Mike Duncan: What Is The Point Of All This?

you know life life has its ups and downs and I think that on the whole the role that podcasting plays in the role in the life of both producers and and listeners is as a flotation device it's not an anchor man I don't think podcasting is like it there's like a chain it's not LED boots that are dragging us down to the bottom it's a buoy that can hold us above the surface that's great for society I think it I think it creates a healthier and happier society most of the time I think about the content that is going into any individual episode of my show which kind of it's a weekly show I have a deadline every Sunday night and I have to hit it and all I think about is what I'm doing this week I before I came here I was thinking about the rapid industrialization of the Russian Empire in the early 1890s that is typically the kind of thing that I think about I've very rarely step back and actually think in a meta way about what podcasting is like what is it good for what possesses us to create podcasts what possesses us to listen to podcasts why do we pour our hearts our time our soul and our money into these shows so I want to ask the question what is the point of all this for creators for listeners and for society as a whole so when I think about what it is that I get out of podcasting why I started why I keep doing it the very first thing that always leaps to my attention is a sense of creative fulfillment I think that there is an innate desire inside of human beings for self-expression to create something new you have something that is inside of you whatever it is it could be in fashion it could be an art it could be in writing or music or knitting or any number of different small and large hobbies everybody wants everybody has something inside of them no matter how big or how small that wants to come out of them and I certainly have things that want to come out of me and my creative process which is just reading books and taking notes and taking very complex historical issues and trying to work through them like a puzzle to figure out how on earth I can explain something as complicated as the fall of the Roman Empire or as complicated as the French Revolution and make it intelligible to people so that they understand what actually happened this is a creative fulfilling endeavor for me the actual writing of the transcripts I love writing sentences I love crafting sentences I love making paragraphs I love putting them down on a page and then that all of that creative expression is what I get out of doing a podcast as a producer of a podcast that sense of that desire for creative fulfillment is then you get this bonus if you follow through to the end which is this thing called a sense of accomplishment right a sense of accomplishment is a profoundly important and cool thing to have in your life most of the time and I'm talking about myself here I mean you'll say oh the history of Rome it was a great idea you did a great job okay well that was one of about a thousand different things that I've started and quit at various times in my life you picked things up you try them out sometimes no matter how much energy you have going into it it Peters out and after a while you know you can you you want to have finished something have done something with your life I think people want that and so every week every podcast episode that you put out every podcast episode that I put out when I hit upload you know I sit back and I have about five minutes where I get to ride a little emotional high and say yeah I did it I did it I did something else I have a sense of accomplishment that sort of courses through me and then after that five minutes of course next week's deadline starts looming and I say okay I have to get back to work now and go back to my of fulfillment because I have to have a new episode out next Sunday so you get that we are fulfilling ourselves creatively we are surrounding ourselves often with a sense of accomplishment that we did something and then there's this other little subtle joy that can come out of this which to put a fancy label on it you would say it's honing your craft or simply put it's getting better at something the feeling that you get from getting better at something is fantastic and this is true not just of podcasting I mean this is true if you're a musician anybody who has ever started to try to play a musical instrument knows that there is a real subtle and persistent joy that comes from trying to play a song the first time and just fumbling your way through it and then playing it 10 more times and feeling yourself get better at it and then playing after 20 times and 30 times now suddenly you can kind of do it without thinking about it and then you get even better at it and you can do it you know now you can now you're thinking of little different ways that you could play it that honing of the craft and I can tell you when I go back and listen to the early about do you guys all have listened to the history of Rome okay so when I go back and listen to the early episodes of the history of Rome they are a little mortifying you know it's very much Hohokam this is true from my my name's Mike dunker we're talked about so it's and there's a feeling that you can kind of get and people ask me well are you ever gonna go back and rerecord it the answer is that no I'm not gonna go back and rerecord it I'm not pulling George Lucas on the history of realm I'm not gonna start inserting tauntauns into the early Roman Kingdom but what I feel about that is not so much like you know shame at how bad I was but kind of joy at how much better I am at it now and I hope that five years down the road I even look at the stuff that I'm doing right now and