when somebody would say okay after you've worked hard all day at your job right I was a KABC in LA for example working on the assignment desk after you work hard all day at your job and you come home exhausted then put time into your side

1:05:39 gig right and I always thought oh my god that's so hard I have nothing left and says I especially don't have the best of me left right and so I always found that to be so hard this is the opportunity though to do that if you I always said boredom is a wonderful motivator to go do something um and I always thought that's kind of the problem with the kids and that I have I mean they're never they think they're bored but they're not bored like we we were like little rascals bored like you know I was I was throwing anvils off of my garage door roof onto a onto a board that I'd set up on a fulcrum to imitate something from a car - nice saw that I left a dent and a chip that's still in the Toluca Lake sidewalk in front of that house I haven't lived in in 40 years because we were so bored we were just trying to eat but but my point is from that boredom stems a bunch of stuff and I could think of a bunch of

1:06:32 things I did throughout all those bored times that I have a buddy I've known since I was four years old and he said all that crap you were doing when we were kids somehow wove into your modern life today so it's weird how all that I have nothing to do I guess I'll do this and your mind coming up with something from nothing to make this so you could be entertained plays into something down the road there's a lot of bored people right now we're binge watching and doing all these things eventually they're gonna get tired of doing those well then do something you would do on your side gig time if you weren't so tired when you got home from work right what would you do if you had the energy may be without your job now you have the int that sounds awful I didn't mean it that way but but you know what I'm saying that that from these terrible kinds of limitations were under now there are potential opportunities that some people

1:07:21 in lucky situations rightie weren't caring for a sick loved one for example I mean if you're sitting around bored wondering what to do this might be something you could take advantage of now that's a better way to put it um truth and I'm with you on that one and folks to Dan's point do it now because the plants are farming us they give us oxygen until we decompose and then they consume us so you got one shot at doing it let's see what's the old saying Dan everybody is born with two lives and your second life begins when you realize you only have one I think that this is that that moment where we're all starting to get that do you mind if we do a couple of questions from the Toronto show no no we can do anything I just don't want you to ever feel compelled to do a Q&A type of format please jump in and add or subtract anything you want to after we start talking sure well usually does a jumping

1:08:11 off point okay well there's so when we did the Toronto show I get a handful of these cue cards and I think we only were able to get to maybe five or six questions for you but some of you were awesome there by the way I have to just tell the audience they didn't hear you were awesome they're by the way the best questioner I've ever run - ever at one of these things oh I have you fooled Oh Dan I thought you were so much smarter than that but I'll take the prove me wrong Jeff prove me wrong that was a lot of fun like when I'm gonna look back on this on this year in my career that was the highlight going away remember while the audience thinking I was drinking beer throughout the whole thing well they gave us beer bottles full of water and they had me what I thought was a beer and I said no no thanks I don't drink and there's like oh no this is what they like Heineken bottles and we're leather bottles hi Heineken

1:09:00 bottles full of water that was like okay these two guys are getting are getting pickled up there there's a few questions that I wanted to that you know I Drive home and I get back to my office and I pull these out I'm like ah you know what I wish I would have looked through these would wish I were to look through these a little more closely because there's some really good ones here so if you don't mind mr. Carlin I would like to interview you on your podcast how's that it was your idea let the audience know you you're the one who came up with this plan I just sent Dan a text saying hey you know what'd be really cool if he just grabbed a bunch of questions from Twitter and did a Q&A on your own podcast so here we go this one going back to the Toronto event from Shawn you tell it in a dramatic captivating and succinct way whom and what experiences do you credit as influencers of your style I got lucky because the times

1:09:55 changed on me I have a vivid memory of a radio station I worked at and meeting my boss at the urinal you know when I'm like on a break the shows in a commercial run to go to the bathroom the boss walks right next to me you know there's that awkward silence for a minute you know never see the boss and Here I am within here and I've got to get back upstairs before the breaks over and all of a sudden out of the out of the silences we're both standing there looking up he says ever thought about getting your adenoids out because because those were the days when you wanted to have the big Gary Owens voice you know the whole Dwolla and everybody sounded the same and I didn't sound like that so in the time that I was doing radio the desirable sound of a male broadcasters voice changed and all of a sudden it wasn't about all sounding the same it was about all sounding distinctively individual and I was

1:10:54 already there right I was the guy who needed his adenoids out well fast forward you know getting older whiskey everything else that comes with age and and my brain slowing down and I just sound like a less speedy probably less smart certainly less quick a lower voiced version of myself so it wasn't a style that developed this is just how I talk and luckily the industry came around and made it okay for me to talk this way without surgery you know there was a you know mentioning you know having a squirt beside a program director we used to do this segment on this old show that that I just referenced with with Strongbow and Macko called celebrities I've urinated next to and the most famous person for me the most it was it was late at night at a club down a bar downtown Toronto called Bistro 990 during the film festival day three three or four o'clock in the morning and a very inebriated Sean

