Full transcript:
Tracy: Hi, and welcome back to Episode 10 of Results May Vary. In our last episode, we spoke with Bestselling Author and Co-host of the Dear Sugar podcast, Steve Almond about how you can design your creative practice and live a more deeply examined life. Today, we're talking to fishmonger-turned-award winning podcaster Mike Duncan, best known for The History of Rome, and his latest endeavor, Revolutions, which is a weekly podcast series examining great political revolutions. His upcoming book, The storm before the storm, will examine Roman history between 135 bc to 80 BC, with special attention given to the question, if America is Rome, where are we on the historical timeline? In this episode, we talk to Mike about how you can design the past to engage more people in our shared human history, as well as to gather insights that are useful for us to design our future.
Why don't we just start off by you telling us a little bit about yourself?
Mike: My name is Mike Duncan. I've been a history podcaster. Now for eight years, I started doing The History of Rome in 2007, July 2007. I did a whole run of episodes to cover the entire history of the Roman Empire from beginning to end, which took me five years to get through. And I took a year off and came back and now I'm producing Revolutions full time, which is a show that focuses on great political revolutions in history. And I've done the English Revolution, the Cromwellian era, the Protectorate, of the American Revolution and then I just wrapped up a huge cycle on the French Revolution. And I'm taking a break and in a couple of weeks here, I will be back to cover the Haitian Revolution, which is the first and really only successful slave uprising in world history.
Tracy: You haven't just done these things, but you've delved in with the most extreme detail and care and have turned your passion into a really successful career.
Mike: Somehow, yes, I have done that. It definitely started as just a hobby. I think almost all podcasters initially start out as I have something I want to do, I'm passionate about something and I'll just do it for the love of it. And it was a good two years before I even put up a button that allowed people to donate money to me. I had a full-time job. I was just doing it on the side. I didn't really need to get into it. I didn't think it was going to make much money to begin with and then things just started piling on. I was able to take advertisements, we've done listener tours, which Tracy you may possibly remember that we do.
Tracy: I think I remember. Yes.
Mike: We had an awesome trip to Italy.
Tracy: Yes. So, Chris, I actually met Mike in Rome, right? We were in Rome to start off the tour. We went to so many different places. But I was trying to remember where the beginning was.
Mike: Yeah, we started in Rome and ended in Istanbul.
Tracy: Yeah, it was amazing.
Chris: The perfect person to travel with, Tracy, the author of knowledge.
Tracy: Well, and the great thing was, too is that Mike was so inspirational that my husband had been thinking about doing his own podcast. And I think that the two of them together, meeting Mike and kind of hearing his story inspired him to start following his own path down to ancient history.
Mike: Yeah and famously one of the ideas that I had for what I was going to do with the show after the history of Rome was to go into the early Mesopotamian civilizations, it was just one of the things that I was kicking around in my head and Scott took it. Scott had the idea first, he’s like, I want to do this.
Chris: Mike, can you take us back to the origins of your passion for history? Where did this all start?
Mike: I've been a huge history nerd from the time that I was just like a kid. It's always been there. I would just read encyclopedias, but I would skip all the science. Now skip all the hard sciences, not really super interested in but like though just an encyclopedia entry on the Roman Empire, on the Mayans, every biography I could get my hands on, I would read and I just inhaled this stuff. Like there was a whole period of time like I'm kind of a comic book nerd too but I had as much fun reading like the encyclopedia, they had, like the Marvel Comics, encyclopedias, and I had as much fun reading those as I did the actual, like comics themselves. And then when I went through school, it was all for political science and philosophy, but those are heavy doses of history. If you're going to study Political Science, so I just kept getting and getting and getting it in my head. And that's just been what I've been focused on really, practically my whole life.
Tracy: I was just gonna ask them what happened after college? What did you decide to do with that or not?
Mike: Well, after college, I was fairly adrift. I think that I graduated and made it all the way through to get my Bachelor of Arts. And then I came out on the other side and was like, oh, now I have to like to find a career. And as I was just in my early 20s, that's when I fell into reading all the ancient Latin and Greek histories, which I was just reading for fun. So it's like the Libby and Polybius passage. So I was just reading these and reading these. And there are so many good, interesting, fascinating stories that are buried in these old texts that nobody reads because it's impossibly dry. If you pick up the early history of Rome, unless you're super into it, it's gonna be hard to read the whole thing. So I was like, I can take these stories, pull them out, kind of put them into more modern language, and release them as podcasts. And I can get this information that is out there that is so inherently interesting. But there's a barrier to it, because of how difficult it is to actually read through the text without falling asleep.