I'm like yeah man I'm better than I was then I always want to be getting better and there's this great story about this there's a cellist there's a really great cellist his name is Pablo Casals does anybody know who Pablo Casals is Pollock sauce it's technically Pollock a sauce right in honor of how he actually wants to pronounce his name we call him Pablo so he is you know arguably the greatest chalice in the world he's early 20th century to mid 20th century and when he was very late in his career we're talking like the 1960s he was still practicing like six hours a day he's an old man he's like when he goes and plays shows it's like here comes the greatest cellist in the world sauce and asked him uh why do you keep practicing six hours a day and he said well I'm beginning to see some improvement and that is meaningful right getting better at something all the time is awesome so if you keep at it and you keep at it week after week you're gonna get better at it and then the last thing that I will say about what I get out of this is what anybody who produces an educational piece of work that's ten minutes or fifteen minutes or in my case it's usually twenty or twenty five minutes you know that you are not putting in a lot of things right the actual writing and editing process is a lot about not saying something or taking something that took me three or four paragraphs to write and condensing that into a single sentence and just being like yes it was chaotic for three weeks and then just kind of blowing through that little period because otherwise we'll be here for three weeks if I try to explain to you every every single twist and turn people sometimes accuse me of going through every single twist and turn in history and that's not true I leave a lot of them out but what I'm left with then is in the process of producing a piece of educational content an episode or a series to explain it to all of you I am sitting on top of a mountain of information that didn't even make it into the show and now I'm walking around having educated myself I'm walking around because I'm trying to explain it to you I now have all of this additional information that is rattling around inside my head and I think anybody who does a show has that same feeling of being profound feeling profoundly more educated about something just because you had to go through the process of learning it so that you could explain it to somebody else so those are the things that I think about if somebody's going to ask me question what do you get out of podcasting it's all of those things now there's this other stuff that has happened as a result of me keeping at this for quite a while and having some measure of success I've I've gotten some recognition I have a degree of popularity I got invited to this thing to do a keynote address in front of all of you guys right now I got it I got a book out of it I have a second book that I'm writing and all of those things though don't really impact me on a daily basis you know if I hit upload on an episode my lived experience is about the same if I have one person download that episode or I have a hundred thousand people download that episode I'm still doing the same basic work that I was doing in July of 2007 when I got started I'm reading books I'm taking notes I'm trying to figure out how to explain this to people I'm writing up a transcript I'm editing it I am recording it I am publishing it and then I'm starting that process over again my daily life my weekly life is pretty much all the same so when you go into this as somebody who wants to produce a podcast or if you're thinking about doing it those are the things that you should take away from your work is the creative fulfillment the cell the sense of accomplishment the feeling of getting better at something and then educating yourself and create you know in your own head having a richer understanding of the world that you're living in and if you go into it being like I'm gonna start a podcast because I'm gonna get rich and famous number one it's no not maybe you will Dan Carlin did Dan Caron was pretty famous but your life is actually going to be enriched by the creative process far more than any sort of fleeting or superficial Fame that you might get out of it so I think if you're going to start a podcast you should definitely not be going into it thinking what I want to get out of this is Fame and riches what you should be wanting to get out of it is creative fulfillment and a sense of accomplishment and that's what I still to this very day after 12 years that's still exactly what I get out of producing my podcast every week and sometimes a sense of fear because I have an episode due out tomorrow that still isn't finished yet so then we move on to the listeners okay we can't actually do any of this without listeners and most of us aren't just podcast creators we are we listen to podcasts too I listen to podcasts I mostly listen to baseball podcasts because I need a break and I also will binge I will find a certain show and then I will just binge on it as many of us do that I do all the same things I'm currently have discovered I'm way late to this party but you must remember this by Corinna Longworth does anybody know that podcast I'm gonna I'm plugging it right now because I'm like listening to it obsessively it's fantastic it's about early 20th century Hollywood history it's great so what do we then as listeners not as podcast creators or what do our listeners get out of this and first and foremost what listeners get out of it is new new information information that you didn't have before one of the reasons why you pick up an educational podcast is because you don't know about something you want to learn more about it so what you