1:11:52 Connery pulled up next to me so that was my big celebrity do do you have one Dan Carlin the most famous person you've urinated next to it wasn't I don't think it was most famous but it was certainly most cringe worthy response on my part so I'm one of these people I was I was born in a family where you know you ran into famous people pretty often and so normally I'm pretty good about not losing my mind or anything like that but there's always a few people right everybody's got it doesn't matter who you are everybody's got a few people where you just lose it and I was when I was a kid I was a baseball fan and for some reason that is absolutely I have no connection to the city I don't know how it ever happened I was a Baltimore Orioles fan in the 1970s when when you know it was those great teams and everybody else in the picture I liked so much was Jim Palmer I'm not sure who doesn't yeah he does a great great job

1:12:49 broadcasting everything today when I was a kid my stepdad who was in radio also got me on the field to meet all these guys I got I totally mute I mean I was stunned in he said I never heard you not talk for like two hours I just I couldn't even speak around these people so I got all their autographs I was about 10 or 11 years old or something so fast-forward I'm working at ABC and they have those morning that the cheesy I guess they're not cheesy I shouldn't even say they're cheesy but you know they had those local la morning shows with you know tawny little and Steve whatever his name was and they'd have this guy and and they'd always have you know Evander Holyfield is on or or and you know all the morning stars or whatever so one day they have Jim Palmer on but I didn't know it but I walked into the bathroom down there got myself a croissant or something off their set walked into the bathroom down there and

1:13:34 Jim Palmer walks up right next to me at the urinal and I don't know what I was thinking cuz there can't be a more inappropriate time maybe like when they're going into surgery is worse but but there can't be a more inappropriate time to say something like hey by the way you know blah blah blah and and and I you know I want to say to his credit he was awesome about it but he wasn't happy and I understand it totally he was like really there's something like that you know really he would do this now and I was kind of thinking to myself later I don't know but now even you know I always say I'm not famous Jeff unless I'm at an event that that's there specifically for me right so I have no no ability to know how to behave in those situations so I did a speaking engagement once at Stanford and I was there like 15 minutes early and I said is there a place I can get some coffee and they said oh yeah the Stanford place

1:14:25 where coffees right right around the corner so I go there not thinking at all I walk in and the entire place freezes and it took me a minute to realize that every single person that was gonna see me 15 minutes from now was in that coffee place waiting for the thing to start and I'd walked into one of the few places in the entire world where I was famous and it got and it got and it got weird right away it's bizarre right away and it's not that people aren't cool it's that I don't know how to behave do you know what I'm saying it's I'm uncomfortable with them being so glad to be around me you got to treat me more like my wife and kids treat me a certain level of disdain and and and impatience and and rolling of your eyes for me to be comfortable being nice and I just but but it's funny because it's that same sort of thing where you go god I did if somebody had come up to me in the urinal next to me

1:15:15 would I have even been as nice as Jim Palmer but you know what though at that at that event that we did at the the hotdog theater the Ted Rogers theater I mean you're like Beatles come to America when when they got off the plane like the places sold out I mean there's a huge lineup for books afterwards and you know a couple of people on the way out you know just sort of turned to me and said I can't believe how you know gracious and nice and genuine like to every single person I get a lot of these a lot of these events you know just grab the stamp and Dan Carla and Dan Carlin thanks for coming Dan Carlin thanks for coming but I mean Dan you stayed and talked to everybody and then the next event was coming on you took everybody out in the lobby to talk with them some more and sign more books like was that done I don't see overwhelming but was that a unique experience for you that packed house in Toronto were you ready

1:16:04 for something like that they may be an honorary Canadian citizen you know that day just so you know and they said it was because of all the apologies I made on stage they said that the obviously I have Canadian blood um here's the way I looked at it to be honest Jeff I feel like those people see normally normally I'm a person that you don't have to pay to hear my shows I mean we obviously after several years put the archives in a paid area but I mean I'm a free guy so I don't owe you anything I'm glad you're listening but I mean you didn't have to pay anything normally I don't have to worry about that so so the Toronto event that we went to was a paid event I don't do those really and so these people paid money to come and see me and I just sort of felt you feel a little guilty about that because normally I'd be fine I mean the podcast is the equivalent of walking in there on stage and just

1:16:55 letting anybody come in and sit down and and then if they don't like it or if they want to leave or whatever I don't feel sort of beholden to them to the same degree I do if they plunked down 12 bucks or whatever it was so I feel like I felt a real sense of well both camaraderie because it's it's it's weird - as a podcaster when you a and you know this - when you speak into a microphone you don't see the people on the other end and it is always it is always I'm not sure what the word I'm not sure the adjective quickly springs to mind it is an interesting and unique experience to all of a sudden have all these people that you have a relationship with but you've never met together does that make you understand me you get this as much as anybody else who does part of me those are one-on-one relationships that you are creating now as we talked about earlier radio you're broadcasting into a car or television

1:17:47 you're broadcasting into a living room full of people but podcasts like I don't know how many times that you have ever said because I know the number for me is zero you've ever said hey come on let's all listen to a podcast together like it is a real intimate bond that you form with people you know especially when you have something as compelling as you present in either hardcore or common sense like that is a real like none of that surprised me like when I when when Harper Collins called me today would you like do we understand your big day and currently families like to host this event I was like I hope it's a big theatre cuz I know how popular this guy is and I know how much people love him like that's a real intimate relationship you make in this medium you know what yeah can I circle back to something we talked about earlier when we were talking about people maybe at home maybe working on some creative idea not sure