Chris: You've just scratched on something that I wanted to ask you about early on in our conversation is, it seems that America at least is not all that interested in history. And you've just alluded to a little bit of why. And it seems like you're in this very cool position, which is to make it more interesting and engaging and tangible. Can you talk a little bit about why you think we have such a resistance to history as a learning platform or inspiration platform?
Mike: There's probably some deep-seated American psychological thing, because like, I have a lot of fans in the UK, like in Britain, and they're all kind of naturally inclined towards history in a way that Americans aren't. And it is possible, you know, we came here to the new world, and we're always looking towards the future rather than the past. But just on a kind of a nuts and bolts level, I do get a ton of people that tell me, oh, history was just my least favorite subject in school like I hated history. And I think it's just because so much of it is, here's the name, here's a date, there's no context for it. Here's a name, here's a date, memorize this, memorize that so as they have like the football coach teaching it. It's a place to stick, I don't know, not particularly passionate teachers. So they're just reading out of these textbooks. And so it becomes incredibly dry missing completely, that history is storytelling. History is one giant story that tells everything that's happened up till now. And I think as soon as you start looking at history, you start telling history as stories instead of as facts to be memorized. Suddenly, the whole thing comes to life. And like you say, I'm in a good position here. Because I'm so passionate about all this stuff. And I'm so interested in it that I'm just going to have my enthusiasm, carry you with me, and before you know it, you're sending me an email that says I had no idea that history could be this fun and interesting, thanks.
Chris: Yeah, amazing.
Tracy: Yeah, I wondered about that. I mean, if you could design your perfect history class, maybe even just for younger kids to get them started, what would that look like?
Mike: Well, part of me getting into history, to begin with, I think I might have actually had that was I had the fifth-grade teacher. And fifth grade is, I think, probably still today is when they start rolling out American history. You do like a big American history, push in the fifth grade. And she would say, put your books down, put your paper away, put your pencils down, just sit there and I'm going to tell you what happened. I'm just going to tell you stories about what happened. And that just all on its own, made it fun, made it more captivating when you didn't have to like be under some sort of pressure to learn it right then and there. She's just like, just sit there. And I'm going to tell you what happened. And that I think was a great way to approach introducing kids to history for the first time. Because if you just start throwing numbers at them, it's like it's this weird discombobulated version of math.
Tracy: Yeah, absolutely. I can never keep the dates in context. Once you get beyond into World History. It's like, yeah.
Mike: And I personally have a knack for holding names, dates, timelines in my head, so it all comes pretty natural to me. But if it doesn't, then yeah, like who knows what came first, like the Articles of Confederation. Or the Stamp Act like which happened? Like, who knows?
Tracy: Well, what I love about what you just said for the perfect classroom is it doesn't take a lot of sizzle. Like, you don't need a lot of things in the classroom activities or whatever. It's just you can be a good storyteller. And that in itself can be enough.
Mike: Yeah, and it lets the kids engage it with their imagination, too. Once you start going overboard with audiovisual stuff, trying to make it more flashy, more bells and whistles, you kind of lose a bit of personal connection to it. Whereas I think what my teacher did was just here's an audio story. This is probably where my history of podcasting comes from, it's like that class. You allow people to use their own imagination, and then they start having a personal connection to it. And so they just become interested in it on a deeper level.
Chris: I read some stat recently that the world's information knowledge has, in the last two years, disseminated more than it has in the last hundred and 50 years. Just by the tools, we have the access to information, where do you go to dive deeper into history? And how do you find the historical truths? You know, I think a lot of history is hard to decipher what was a myth? What was real? What was the story? And what was the fact?
Mike: Well, I go to old dusty books. I actually just got in Madison now. And, you know, just as a citizen of the state of Wisconsin, I'm allowed access to the University of Wisconsin's library system. And so I can go, and all of those, like, sort of academic monographs that are written for academics by academics, which are even more boring than reading but they're so information-rich that I can go through all of those. And I'm a popularizer in that sense. So I'm able to go through all of these historic graphic arguments about the French Revolution, or about the meaning of the merchant class, vis a vis, the taxation of the 1760s, and pull it out and use it as a basis for trying to tell a straight-line story. When it comes to like, you know, separating myth from reality, that's just an ongoing conversation that you need to have, that all historians have amongst themselves. And then I did this a lot. So often, like in The History of Rome, I would use some formulation of you know, there are two versions of what happened next, or there are three versions of what happened next door, you know, here's the story the Romans told themselves. And here's what kind of guessing might have actually happened based on archaeological evidence or coins. And really, it's just a matter of trying to be upfront with the fact that we can only know so much from the sources. And some of it is conjecture, and some of it is filling in the blanks. And I think as long as you just talk openly about what we know, and what we don't know, you can get rid of a lot of myths that way.