get by plugging in your headphones and listening to it is new information and there are so many people out there who have expertise in passion and all number of little niches that can all on their own be you didn't even know that you wanted to learn about but if you plug it in you will learn new information about something that you knew nothing about before and I think I am I'm possibly a bit of a podcast enthusiast on this front but I find the world to be full of a lot of noise television I find to be full of a lot of noise you know the 24 hour cable news the signal-to-noise ratio and 24 hour cable news I find to be disappointingly low if I could be diplomatic about it I think that the signal-to-noise ratio in podcasting is quite high because most of the time the people who are producing shows especially educational shows are oftentimes getting to the point here's here's what the topic is and I'm going to explain it to you here's what here's what something you didn't know about and I'm going explain it to you and so in your life where we are often surrounded by just a cloud of informational bright noise a podcast can cut through that and give you really rich pure signal and I don't know about you guys but my brain often craves pure signal I want information I want new information I mean I am you know I mean johnny-five the robot from short-circuit I don't know if that is now officially too old of a reference to make probably it's a good movie I watched you like two years ago it holds up really well it's actually pretty funny so we have this I think podcasting has this fantastic signal-to-noise ratio where you're getting new information what are the other things that a listener gets out of listening to a podcast I think and I'm gonna use a swear word right now be prepared but it turns the shitty part of our lives into awesome parts of our lives and what I mean by that is where do we listen to podcast the most most of the time it's like commutes right when you actually have to physically move your body from where you live to where you work there is nothing character-building about a commute there's nothing great about a commute nobody likes commuting nobody likes being stuck in traffic or standing on an overcrowded subway I don't I don't think anybody does you would have to be a different sort of person to be like yes commuting I love it traffic is great so when you are and then but the other things not just commuting but doing chores I listen to podcasts when I'm when I'm doing the dishes you know like I'm doing chores all of these sort of the mechanical drudgery of our lives that we have to do to maintain ourselves to actually make it to work so we can have this oh they give us these little bio survival tickets that we can turn in and exchange for food and rent and things in order to do that we need to suffer through this these parts of mechanical drudgery often these things involve using our hands or using our bodies so we can't sit down and watch a TV show or a YouTube video we it's even sometimes hard to read a book you know even if you're on the subway reading a book can be difficult but you can always put in headphones and listen to something and if you discover podcasts that you are interested in that you are excited about you know people I put my shows out on Sunday night and I have I've gotten plenty of emails from people that say to me that the Monday their Monday morning commute used to be the worst part of their whole week you know getting up on Monday morning and driving to work is traditionally really terrible but people say but now I have this new episode back in the day it was the history of Rome now it's revolutions I have a new episode of revolutions to listen to and instead of this being one of the worst parts of my week it has become one of the best parts of my week and I think that that is a profoundly cool thing that we are offering to people that we are taking these parts of their lives that are not so great and this is me too you know I'm talking about myself to the parts of my life that aren't so great and now I get to listen to cool new interesting things and then podcasts also being a sort of uniquely it's a it's a uniquely intimate media audio is like when you have somebody actually talking in your head it's a it's a different experience than even listening to a band play music or certainly watching a movie or a TV show as much as you might love a TV show or a movie there's always something that separates you from what you're watching and there is something about listening to a podcast that plugs you into this community that plugs you into the show and if you listen to like a panel show where there's like two or three people they're getting together every week to talk about something new like when you start listening to that you just feel like you're sitting at the table with them but these people are your friends like others my buddy there though we're all gonna hang out together and talk about whatever proper football or talk about baseball which is often what I'm listening to and so you get to create there there are communities that are then created that connect us to each other that connect listeners to the people that they're listening to then when I come out and I come to something like this people just walk up to me and they say hey man we painted my house together so thank you very much I ran a marathon with you like okay great so now can I check ran a marathon off my bucket list because I don't think I'm gonna run a marathon just on my own or I did a cross-country Drive and you were with me the whole way like like as producers we get to participate in people's lived experience and as listeners you get to have somebody who's like they're along for the