1:18:39 what they want to do when all these kinds of things I don't mean to sound like something out of some pep talk you know Tony Robbins you can do it video but to hear you say that Jeff and to have come from a place where like you said earlier when you're talking about the Trent Reznor advice or whatever it was where there was like you know where there's a time when you go am i doing the right thing should I continue to do this and now looking back on it saying you know having Jeff say that I'm going wow you know what if I hadn't stayed and done what I did I mean I think when you get to the end of your life whether you're happy with your life are not happy with your life or have mixed feelings about it I think it's normal for a lot of people to look back at it and go what if right and a lot of times it's what if I made a better decision somewhere but I mean what if I made a worse decision somewhere what if I didn't do this or

1:19:27 what if I what if I had all these same qualities but lived in a time period that wasn't conducive to podcasting right what if it's 30 years ago or 40 years go so to hear you say that um it's a it's a it's a unique feeling I always say that that you know when you get to be my age I'm 54 now you see a lot of people who you know whose dreams have not panned out whose life's have not gone the way that they would have hoped and there there's a lot of regret that creeps into some people in older age and if you don't have that you just feel so fortunate and you look around and you say well why do I not have that and a huge part of the reason why are those people that showed up to the show in Toronto the people that listen to the podcast I mean I tell them all the time and it might must sound like some sort of just you know thing you say at the end of the show but if not for the collective audience and much more than

1:20:23 say a big broadcast network or something like that if not for the audience my whole life is different and not in a good way so I think about it a lot actually and and so the relationship between the audiences I may be speaking in their ear and I might have a personal relationship with them but the reason I stay afterwards and I would have stayed afterwards at that show whether or not they plunked down the 12 bucks is because I'm aware everyday that this life I have is because of them it sounds cliche but it's literally true I mean we we exist on donations and people who buy the old shows it doesn't get any more personal and connection than that there is a real freedom to that too I know it tends to be harder work like I work for Rogers you know a major you know communications company and and you're one of the great independents and there's a lot of different and harder work that comes a lot okay that comes

1:21:13 along with it could you ever see yourself not as an independent well the first thing I'd like to point out is that I'm not good at a lot of the other stuff that comes with being an independent and there's a couple of ways you can go there's a lot of people always want to know about the business that I operate here and and there's a I could have gone the route where you hire a lot of people there's a lot of work to be done but if you do that you become a people manager and I'm not good at that I'm what I'm doing here now see this is what the great this is the great thing of working for say a radio station or a broadcast outlet they do all that stuff for you right they sell the airtime they about the show that they're the infrastructure and you get to be the tip of the spear that just focuses on what you do if the infrastructure is not there you have to provide it you have to provide it by hiring people to do it in

1:22:01 which case you're the boss of a bunch of people or doing it yourself a financial adviser told me a while back that we're leaving a lot of money on the table well there's no doubt we're leaving a lot but I mean in order to get that money the things we would have to do would destroy the creative side of what we do here which is what's both what we enjoy and what makes it good on the listeners end of it right so you say to yourself I'm not going to make as much I mean listen we could do a lot of ads but I think it spoils you know some of the the quality of the experience you know so I mean I feel like what what's the question again bring it back to the point from me here Jeff we talked about this in China remember yeah we talked about you know could you could you see yourself existing as anything yeah of an independent yeah well listen the one the one thing that that that I've gotten out of practice of is and I started to talk

1:22:57 about this earlier and I got off on a tangent where we were talking about collective creative work versus individual creative work when I was starting to talk about the South Park guys and stuff you know if you're Jimmy Kimmel or whatnot you've got a whole huge staff of people and you've got writers and everybody is part of the creative contributing staff right so you get sort of a creativity by committee and when it works you have a Seinfeld write or something really magical but I find that when I do creativity by committee me being the persnickety very specifically weird person I am I like it less than when it's my own baby sort of and so being an independent allows me to not have to do anything I don't want to do and I don't we make no allowances at all for anything for I mean at this point this is the wonderful you know we talked about regrets earlier they're wonderful part of my life now is to be

1:23:51 able to sit here and go I don't care about any of the that I'm gonna do the show the way I want to do it if I have some there's just there's nothing that comes into it other than because I hear the way we figure it we figure that this stuff out lives right the stuff we're making the stuff you're putting online this stuff will be around longer than we will and so we have to live with it what's more it's gonna be the best representation of who the hell you were when you were alive that you could find can you imagine having a podcast of the kind that we do with hardcore history of common sense from any of the great figures in history centuries and centuries ago think about how much of their soul would be transmitted I mean Cicero we said earlier said that writings the only true form of immortality well think about if it was on YouTube instead think about the other nuances of that guy's personality you get if you could see him

1:24:39 hear him you know what I'm saying it's it's a three dimensional transmission of one's soul personality and and sort of character and so I mean I've often said I feel like my great-grandchildren will get a chance to have a sense of who I was if they simply listen to these podcasts now that that boomerangs back though when you're doing them and you think about okay how much should we tweak this or exactly how right does it need to be before we release it and all this because you have two audiences it's like when you're writing a book you have an audience if you're serializing it in the magazine right chapter one in June chapter 2 in July chapter 3 in August right you've got an audience waiting for each of those that's one audience but then you have an audience who's not gonna find your book for five years right who's not gonna have to wait for any of it that's a different audience so we've got people waiting on the next