Chris: You've created a really interesting platform for people to engage in history in a whole new way. I'm wondering how your podcast is reframing how they think about history. So in other words, what's the story of your listeners' story?
Mike: It ties back a little bit to the people who went through school and history was so boring for them. And they didn't like history. There's a whole chunk of people out there who are using podcasts, and then other things you can find like YouTube, other medium stuff on the internet to fill in gaps that they had, that they feel that they had in their own education growing up. So they're adults, and they're like, wow, I don't know anything about what happened, I emerged as a fully grown adult, and I know nothing about what happened, so they come to like history podcasts. And there's now an extremely fertile and great history podcast universe out there, that if they want to fill in the gaps, we are kind of there for them, doing it in a way that is accessible to them in a way that obviously, trying to learn it in the past wasn't particularly accessible to them. So I get a lot of those people that are trying to fill in gaps in their knowledge. And they're like, thank you for doing this because I never would have known this before. And you've actually made it comprehensible to me. And then there's, of course, just the other side of it is the people who want to inhale all the history that they can find all the time. And these are my people. I have also been able to make connections with my people from all over the world, which is fantastic. So I get to sit around and have these really interesting conversations with people that are sitting in Australia and Britain or you got like ex-pats living in South Korea that want to have a conversation about what was going on with Cromwellian 1663 that's really, really fulfilling.
Tracy: Yeah, I was gonna ask about your tribe or your community because it seems like this is a solitary pursuit going, reading the dusty books, and then recording your podcast and you do it all yourself. So what are some of the ways that you connect with people? Are you actually scheduling conversations? What does that look like?
Mike: Well, no, a lot of it is just by email. So people will email me questions, then I'll get on that. And then I have just now, after, however long Twitter has existed, I finally got onto Twitter, like two months ago. It's so silly, I'm at Mike Duncan, come find me. But now that I'm actually on Twitter, all these people have found me and now I'm yeah, I just have a running conversation going with people about history and current events and intermixing the two and it's been great.
Tracy: That kind of brings up we lived into it a little bit before with the History of Rome tour that you ran. But there are other ways that you've been engaging your audience. And I'm wondering if you wanted to talk about those a little bit.
Mike: What I do is write the show and put it out and write the show and put it out and write the show and put it out. And so my level, like the relationship that I have with the fans, is a lot of it, just putting out the show like a clockwork forum every Sunday night, so that every Monday, a lot of them will get up on Monday morning and see what they listen to on their commute. And so when I go away for a week, if I have to take a week off, or like right now I'm on hiatus, I get these great tongue-in-cheek emails from people that are like, you bastard, I got up this morning, I did not have an episode to listen to you suck it back to work. Like I just had another baby, I need to take care of the baby. So a lot of it is that I'm a podcaster who somehow made a living in whatever new digital media. I've never been particularly great at social media, like social networking. I mean, I've just now gotten on to Twitter. So my interaction with the audience has primarily been emails, some comments, and then just me putting up a show for him every week so that I'm always there. I'm just a part of the routine of people's lives. That's where I want to be anyway.
Tracy: And how do you think I mean, you kind of joked before, when we first contacted you about it, you didn't intentionally design this as your lifestyle at all. How do you think that happened, that you're able to do this, because so many people out there are starting podcasts, and they're hoping to be able to sustain themselves in some way or supplement their income? What are some of the things that you think you were able to do successfully to make that happen?
Mike: Well, I think part of what I just said, is a part of it. When I started back in 2007, I had two basic ideas that I was just going to cling to. One of them was I was going to put the show out on time, like whatever. And I said Sunday nights, that's when the show goes out every week. And I hit that deadline. Because so many podcasts and this is true. Even today, it happened back then and it happens all the time, where people start with, oh, this episode was late, or I got distracted. And so I didn't have time to put this one out on time. And I think that makes it difficult to build a really regular following a really regular fan base. I think the really successful shows do operate on a kind of a professional basis in that way. Like you don't have network TV shows come out and say, Oh, we didn't do a show this week, how we're gonna run an infomercial, instead of like the latest episode of Game of Thrones, they don't do that. So that was one thing that I really wanted to focus on was just hitting my deadline being there. So like I say, I become a part of people's routine. The other thing is, I don't mess around with anything. But content, right? It's an intro to the show, like intro music. And then I just start talking about whatever this week's topic is. I don't like to mess around a lot with talking around the show or talking meta stuff about this. I like to do interviews like this, so that I can actually talk about the meta stuff because I don't talk about it on the show at all. It's just Intro music. Here's this week's show. Outro music. That's it. And I think people appreciate that. I've gotten a lot of good feedback at the beginning, which is like, I really like it. You just go right in for it. You know, there's no sort of chit chatting around at the beginning of the show.