ride with you who is like a really well-known um a friend of yours basically who is explaining to you often very interesting things because I do believe in the signal-to-noise ratio brilliance of podcasting so that's what we get we get to have a sense of community we get to bond with each other and that connects you know life in these modern times can be isolating it can be alienating and I think that podcasting can and does help break through that which segues into the last piece of this which is ok I get something out of it as a producer I get creative fulfilment I get a sense of accomplishment I get to learn all these cool things as I try to explain them to you and listeners get new information the crummy parts of their day are not good parts of their day we have we have a community that has now grown up and is that good for society to have all of that going on I sure think so I think it's great to have people walking around feeling creatively fulfilled and walking around with a sense of accomplishment I think it's great for people to have taken the crummy parts of their day and made them good parts of their day I think it's good for the mental health of individuals out there and I think it creates kind of a psychological and emotional like buoy for us as we go through our lives you know life life has its ups and downs and I think that on the whole the role that podcasting plays in the role in the life of both producers and and listeners is as a flotation device it's not an anchor man I don't think podcasting is like it there's like a chain it's not LED boots that are dragging us down to the bottom it's a buoy that can hold us above the surface that's great for society I think it I think it creates a healthier and happier Society I also think just in general I work in in history specifically but this is this is roughly true of any educational any educational field or any educational topic is that everybody walks away better informed and I often think more reflective in your daily life because if you learn something new you normally don't just I mean maybe Johnny Five did this is just learn something new and in his data banks his data banks it's the age data banks but normally when you get new information whether you like it or not whether you think you're doing it or not you're often gonna wind up then reflecting on what you were just told you're gonna turn it over in your brain and you're gonna hat you're gonna be much more used to taking in new information and reflecting on that information and I think that that habit of reflection is again really really good it I think it I'm gonna say it I think podcasting makes better citizens I really do and for me you know I work in history as I said I think that even if you don't you know even if I hand you a test on the Roman Empire right now and you can't necessarily pass a test on the Roman Empire if I say you know who came you know after Decius and you might say I don't remember I think that the fact that people if we as historians if I need to speak about history for a second if we have historians can expand the timeline that people are living their lives if you're not just living this life that is like if it's more than three months ago it's ancient history and if it's more than three months from now it's so far in the future we can't even think about it if we can expand that to where you're now placing your life on a timeline that you know 2,000 years ago things were going on right just remember that 2,000 years ago things were going on that have an influence on where we are today and I when I go to like let's say like a National History Museum wherever like in Europe and you go the early parts of those are usually chronological and you'll find these like fish hooks or spear heads and they'd it's marked like oh yeah we found this it's a hundred thousand years old this blows this still blows my mind and they're like really good they're not crummy fish hooks they're like really well-done fish hooks like I was I was in Copenhagen at the Copenhagen national they pulled them out of a bog they're really good a hundred thousand years ago these things are being made and that alone just expands and enlightens my own mind just contemplating life on a scale that big I won't bring the geologists into it because any time I get off on like a hundred thousand years ago was such a long time ago there's always some geologists it's like yeah man no it's not four billion years ago as a long time and then to wrap this up the I really love the symbiotic relationship between listeners and creators and the fact that as creators were listeners and I think that as a listener I think you should be thinking about what can I do how can I contribute to this body if anybody tells you you shouldn't start a podcast because all there's so many podcasts you should just start a podcast that's what I think and it's like telling somebody they shouldn't start a band because there's so many bands out there alright nobody ever says to somebody ah there's so many bands you shouldn't start a band like you start a band if you want to start a band you should start a band too that's also very creatively fulfilling and it gives you a sense of accomplishment all this works for starting a band too in case you're wondering so I love this mutually reinforcing symbiotic relationship between listeners and creators and I think it again it helps all of our emotional health to be here participating in all of this so so when we ask the question what is the point of all this I will I'm just going to read this paragraph I wrote because I've honed my craft and so I want to get this exactly right what is the point of all this it is about podcasters creatively expressing themselves in some area