1:25:29 show for us that are you know when is it coming out when is it coming out and so we're trying to make a good show for them but we know that there are gonna people be people that don't find this for years and years and years and we have to make a show for them right that that's that's they don't care how long it took five years from now they just care how good it is so these are the kind of things we think about in to dovetail it with your point about independent versus corporate can you imagine going to a giant corporation that invested in this and has a publicity staff that's working in line with their promotional side and you know to get this out of the you can't do it they can't function that way and it's not a slam on them they have to coordinate the activities of all kinds of people I have to coordinate the activities of me and it changes how I approach this creatively and how I can

1:26:12 make something that hopefully my grandchildren are happy you know you know there was um there is a feeling and I believe this that things like music for example we're at their most vibrant when the people that ran the shops didn't know what they were serving up when there were the program directors that got a new album across their desk and said I don't know maybe the kids will like it put it on there let's see what happens and some of its crap as we've heard before but a lot of it is good when you just admit that well I don't know let's just try something here you came here you go back and listen to I'm gonna sound like an older guy here Oh everything was better than in the olden days but if you go back and listen to to music in the late sixties in the early seventies like every song you know on on any top 30 list every song was distinct from the very next up there was so there was a vibration of so

1:27:05 many vibrant sounds and different types of music that made its way on to radio it was fantastic and then things like you know formats got tighter and program directors who thought they knew what the kids wanted became more of a things and focused testing which is still the bane of a lot of a lot of radio people's existence do you find that you're the kind of person that is more willing to just try things because you don't know or Dan do you already have this idea of a focused test in your mind before you put it out you know William Butler Yeats I'm on my favorite poets used to talk about killing skepticism because in his mind it was the acknowledgment of a limit and he didn't want to have that with his art do you feel similar are you the type of person that embraces the let's just try this and see what happens type vibe absolutely it's it's one of the reasons the shows take so long and and one of the things I don't ever want

1:28:07 to do is have a template for this I mean once you say you've got this giant creative white space that we talked about earlier and once you acknowledge this is something you really like about the medium well why do you anything that then creates your own boxes that you're then constrained by right radio used to give you those boxes so you're gonna put your own boxes in there so when I try to figure out how to weave a narrative together one of the things I asked is is this something we do all the time or is there a way we could switch there could we tell the end of the story first and then switch it around so not only does that keep that fresh from a listener stamp when it keeps it fresh from a storyteller standpoint and helps you help I mean I guess I there was a friend of mine and he's probably gonna listen to this who described what I do because we used to just do this entirely like all my shows I would walk in and

1:28:55 record it and we'd be done and and we can't do that with six hour podcast or three-hour podcast or whatever so we started editing them and I always said that one of the things I didn't like about live talk radio was that as you know you're juggling ads and you're juggling news and you're juggling the next guest and yeah yeah 900 things to think about while the callers talking with you but then you have to live with whatever political statement thing comes out of your mouth over three hours over 15 hours a week over all those a month and I used to say god I just would love the the freedom that an editor has at a newspaper when they write a column to go oh that's the wrong word there strike that and put the words you really want there so that when when it goes out to the public you can say I've signed off on this this is really what I meant to say and I feel like the way our podcast develop has given me that freedom now

1:29:44 what that does though is you know and you you know this but the audience maybe doesn't this is not a scripted program so my friend who I was just mentioning had described what I do as edited performance art and that kind of is a good way to put it it's because we get up I get up here and I just sort of riff I know what I want to say usually if I'm if it's the history show I have a couple of quotes usually marked that I want to include and then as soon as I run out of steam or it starts falling apart or we tried some experiment and it didn't work or it did work we cut off of the day and then stitch it to whatever last worked and then by the end of it you have a bunch of improvisational sessions that hopefully you know tell a story in a way that keeps it fresh and moving and hopefully if you've heard a bunch of my shows doesn't sound like all the other shows where it has all the things you

1:30:31 like from all the other shows but keeps you guessing in terms of show design narrative the way the stories approached and all that kind of substance er your question we experiment all the time and it is one of the things I like about the gig so let me follow that up then with this question and this audience member didn't put his or her name on it but it dovetails your idea about learning what's what's the old saying when one teaches to learn dan what podcast did you learn the most from it's a tough one for me for two reasons one when we started podcasting there weren't all that many podcasts 2005 June or July 2005 the second reason why is I don't listen to much in the way of podcasting because I'm a reader I mean that's what I that's my medium and in part because of the speed at which I read so conversation often goes too slowly for me and I don't have a I live in a place right on this long commute so

1:31:31 my lifestyle isn't conducive to lots of radio or broadcasting so the podcasting answer is gonna be more I mean the podcasts that we learn from in 2005 were the bit I Madame Curie had the daily source code I mean that's an example when you would listen and go what the hell is Adam Curry doing I mean so but at this stage we were at you weren't sitting there trying to pick up little tricks you were sitting there going now does he have an email linked to this on a web page I mean it was really really basic stuff you were trying to learn I remember when people were trying to figure out how to ask for donations and that kind of stuff we would look at what other podcasters were doing and say okay did they put a note on their front page or are they running ads in their shows and so it was more trying to get a sense of where the industry was and where trends were moving rather than oh this host had an approach I like or I like