Tracy: We don't do chit chat. We just got into the interview. We do chat at the end.
Mike: The end is a good time to chit chat. And I do listen to a lot of podcasts. And there is a lot, you know, the first five minutes, I just feel like, hey, you should just cut that right out. And yeah, get cut to the chase.
Chris: Mike, where's it going for you? Where do you want to take it?
Mike: Well, just a couple weeks ago, I signed a book deal with the public affairs press to write a book about the Roman history about the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. That's about to fulfill a lifelong dream of mine, which is to write a book. That's something I've always wanted to do. From the time I was a little kid. So it looks like it's finally going to happen. So yeah, right book. I'm hoping that the book is successful. I can write another book. I want to keep podcasting. I want to keep doing it. I've listened to or said we're going to go back to Rome in the fall of 2016. We're going to go on a trip to Italy, and then another trip to Spain. So I just want to keep doing those because those two words are the most compressed fun that I think I've ever had. Because it's usually really smart, really nice funny people who are really passionate about history. And then we just go around and nerd out on the stuff that we all share a deep passion for because otherwise, you wouldn't be on the trip. So the tours are great. And then in the future, like, who knows, there are others, there's TV, there's just doing stuff like video-wise on the internet, I don't really know what the next step is. beyond that. And then after that, take over the world.
Tracy: Well, you'll have all the keys to the kingdom, because you have history as your guidebook?
Mike: Right. I can say, all my mistakes will be new, I'll make new mistakes, and will at least be making the same old mistakes that we always seem to keep making.
Chris: I just realized, I don't know that we've referenced the name of the podcast yet. I just want to make sure people know where to find your podcast and what its name is.
Mike: Right now, I am Revolutions, revolutionspodcast.com. So I can be found on iTunes, Stitcher, any podcasting medium, I'm about to be on Google's, whatever they call it as soon as they launch it. So I'll be on. There'll be an android app that you can get it for. And then on the web, I am at revolutions.podcast.com.
Chris: Great, you talked about this starting as a hobby, and then ultimately, it transitioned and became a livelihood. Can you take us a little further into the history of Mike, around that time when a lot of what the premise of our show is about is designing the life you love, and people really struggle with where to start and then how to evolve? Can you take us into the context of your life when it was switching from a hobby to a much bigger thing?
Mike: Yes. So I was working as a fishmonger. When I started the history of brown, I was cutting and selling fish at high-end retail supermarkets. And that's what I was doing for the majority of the show. When I started getting some ad revenue, I was able to cut back to part-time. And that was actually a really nice balance in my life. Because I was doing the fishmonger gig, which I kind of kept purposefully because it required no brainpower. I'm in my late 20s. At this point, I'm married, by the time that the show actually starts making a little bit of money. But I didn't really want to get into a job or a career that was going to take up a bunch of, for lack of a better word, my brain space, because my heart and my soul was at that point then completely in The History of Rome. So I would go to work for eight hours and cut fish and come home smelling like fish and go to work on the show. And then we moved I was living in Austin by then, I started the show in Portland, then we moved to Austin and then after The History of Rome, we moved up to Madison and part of the deal in moving to Madison was I was not going to look for a job, I was not going to work for any job, I was just going to try to make podcasting work full time. And it's been two years, I've managed to make it two years without falling on my face. So who knows what the future holds on that. But so far, it's going well enough that here I am, two years later, still just doing it full time.
Tracy: How did that feel? When you made that decision in the move? Like what were some of the emotional things that you were going through or questions you're having?
Mike: Sheer terror because we had Elliot, he had been born by that point, he was one. So I had a one-year-old, and we were moving to a completely new city. I was also transitioning from The History of Rome to Revolutions. And I think a lot of what made The History of Rome successful initially was that people are just interested in Roman history. So somebody who's interested in Roman history naturally goes online, they look for a podcast about Roman history, they find me because, for a long time, I was the only thing around when it came to Roman history podcasting.