where they have a unique and special expertise or passion they get a feeling of creative fulfillment self-expression and a sense of accomplishment this creates a wonderful variety of information streams for listeners out there to choose from an array of very strong signals that people can pick up and listen to that will enrich their own lives with new information overcoming the mechanical drudgery parts of their day and finding them and placing them inside of a community this all works as a feedback loop that makes everyone on both sides of the process a little bit better than they were before which I feel can only lead to an improved more connection more connected and hopefully more thoughtful society and that is the point of all this thank you very much [Applause] how the techniques very used to teach people history both offensively and as a discipline okay so my how can how can the techniques of podcasting be used to work to to better disseminate historical knowledge to people so one of my passions is I mean obviously if you've listened to the history of realm or even listened to revolutions you know that I'm working in a sort of sub-genre of history that is historical narrative right I love history as storytelling when I was in the fifth grade I had a I had a teacher when we were doing American history for the first time who would say like just sit there and I'm gonna tell you a story about how these guys came together in stage this revolution and what happened at Yorktown and I'm just gonna tell you this as a story I think a lot of the times especially like in high school they will I don't want to you know say anything to mean about like football coaches out there football coaches are often put in charge of social studies or history and they're working from a from a list that says they need to know these dates and they need to know these terms and it often feels very disconnected and just some just some bits of information that you need to learn for a test more then also more richly and robustly is there can often be themed attic elements of history where you're talking about one particular like the role of labor in some over some long period of time and I think that people often get unfortunately they get turned off to history because they don't really find a way to get into it for the first time like what's gonna get you into it for the first time it's gonna keep making you wanting to come back and I think that that can be accomplished by telling really accurate and enjoyable and informative stories about the past because everything that has happened up until now really is just people doing things and if you just explain to people this is I mean when I wrote you know when I'm writing about the French Revolution Ellucian people like this is so good and so fantastic it's like yeah well all I'm doing is telling you what happened you know I didn't I'm not making you know I don't have to you know think anything up I just have to tell you literally what people did and I think that the the material is inherently interesting to people and I think that that can be the way that we get people who might be standoffish towards history into history is through narrative storytelling which podcasting is I think really truly uniquely suited for all of them petered out so I quit the history of Rome famously does anybody know that that I quit the history of Rome some people were around when I got to Marius and sulla Solo is about to march on Rome for the second time and I think that now the lingo for it is pod fade where all of your initial enthusiasm that had carried you forward sort of Peters out and runs dry that initial burst of enthusiasm that you had this is like I don't know maybe 30 episodes into it because the thing is I was really into the Punic Wars at that time and I had covered the second Punic War in all of its glory and then as I moved past that I just sort of at each episode became a little bit harder to put out and a little bit harder to put out and then at one point I just stopped putting out episodes and like everything else that I had ever done with my drawer full of novels that are 1/3 finished you know songs that I've written that have an initial verse and chorus but I got two more verses to write and I didn't write two more verses for him it was just another thing that I started and then quit and after I think it was about seven months of not doing it that there was just this voice in my head that was saying you should go back and finish this like you should do that like this that was a good thing that you were and you shouldn't leave it unfinished you shouldn't walk away from this again feeling like you just quit something and so I went back and I picked it up and if you listen to the history of Rome there's an episode where I say it's been a while I know because I was just picking back up where I left off and that moment it was honest to god one of the greatest decisions I ever made non-family division right because like meeting my wife and asking my wife to marry me that was like a really good decision restarting the history of Rome non family decision or non family category was the best thing but I think I could have done because I did I don't know when the feeling came but it was sometime after I quit but before I started it up again where I felt in my heart that I was doing something wrong by leaving this unfinished and when I did come back after that it was like I had a permit like it wasn't a second wind it was just a permanent wind and I never then putting out episodes just became a part of the rhythm of my life and it's very it's very weird and abnormal if I don't have a show to put out it's just a part of my daily lived life now and I've never felt pod fate about