1:32:24 the way that that show did intro music I mean I feel like in a lot of ways everything from the imaging to the branding to the show announcer the the the buffered I mean all that I think we you know hoping in the non area where but I think we introduced some standards on those things that hadn't been around before I mean we brought a big voice in a friend of mine I've worked with for many years the great bill Barrett and all of a sudden you know podcasting sounded like your radio show but I don't mean we invented that but that was one of the things that we just said okay well we have acts to a big voice let's use them we named all the episodes so instead of a lot of shows we're just doing numbers when we started right show number 140 and the feeling was is that if you name these shows it's like a Star Trek episode right it gives it a personality and it has it it's not show 127 its trouble for

1:33:15 tribbles you know and you go oh yeah I know so we thought the same thing and then the history show was the same sort of deal to where you turn around you go that's the idea behind the artwork with the history shows to our wonderful artist who's Canadian Nick Leigh said I think all the show should have individual artwork for the same rationale that having an individual name was thought of right it gives them even more of a personality even more of a of a standalone sense of this is a book right it's not a podcast where all the shows are the same this is a this is a a piece of art that is a standalone piece of art and I don't mean the art of the cover or the album art I mean the entire package wrapped in the art right the art in the art and and so when you say what did you learn from other podcast well most of what I learned was trying to figure out and I think they did the same with me we were all watching each other

1:34:09 to try to figure out what's everybody doing what's the newest thing what works what doesn't I remember when some guy I don't remember want to have him one of these podcasts tried to make it was the first guy that tried to make it a members-only thing or you have to pay for it thing and and I forgot who it was but they had a lot of listeners whatever that time period considered to be a lot of listeners because it's probably 2006 or 2007 and they went like pay and everything dried up instantly and I remember they came back and said okay rule number one don't ask him to pay but I mean but nobody knew until somebody tried so what I learned most was we were watching this development and and you didn't want to have to learn everything by trial-and-error yourself so you kind of watched what everybody else was doing and tried to figure out what was adaptable for you and what wasn't a lot of what other people were doing wasn't

1:34:56 adaptable for for our particular style of stuff but but I think everybody watching everybody that's how that's how the early industry sort of move forward let me follow up with a question about readings you talked about that off the top of that answer I can recall specifically cuz you know like you I was a big reader when I was a kid always have been I can remember my mum sing to me once never make fun of anyone who mispronounced as a word because that means they learned it from a book and didn't just hear it and we should be encouraging more people to read how do you talk to your kids about reading hmm well first of all that that's the kind of statement I can completely get behind cuz you know when I mispronounce words that's why I mispronounce them thank God the audio pronunciations online are getting so much better it's easier to work with I it's funny to guys Jeff I always get these wonderful offers from

1:35:51 people all around the world to help me with pronunciation if I ever in and I'm dealing with anything from there the neck of the woods but but it's funny cuz you go oh you know I had that Japanese guy five years ago who told me he'd help me to find the email look the guy it just is so thank God for the audio pronunciation things because that that's been that's been difficult for a lot of history show people over time how do I teach my kids about reading it's a tough one because um I happen to be a person who probably assumes some level of magical power comes from reading I do think that that that statement in the in the world of the blind the one-eyed man is king I do think that as less people do things the people who still do those things become more valuable there was an interesting book out ahead in the cloud I think it was called something like that where the author was talking about

1:36:43 that how important it is to still know things even in the era where everything is look up a bull and in part because you don't know what you don't know the reading is the same thing where I think and I talked to a guy who said cuz he knew I was a big reader and he said can't you just get everything a college can give you from reading it yourself and I said yes and no you don't know what you don't want to read though you don't know what you don't know and that's what sometimes the professors are there to guide you right if they said here make sure you read this well then maybe yes but if you're just reading what's interesting to you you're gonna find that your knowledge is is somehow limited by that right your choice is on what you find interesting has have determined the parameters of what you know you didn't learn what you didn't want to know and it's skewed your image so when I look at my kids I'm

1:37:36 trying to figure out how much the term reading applies to what they do now so when you say reading are we talking about the greats or are we talking about their on the iPad and they're you know I mean so I think we have to define are we talking about the what they're not getting with the great pieces of literature or the ancient classic scholars or do you don't I'm saying that there's there's all kinds of reading there's trashy novels and there's Steinbeck right and do you get the same from both of them so I think all the kids today read a lot they just a reading little snippets here or there on on in a digital format the question is is that is that giving them the benefits that we always associated with and I'm using air quotes with my fingers reading is there enough water to the village if you do it that way is what you're saying well I mean look if I'm reading if I'm reading a digital piece

1:38:33 on TMZ right now I'm reading but did it did it improve it did it provide any of the qualities we associate with bettering us as human beings that you know when I was a kid they say you know readers this and readers that well what if I'm reading the National Enquirer see from I mean my kids are ten ten eight and three so we try to encourage things that encourage the kids to ask questions like well always okay still sit down and read and then we'll sit and talk to them about it and ask them about the questions just to sort of trigger the idea of a questioning things you read finding things that are interesting because that's what I always did when I was a kid feeling that eventually that type of curiosity in reading will lead to all those things that you talked about eventually if you can understand that you know through you know even just you know reading a book about like right now my kids are what are they