Tracy: Well, and you're the biggest.
Mike: Yeah, it's still a thing. You know, it's like when it comes to the world of Roman history podcasting? Yeah, The History of Rome is a big thing. So are people going to follow me over to Revolutions? I basically walked away from a fairly massive fan base and a fairly successful show, because the time had come to wrap it up, it felt like a good natural time to conclude the show when I did it. So I didn't know if people were gonna follow me two revolutions if it was going to be successful. You know, it wasn't how much if it was me how much of it was just a natural interest in Roman history? Am I going to be able to keep making an ad? Is there going to be ad revenue? Is podcasting even going to exist? Like, is it just going to fall apart? And instead, what happened is podcasting has become even more popular now than it's ever been? Whatever happened kicked it over into like a really mainstream awareness of what podcasting is that it really the medium really got a shot in the arm, which got helped me out a lot. Because I've been around for quite a while. So yeah, and I'm still terrified, right like, I'm terrified right now. How I'm going to keep it going, because it's not a job that has a steady paycheck or any kind of sort of promised security, it's just, am I going to be able to sell ads? Are people going to donate any kind of money? If I do a fundraiser is anybody going to want to buy what it is that I'm trying to sell to keep the show going? So it's just it's the life of, of any kind of person who's just an independent. I, technically, I guess I'm a small business owner now. But not, I don't feel that way. But any kind of just independent entrepreneur, it's, it's a lot of it is just sheer terror. And that's a great motivator. You probably know this, that fear is actually a fairly exceptional motivator.
Tracy: Yeah. I wondered, what are some things that you might do or put in place to help you deal with that terror? How do you feel that and do it anyway?
Mike: I focused on the work, I think if as long as I'm putting out the best product, the best show that I possibly can put out, there's really nothing else I can do. So I just focus entirely on making the show as good as I can possibly make it. And if it works, it's going to work. And if it doesn't, then it was never meant to, but at least it was the best that I could have possibly done with it. So that's where all the energy and focus goes, when I start to, you know, when I'm lying awake at night, like God, I hope this works. Usually, I'm pretty motivated the next day to like, really put out a good show this week.
Tracy: So you said that the book deal that you just got was about kind of the fall of Rome. And I thought that another piece of that was also looking at current history and drawing conclusions or making hypotheses about what's happening now. And I wondered if we could talk a little bit about that, like how history applies to the current political situation?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, it's a really dangerous game to get into any kind of like, serious, historical analogizing, because everything is different from everything else. But there are some parallels, there are things that you can look at. And if you're not studying history, try to learn something about the present, or I have this little formulation in my head where you study history, to make decisions in the present that will make the future a better place. Why else? Are we studying history? Otherwise, it's just an academic exercise with no real-world application. So I do think that their mining history and trying to figure out times when it was like this before, what happened? What are some of the things that went well? What are some of the things that went wrong? And then just try to do it a little better than they did it? I mean, why else are we in this game? So when I look at, say, Rome, in the United States, for Rome, and like the industrialized West, I don't think we're anywhere near the fall of the Roman Empire. But there are some things that are going on, at the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. And so we're like, we're way before Caesar even, we're nowhere near Caesar. But there are things that are similar that we can look at, without being like, Oh, this is I get laid, it's not some Galeon thing where there's a force of history and like, it's we're literally in some science fiction universe, where history is repeating itself.
Tracy: One of the things that we do in the design process is to look at analogous industries' fear in healthcare, there was an example where they were looking to redesign the ER to be more efficient and save more lives. And so they went to see a NASCAR pit crew to watch how they handle high-pressure situations and get things done speedily. So I think, yeah, I totally understand that it's not the exact same. But I think, yeah, there's so much there to mine to help us make sense of what's happening today.
Mike: Yeah, it's an entire civilization's worth of experience. So I do think that that's where you want to go, that's a really good example, right? Because then somebody would say, Oh, well, there's not a car involved. So how can they possibly be the same? Like, well, you know, step back a little bit, look at sort of the bigger chunks that are moving around. And yeah, go from there. So I'm, in part, yeah, writing a book about the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, which is the period from about it's really after 146, after the final defeat of Carthage and the conquest of Greece, through the dictatorship of Sala. So again, we're in the generation or two before the actual fall of the Republic.
Tracy: And what are some of the lessons or things that you think that people could keep in mind today as they're trying to figure out the landscape of current political situations? In regards to Rome specifically, or just in general? I think just in general, just historically, is there anything to keep in mind?