revolutions and so I think that I think that's the answer is that first of all you should you should know that I did quit the history of Rome one time and I did come back to it and I think that's probably why the second thing I think of when I think what did I get out of this is like a feeling that I accomplished something after setting down so many different things in person before and I'm a big believer that any subject is better taught when it's engaging when it's interesting and and when there's a human element brought into it I know that I had a student when I was helping at an after-school program who missed their day on the beginning of the Roman Empire I gave her your podcast and said if you don't like it come back let me know we'll talk about it and then she asked me for the second episode ringing endorsement from a high school student I just dropped this on but how do you find that balance between getting the full context and the depth of a subject but also making it that engaging thing where a person doesn't feels like they can get it and is enjoying that experience I think that part of that one thing that I have tried to do from the very beginning is never talk down to my audience like I will never treat the listener as if this is something that they like I say right now like I'm working on trying to explain this really complicated thing to somebody and that's a part of my creative process but when I actually what I actually produce and what people are actually listening to I rarely say all right if I don't even think I've ever said this now this is gonna be difficult and convoluted and you're not you're not getting this is gonna be too hard for you probably so just tune out for five minutes I think that if people are I mean the word you could use is challenged but if you just talk to anybody like they're capable of understanding something there's a part of their brain that will be like whoa what oh okay yeah sure I what's dust this part of my brain off because people are often talked down to people are often led to believe that that something is too complicated that they can't understand it that they're not capable of understanding it and I think unfortunately a lot of childhood experiences and in high school we are often walk away feeling like stupid that we can't do something and I don't think that that's true and so I will always and I will always write material for the listener so that when they're listening to it they don't get the feeling like I'm talking to them and I think that I you know I would have to look into like a psychological study but I got to think that that has something it connects to their ego a little bit that yo this person is talking to me like I'm a person not like I'm less than them and I think that that invites them into the process and it invites them to be like yeah I can do this I can learn more and so I do think in all walks of life right like I think that it is really important to not talk down to people because I in the grand scheme of things the intelligence difference between like you know what you would call a dumb person which is like a really subjective term anyway in terms of like IQ and some genius-level IQ the difference between the low end of the spectrum and the higher end of the spectrum in any given you know nervous system sack of water that is wandering around on the earth compared to like literally a rock is very small like a rock is really dumb it doesn't matter how much I try to invite a rock into the process of learning about the Roman Empire the rock is just gonna sit there it's not gonna get it trees I don't know there's entirely possible we might figure out a way to explain the Roman Empire to a tree but not a rock but a human being like the difference between what you would consider to be low intelligence versus high IQ in that very arbitrary constructed way I think is so miniscule that we should never treat anybody like they're dumb or they can't get it that's my answer yeah there what are these similarities I do I don't think you know humanity's quest to find and identify this thing called human nature has always been a very fraught business right anytime you're like I think I've got it I think I've got a piece of like universal she in nature like here in my hand there's your always the anthropologist then are gonna come in and say like nah man I'm sorry we found a group of people who don't exactly exhibit the behaviors that you just said are gonna be universal human behaviors but that said I do think when it because I'm often time talking about political history right I do think that there are commonalities to the way that humans behave we need to eat we need to find food right we need to drink you need to find water when it's cold we need to find warmth when it's hot we want to go someplace cool and those sorts of things do create common drives whether you're talking about the Romans or whether you're talking about ancient Chinese history or whether you're talking about modern day just contemporary events there are commonalities to how the biological organism that is human needs to respond to its environment and I also think that there is an array of sort of emotional faculties that do recur over and over again there is love people fall in love right people are attracted to each other they fall in love and they have babies there is jealousy right that's a thing that pops up there's hatred that pops up there's joy and laughter these things are found everywhere I'll bet that if you go back a hundred thousand years to some cave in France that they were swapping jokes I bet there was laughter back then laughter is something that you find everywhere so there are these things and then of course when I'm talking about political