1:39:34 reading now I think they're reading The Walking Dead you know a graphic novel series but they have a million questions about them and they'll come to us with like ethical questions about them and although you can't talk to your kid about utilitarianism when they're eight years old those same questions still do exist so for us as long as they're still asking questions based on what they're reading then I think they're heading in the right direction I always try when I'm talking about education reform to to focus on taking what the child's already interested in and then trying to figure out a way to help them distill value based on what they already find interesting so for example um I have a daughter who's not gonna like any of those kinds of who's not going to get into those kinds of questions with you but she's gonna be very interested in the way a story is told so she's got a very good head for story development and

1:40:26 how the pieces fit together right some of the stuff we just talked about with how I like to try to switch it up with our show so she's got a very good sense of that so that's when we read I break the stories down that way I'll say well do you see how the author tried to tell this story this way and she'll say yeah but they could have done this also and so she's not necessarily getting she might not be absorbing whatever the message that the writer was trying to get to her was she's more absorbing the way that the writer decided to tell the story there was a I read a story about John Belushi once and I think it was Lauren Michaels of the Saturday Night Live the Canadian Saturday Night Live um a producer who was saying that he was giving John Belushi one of these speeches about cleaning up his act for his health purposes and all that and he goes but he'd already heard that story before he

1:41:15 says when you tell a comedian like that something like that they're more probably trying to work out an impression of you and how you raise your eyebrow and how you how your voice talks and all that sort of stuff instead of hearing the content of the message well my daughter wasn't hearing necessarily what that what that writer was trying to impart in terms of data and story and information but she was paying close attention to the way the eyebrow went up and the tone of the voice and the way the story was told so an answer your question I try to find out what it is that they're finding appealing from the work and then I try to examine that I you know I I did I wrote a piece once for edge Autopia which is um it's an education reform online resource and and I didn't want to write it because a lot of teachers use it I didn't feel qualified to tell teachers how to teach they're in the classrooms every day so I

1:42:05 try to just say isn't it silly to teach kids a bunch of things if they don't remember it later because the whole idea behind teaching say names and dates is it's important stuff for a citizen to know these things but it doesn't matter if they don't retain that knowledge and so I was trying to point out that maybe if you started with the fact that we're all interested in history innately but just not the same history you find out what your kid likes and then you teach him the history of that right they like hockey hockey has a history they like fashion fashion has a history you can teach how you know historical evolution and historical processes and all these things by sticking with the subject the kid already likes and so when we talk about books and my kids they aren't necessarily getting we know you could say here read this book you'll learn a lot kid but they might learn a lot it just might not be what you think they

1:42:55 should learn so I try to craft what works in the piece with what the child what resonated with the kid does that make sense it does and there's actually follow another question here that sort of follows that up again from someone unknown they didn't write their name Dan I have a three-year-old daughter I can't yet play her your podcast what do I do until I can how can one gradually or best introduce children to history again I think this is something that you tailor to the personality of the individual that's why we are that's why we all choose if you go to a history section at a bookstore if there are any Oh brick-and-mortar bookstores left or in the future um different people are going to pick different books it's all history but different I mean for a while one of my kids was interested in the life of pioneer women on the frontier and in them in the middle of the United States and she was really taken with

1:43:50 their stories so she'd read these novels or the or these pieces that would include a lot of the primary sources where you'd hear you know what it was like growing up in Little House on the Prairie type situations and and that resonated with her and so you find something well if you like that you might like this um all you're trying to do there is awaken love of the past again this is what I said in the education article if you can manage to turn that spark on if you could appetize someone for the love of history they still may not know what year Columbus discovered the new world from the old world but they will be continually reading historical things be interested in it and they will begin to fill in this is what I always hope that you start to fill in broad areas of knowledge Oh before our own time you had this era and then before that era you had this era and so you begin to form a framework for how the broad eras of

1:44:45 humanity have fit together but you have to do it like a jigsaw puzzle and when you're talking about your kids you start with whatever piece of the puzzle first is attractive to them that is you know my parents did that with me in one very specific way dad every year at least once or twice this is before obviously you know the Internet and you know they have various books about hockey but as a kid I was always fascinated with hockey still am to this day they would take me the Hockey Hall of Fame in downtown Toronto and leave me there I had a notebook in my little knapsack geez dad I was eight nine years old and I would write everything down I would sit there and watch all the videos and make notes and I come back with my notebook all filled up with observations and just regurgitation of facts that I knew about hockey and honestly afterwards I would start to ask questions about what was happening around the games that weren't

1:45:43 just the games who are these guys where did they go what was the circumstance why didn't they play this game why did this person get arrested different things like that so I can from from personal experience that's how my parents did it with me now maybe they just thought the Hockey Hall of Fame was gonna be the world's cheapest babysitter I don't know but they would just plunk me down at the Hockey Hall of Fame and I would stay there the entire day I got one more for you this is this is a really interesting one how does our tendency to gloss over the carnage Gore and unforgivable aspects of history affect how we interpret our pasts hmmm well obviously we do the opposite from the hardcore History Program we don't gloss over you know I think it's an interesting question because I would argue that we don't gloss over it we we zoom in and zoom out in a way that gives us quick hits of the of the nastiness without any of the

