If you’re thinking back to an old Three Moves Ahead episode then good on ya mate!
To each their own, and if I was as knowledgable about history as you seem to be, I would probably agree with you. But I find his passion for the subject matter, if nothing else, to be very entertaining.
It is, and I agree with you. He is a great storyteller. But as someone who is (a) much more interested in academic history, and (b) questioning of the premises underlying a lot of the same academic history, I find the breezy generalities that Dan Carlin uses to advance his narrative to be very annoying.
It’s true he enforces the “skepticism 101” course over and over.
I appreciate his instinctive grasp of things that goes over the head of a bunch of people much less dilettante than he is though, and I enjoy being confident that I’ll learn something about periods of history I am not familiar at all with, with little fear of being fed bullshit. It’s kind of comfortable, as a skeptic!
I find people using the “like” word, like, every other word in, like, all their sentences much more annoying, personally. Those are everywhere in podcasts!
I love Dan Carlin but boy are the podcasts ever spaced far and few between. What does he put out now, like one every nine months? (Admittedly, they are the length of a small audiobook, but even still).
I assume you haven’t listened to him in awhile since you don’t like his podcast, but do you have any examples of this from episodes you have listened to? My history podcast bandwidth is higher than my history reading bandwidth these days, so I’m always looking for additional perspectives that can help me listen a little more critically to these podcasts.
My experience with this episode was sort of like LeeAbe’s, although I finished it. I was warming up with the initial ruminations about Chainmail, Kriegspiel, etc., and then the interview was a hard turn into discussing a game, abandoning the type of historical perspective that I thought had been building. I guess my expectations were off because I was hoping this would be a quick audio version of the Playing at the World book, and he seemed to be interested in the history of increasing fidelity of group combat simulation.
Regardless, I don’t regret the time and I’m now subscribed to this Addendum feed—thanks for posting this!
I have to admit to being a fan of HH. His LONG mutip-episode arc on the WWII war in the east was my companion on some long cross country drives. Dan says up front that he is not a historian, as in a scholar. He just does a ton of research and goes from a lot of resources (and he’s quick to point out when a resource is likely not completely accurate, such as Churchill’s writings on WWII or certain Greek and Roman writers.) But I appreciate his attempt to try to help people get a feel for what it was actually like to be a British or German soldier at Verdun, or a person from the west first facing the Huns in battle. I have a basement packed full of history books that I go to for detailed historical accounts from scholarly (and not so scholarly) points of view, and I find HH very complementary to these.
I’ve still got the last two episodes of that series saved up for the next long drive I take by myself. I also have found that a lot of the non-academic history stuff I’ve been consuming lately has been very much into bringing things down to a personal level. Tides of History is another podcast that does this frequently, up to episodes that invent a character and walking through what their imagined life could have been like. The ACOUP blog has been linked to several times on this forum(it’s how I found it!) and he really likes to dig into the lives of the non-elites in a period as history is largely written by and focused on the elites of a time and society.
My favorite episode of Hardcore History is still the first one I listened to. Episode 48 I believe, Prophets of Doom. In it, he expresses a lot of frustration that he can’t actually generalize the situation enough from the story he’s telling to a more general observation about humanity, but in the end, that’s what endears me to that episode is that it’s a little known incident in history that I haven’t heard about from any other place, and it’s a really fascinating story that Dan tells really well.
Of course, after I heard that, I went back and listened to all of them. In the latest one about Japan and the Atom Bomb, I only heard the first episode, I need to catch up. And I still have to find time to finish 2.5 episodes of the King of Kings.
I can picture the airplane seat I listened to this episode from. Definitely one that stuck with me for the same reason that it was something I was completely unfamiliar with.
That was a fantastic episode, one of his best. It was do cool to find out that Hanks is a big HCH fan.
I haven’t listened in a long time, so I don’t recall specifics, but I do remember that I was very put off by the “origins of the First World War” explanation.
So, there was this guy Archie…
That Tom Hanks episode is indeed a good conversation; thanks for mentioning it. It got me wound up to watch Greyhound again, too.