revolutions in the Roman Empire there is this sort of Nietzschean will to power that is not necessarily universal in every single person but it's going to show up in just about every society and those people who feel that will to power and domination then wind up at loggerheads with each other and that's kind of the story that's the political history of humanity that you are if you're talking about politics and human politics and how we govern Society going all the way back I'm you know if you look at what chimpanzees get up to in Africa you know one of those chimps has got a will to power over you know whoever the Alpha chimp is at this moment and they get into a tussle that's something that reoccurs so much that I think you can get very close to saying this is something like human nature that does occur and I think because we have these sort of basic emotional building blocks and biological urges that we do sometimes combine and recreate patterns of behavior and certainly you see patterns of behavior in revolutions and you know I saw patterns of behavior when I wrote the storm before the storm you know what was happening then yes reminds me a little bit of the contemporary United States and not in a good way but also to all the various revolutions that I studied I do see similarities between them so so I think that will and that will continue to happen as long as there are human beings I think that these things there will be laughter there will be joy there will be love there will be hatred there will be probably unfortunately dishonesty somebody's gonna tell a lie where you know there's an ax there's an old philosophical discussion of like if we colonize the Moon or Mars how long will it take for a murder to be committed on Mars there's never been a murder committed on Mars but if you put people on Mars eventually one of them is gonna kill another one there's that that exists - are there any it was that was that joyful enough I tried to talk about the joy in the laughter I mean come on in the love it was all a part of it in the very back in the very back Am I am I gonna do cultural stuff for the history of realm anymore or in no I have to explain the Russian Revolution between now and the summer of 2021 it's gonna take every fiber of my being to condense that down I can't stop for Christmas Lenin didn't stop for Christmas let him kept going when it doesn't give a about Christmas oh I can't either that is true and I made a decision at one point that I was going to focus all my time and attention on writing the script and recording that script and there was there was quite a while that I was I was doing a lot of labor-intensive map making for the history of Rome and I was doing it in revolutions too and yes that stuff I would really what I should probably do is like hire somebody to do that for me but I can't hire somebody because I'm just this like one-man operation but most of the time most people are listening to it again in their car or doing you know you're you're listening to a podcast in part because you can't sit down in front of the TV and watch something and watch a youtube video so I do put just all my time and attention and effort and energy into making the narrative and the script as good as it can possibly be rather than trying to peel off and additionally create a bunch of visual material to make it an audio-visual experience because most of the time most people are experiencing this as a purely audio exterior of course it's yeah I got a lot of feedback from people they would say like okay pull up your map and you can follow along and they're like I'm stuck in traffic man I can't pull up the map like well you're referencing a map I can't look at so my answer is that basically I focus entirely on the audio and the visual stuff has completely dropped off this is this is this a back way of asking me if revolutions just radicalize me everybody's oh it's you seem to have been radicalized by revolutions okay I have been reading a lot of anarchism lately I think there are there are things that I haven't changed I'm still the same person I was when I went into this in 2021 there are definitely parts of my understanding of the world that have changed significantly since I started doing the history of relman and revolutions I mean I've been at this for 12 years it would be it would be a profound tragedy I think if I I don't know how many books I've read for these shows how many hundreds or maybe I'm touching a thousand books to have read all of that and then walk out the other side of it be like yeah I'm basically the same person I was before I mean that would that would be that would be a tragedy so it is it is hard to like pinpoint because all these things happen very slowly over time I can say I know this for a fact that I have changed a lot after having done the Haitian Revolution in particular like the the what I think about the world before I did the Haitian Revolution and what I think about the world and the United States and the Atlantic world in general a since I've done the Haitian Revolution that was a very large there was a very large tumbler that fell into place that opened up my eyes to a lot of different things that opened up my eyes to a new understanding and appreciation for what the history of the world actually is not just a history of the world as I received it as a child and as somebody went through high school and went through University missing a story that is one of the most profoundly important stories that has ever happened in human history and to not really know anything about it and then to know everything about it I mean I really do feel like that opened up my eyes quite a bit and I'm sure that's what that's one example that I know that I can absolutely