1:46:50 long-term contemplation that you would hope comes with it right so if you look at the second at both world wars any major events like that you'll see that there's a period of almost like international reflection afterwards where everyone sorts of think they're trying to absorb the enormity and the lessons and and all everything what just happened cuz it's so fresh and so enormous I I think that there may be almost an evolutionary self-defense mechanism that allows us over time if not to forget that than to not feel it at the same levels of intensity I mean imagine if if human beings still felt with the same intensity all of the great you know traumatic events of history you don't over a couple of generations it fades and that may be like a protective measure right to allow us to move forward unburdened by all of the trauma of the collective past but of course it comes with the downside too which is

1:47:53 without the trauma and without it being fresh in your mind that contemplative reform period that a period where you say what did we learn from this let's make sure this never happens again that fades - I was talking to somebody the other day we were talking about a line I forgot where I heard it but it's about the smell of the bodies and we're talking about the we were talking about the concentration camps at the end of the Second World War where some of the allied generals made some of the local Germans from the nearby town walk around the camp with all the the dead bodies out and there's film of this by the way and one of the generals had said something like you know I want them to smell the bodies I want them to remember the smell of the body something like that and so that became almost like a term that you use to say when the smell of the bodies is fresh we're in one frame of mind but

1:48:42 after a couple of generations when you don't smell the bodies anymore and you don't remember them and you know those people and they're not even real to you it's almost like okay well the contemplative and reformed side that came as a result of the smell of all those bodies also seems to fade some you know one might say that they're you know when the person who asked the question was asking he's basically sort of asking isn't he how can we how can we maintain the benefits that come when somebody smacks humanity in the face with something like a world war long afterwards and I don't know the answer that that's the old line about people forgetting history right it seems as if as well my buddy Bob not phrase it to me the other day like this it's like it's like trying to do a Rubik's Cube that fights back it's a wonderful line or it's like playing a game of cards where every two minutes a new deck is

1:49:35 introduced you've talked a couple of different times in a couple of different places about this idea that history doesn't teach us what we think it can can you expand on that yeah sure cuz I think everybody winces when they hear somebody trying to say something like well 1938 at Munich teaches us you can't appease dictators or something like that because that's exactly what history doesn't teach us that's exactly the line that somebody had once said about it being like a river where you can put your toe in the river and it's the same river but it's not the same water right and it's not the same water at the same place at the same time so it so what I always say about the Hitler analogy is what 1938 reach really teaches you is you can't appease that dictator at that time over that subject so it really doesn't teach you much of anything but what history does seem to teach us is certain things involving well for

1:50:36 example the herds stuff so we talked earlier about how we are all reacting humanity wise to what we're facing now with the coronavirus and that some of that stuff was what if I brought anything in the recent book I wrote to the table it's certainly not the Nostradamus like prediction about a coronavirus cuz all the experts were predicting that it's about how people behave once they have a threat of a virus though um so so the 1938 analogy doesn't work but it does teach us the herd stuff right the stuff like we were talking about in the book the Nostradamus type thing it's not Nostradamus to predict a kovat virus that's coming it's it's it's predicting how we're all gonna react and and truthfully we reacted a little like you expect a mass group of humans to react whether it's the 21st century or the 10th century so I found I found that to be something where you could say okay history doesn't teach us how to behave

1:51:32 in any given situation but history shows us how large groups of us might behave in certain situations and so I think it's it's a little bit less about specific lessons and a little bit more about big-picture broad trend reactions if that makes sense dan we started this conversation by me asking you about the the title of your book the end is always near if you release this book now as opposed to last fall would chapter six be chapter one uh I'm not sure Chapter six and that's the the pandemic prologue chapter I don't know if it would be in the book at all it's one of those things where you look at it now and you would almost say well why would you put that here right I mean we it's over that we understand it's it's only interesting to me because it hasn't happened it doesn't yeah IIIi would suggest that if I wrote the book today that probably wouldn't even be in there because you would sit there and go so often you know

1:52:35 well what's the baby we know right I'm asking about all these science fiction like things that might happen during a pandemic and you're sitting here going it's not science fiction I'm doing it now one guy wrote me an interesting line he it was on Twitter I think where he said I thought you were jumping the shark when you said that you know would society shut down and with a modern pandemic and yet here we are um but I'm as surprised as everybody I didn't say this I asked it right so so I was asking a bunch of questions throughout the whole book there's no answers it's a bunch of questions so when you ask a bunch of questions about what if a pandemic happened and then a pandemic happens it's almost like well why would I put those questions in the batch that chapter is moot one one final one from me the themes that you tend to talk about a lot end of the world technological regression what interests

1:53:28 you right now Dan as we record this podcast what does top of mind outside of pandemic which is on the top of everybody's minds certainly what else interest in Carlin right now I think you listen I think like a lot of Americans I'm watching the political situation I think that's something that that has become so unpredictable that I think it's hard to take your eyes off of it very long and focus on other things so I would say that right now and obviously this is highlighted by the situation we're in but if you recall before this situation we had a a a not as significant but another significant crisis so I feel like even if you want to focus on other things right now at least in the United States but I would imagine worldwide your attention is is drawn away from those things towards the the bigger show going on right now maybe that's the way to put it Dan you're the best at this how do we end this one on a

1:54:24 positive note I'm out of cue cards from the hot docs event you know somebody was saying to me the other day I was having a conversation with somebody the other name we were talking about worst-case scenarios and they were saying that they thought the worst case scenario would be when somebody did something really drastic right terrorism or somebody bomb something or just some big awful thing and I said yes I said that does sound pretty darn bad and you might be right I said although we should understand something that there's another way it can go when that happens right the other way it could go is that it's like a slap in the face towards society so let me use the example of the late 1960s early 70s and what was called the new left back then and what became the edge of the violent left back then The Weather Underground those kind of people SD when STS went went went to the Weather Underground or when the Symbian

1:55:15 EES Liberation Army was running around in all these things um those people took the political rhetoric of the time which seemed pretty extreme to the logical conclusions and started planting bombs when we had hundreds of bombings in a couple of years the average Americans who might have been some of them anyway open to some counter cultural message remember the John Lennon line you know if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao you ain't gonna make it with anyone any have you that there was something about hey man right on this all sounds great the Revolution and all that but when people are getting bombed a lot it wakes it could it could go the other way too like we said the burning of the Reichstag enables Hitler and you have the Nazis you can go that route too but it can also go wait a minute now time to get real here right it has a way of waking up the ballast of society or is what did Nixon call them the silent

1:56:08 majority does this mean the silent majority we just have to just wait for a good terror attack and all this will be over of course not you can have the Reichstag burning thing we just mentioned but for your silver lining here there is a possibility that the way you get a correction is when something goes too far so if something goes too far that would be called looking at the bright side I don't want to tell you how to do your podcast damn but that is a perfect line to end it a thousand thanks to my friend Jeff Marek for being willing to do this not once but twice for me check out his work on Rogers Communications Sports Net you can also find his stuff he's the co-host of the 31 thoughts podcast he's an awesome guy and if you're Canadian you don't need me to tell you about Jeff Marek you probably heard about me from Jeff in any case he's wonderful guy enjoy him a lot and hopefully we can do

1:57:02 this again and make it a trifecta at some point also just a little update on supernova progress I'd say more than two-thirds of the way done sorry for the wait but you know how I roll I've got multiple feeds and I like to put out just a trickle of content out on each one of them you for trickle-down economics this is trickle out podcasting and we are just you know reverting to form here I should point out just a little announcement if you ever want to find out where the shows are in terms of you know when we release them and make sure you're wrong we do have a Twitter feed at at hardcore history and we make sure that any time we put anything out we announce it there so you'll never miss a show release also if you've had any problems accessing the paid archives and for those who don't know we keep the the recent shows up free for years and then after several years we move them to the paid archive and you can get them

1:57:53 off our website or iTunes or some other places and apparently we had an OS update that broke something that we didn't know about on Apple podcast or iTunes so if you've had problems getting shows recently that should be fixed and I wanted to make sure we thank you all because you telling us about it helped us to find it so once again we're like a little community here and I do want to say that as a little community here it's a little weird during this whole period we're living in right now this whole coronavirus era I feel like we're getting I feel like that line into the end of history or sort of a respite from history that they used to say about geopolitical concerns after the Cold War and before the 9/11 attacks I think that kind of applies to us now in a um in a germ virus disease kind of sense maybe like all of a sudden we're getting the tiniest little taste of what it was like we probably deal with it differently but

1:58:45 what it was like to live in fear of communicable diseases in a way we haven't done a while that's that's a crappy way to have to have some empathy with people in the past isn't it it's also a weirdly human thing to kind of almost need something like this to remind us that we're all in this together isn't it I mean do you have to have a world war to create national unity do you have to have a coronavirus to remind us that we're all connected I don't know but I'll tell you what I never feel disconnected from you folks I feel you know it's funny because everybody's lives have been totally put upside down and I'm still working the way I always do and and because my life is not disrupted as much as most people's I constantly I'm thankful for the fact I'm able to do this and that's all your fault so thank you I hope you're all doing okay and and we're gonna you know ease out of this thing I think together

1:59:43 stay safe everybody and you know we'll be trickling out our content to you at our normal torrid pace in the near future

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP11 Toronto Redux"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Jeff Marek (Guest).

What is "EP11 Toronto Redux" about?

The content recounts a memorable promotional event in Toronto featuring the author and Canadian broadcaster Jeff Marek, highlighting their engaging conversation and Marek's insightful questioning during the Q&A session. The author celebrates their connection and suggests a potential collaboration sparked by Marek's interest in conducting interviews that showcase the author's work.

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

11 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Hardcore History, Jeff Marek, COVID-19 pandemic, The End is Always Near, Jim Morrison, Rogers Sportsnet. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP11 Toronto Redux"?

The episode runs 1 h 60 min; the transcript is about 23,996 words in 134 timestamped sections.

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