point to there's probably a million other maybe not a million maybe like 900,000 different little things that I don't even necessarily register as something that I'm differently about it now but I know that I think differently about things now and again if I didn't think differently about things after having read all of this then I am NOT doing it right and there's so much attention deficit with social media and the amount of information we can gather do you ever feel like the work you do has any what's the last word has any advocacy to it I haven't thought about it like that I do think about it in terms of I do have I do feel a sense of responsibility in terms of how much I want to get everything correct and right when I'm putting this out there into the world because there is a lot of slapdash material or just straight-up inaccurate material that is out there on like YouTube right and so I can't change the whole world if I could I promised I would I promise I would make things better if I could but I can't so all I can do is control the work that I do and the work that then I contribute into this thing we call like in the capital D discourse and as long as I'm putting out good compelling factual information that people listen to the at least part of their day is filled with something that is compelling and factually accurate and it will enlighten them about the history of the world as opposed to just being more bright noise or fake news or fake information or just a walloping pack of lies that are being dumped on our heads like every single day out this happens to me too I feel like whatever that little contribution that I can make that there is a mixture that is out there and all I can do is just create my little part of it adds to the mixture of let's have this be honest and true and about a process of actually trying to understand the world we live in rather than the other side of it which is let's say whatever we want to try to manipulate reality to get something selfishly out of this right which is I think where all of that super quote-unquote fake news is coming from is a desire to manipulate things for your own advantage I'm not trying to manipulate anybody here for my own advantage I am trying to all I ever wanted to do was just explain what happened that's it cuz I give you that dough we'll do what we got um I like the difference between how I express myself in the book versus the podcast was as much was more stylistic in terms of I do I did feel like I had to write in a different than a slightly different voice for the book than I do for the podcast it was a little bit more formal it was a little bit clearer and simpler as opposed to the podcast which is just like a little bit more informal and has you know more jokes in it because I do think people need to laugh along the way but my my focus has been like the one of the roles that I think I fulfill is there what the interpretation that you're talking about oftentimes people will come into history as a discipline or history as a subject and there is a lot of thematic explorations of theory right there's a lot of theory there's a lot of philosophical stuff and what people feel often is lacking from their understanding is just the brass tacks of what actually happened right who did what win right I don't like when did ropes beer do what like it this isn't about just well you know who how does a ropes beer fit into the French Revolution in the course of national history what role does he play is he a good guy is he a bad guy like all that stuff you can find that in a lot of places and what I think that I'm have been trying to provide and what I keep my focus on both in the history of Rome and revolutions you're always going to get who and what and win and then I will do the why in the how in order to explain people's motivations or or put this in some kind of context but mostly what I want my listeners walking away from is an appreciation is is an understanding of the basic skeletal framework of who and what and when and if you have that basic skeletal framework of who and what and when then you can go back and you can read things that are more focused on theory or interpretation or trying to analyze critically analyze on a piece of history and then you be like oh yeah this person's talking about you know the rivalry between Danton and Robespierre I understand that I'd listen to that guy's show that was like there was like 15 episodes about the relationship between rokesmith was I don't think there were 15 episodes on the rest Jim yeah there were a lot so that's what I'm trying to do I am I'm always like at the beginning of a week I am always trying to ask myself who who did what win right that's what I'm trying to get across to people so that you have that narrative framework that then you can build all of this additional interpretation that you want to do and of course you know like I my voice I'm gonna have my own interpretations are slipping into this my own biases are going to be slipping into this my unconscious or conscious but that's always my focus that's why I'm always going to give you names and I'm always gonna give you dates and if you say there's too many names and too many dates I say suck it up we're learning scales and you can't write music until you learn your scales we're gonna wrap it up right there thank you very much [Applause] you [Music]

Channel: GBH Forum Network

Views: 5,952

Rating: 4.8333335 out of 5

Keywords: Boston, WGBH, Mike Duncan, Sound Education Conference, The History of Rome, Revolutions, History, Podcasts, Radio, Listening, Creativity, Purpose, Culture, Craft, Harvard Divinity School

Id: 4Rglq2TkKq4

Length: 50min 30sec (3030 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 31 2019