Mike: I think that one thing to keep in mind always is the likelihood that what is happening right now has never happened before or somehow crazy different than some other thing that has happened in the past. That's probably not a trail. Like all that is old is new again. I think practically every single thing that we are hearing right now, like at this very moment, I mean, we're having a conversation right now about Syrian Refugees, and whether or not they can come into the United States, like, we have had this conversation before. We've had this conversation before, many, many times. And it's really super easy to go back and look at some of the things that we said, I go, Wow, why are we acting like this is somehow completely different than all the other times. And there were Jewish refugees trying to flee from Nazi Germany when there were Italians who were accused of being like radical unionists and anarchists. And we can't let them into the United States, because they're going to destroy our civilization. You can look at those times, and then look at today and be like, wow, maybe we should actually act on the fact that we know that this has happened before, rather than trying to pretend like this is somehow new when you need and oh, my God, this is unlike anything that's ever happened before. It's like now. Now it's happened before?
Tracy: That makes me wonder, shouldn't there be more of a role for historians in the political landscape?
Mike: Yes, absolutely. I agree.
Chris: And the design landscape, Tracy, I was just thinking, as you pointed out to analogous industries is, what a great source of inspiration for anyone, including a startup to say, let's look back in time, who's had a similar challenge to this before? What are they trying? What can we learn from analogous parts of history in another place? It's just a fuel cell of amazing inspiration and content and watch-outs. And like you're saying the context always changes. And it's definitely not the same situation. But you can certainly glean a ton of insight from it.
Mike: Yeah, it's never the same. And so it's always really easy to say, oh, no, but this time, it's different. But yeah, like you just step back, look at the larger pieces in play, and things will fall into place a little bit. And yeah, and if we're not using our own history to try to guide our actions, then we're just this disconnected bubble floating around. Right? That seems very silly to me.
Chris: As a modern historian, when does history start? In your mindset is, when's the starting point of looking back? Is it yesterday? Is that the 70s? Why? When do you say like, Okay, this is where my time starts in terms of looking back?
Mike: Well, I have a very large timeline that I work off of, which is one of the reasons why if somebody tells me like, Oh, that was 50 years ago, you know, people need to get over that or that's 50 years ago, that was ancient history. Like, no, no, that was a week ago, last Tuesday, in the grand scale of things. The project, the civilization that we're living in right now. I mean, it goes back to settled agriculture. However, many 10,000 15,000 years ago, that was Scott can tell me, because I hate what is theirs, I stopped studying it. But yeah, it goes back to settled agriculture. And then before that, so much of this is just Pac, mammalian politics that probably can find its roots in the jungles of Africa, when, before we even become bipedal. Like there's probably huge chunks of our behavior right now that can be gleaned from just looking at primate behavior. It all seems very similar to me, I think that explains trout 90% of what we're up to, is just primate pack behavior. So it goes back to basically the origins of life. It would be my answer. That's what history goes back to.
Tracy: So that's like, around the 70s.
Mike: Yeah, around the 70s.
Chris: And my question is, up until when? So when do you become either a little bit more disinterested?
Mike: So when does something happen when we are far enough away from it? Okay, so there's a great quote from Mao, I think, somebody asked him, what was the impact of the French Revolution? And he said it's too soon to tell. So what is history? Right now, kind of pre World War Two seems like you're moving into a very historical time period, as opposed to like, more current events style. And then the other probably big breaking point that we'll see eventually will be like the end of the Cold War, that'll probably be the next sort of, as we look back the next day, there probably is like a closed historical circuit between the end of World War Two and the collapse of communism in the early 90s. And the further on we get, we'll start marking the early 90s. The 90s are going to be like this weird interregnum between the fall of the Berlin Wall, and at least in America, 911 that will open up a new epoch, probably historically, once we start drawing these lines. But we won't actually be able to draw those lines for probably 100 years. But that's my guess that's when it'll happen.
Chris: When in all of your readings, do you ever see yourself in it? Like if you could put yourself back into any point in history? Is there a place where you'd say, Oh, I would love to live at this time in this place with this going on?
Mike: It's a pretty brutal, smelly, disease-ridden world humans lived in for a really really long time. I think what we have is pretty good right now. We're living better than and like any Emperor ever lived. We have all human knowledge in our pockets at all times, like this is insane. You know, like in the Roman Empire, the golden age of the anti-Knights was really great. But most of those people were just hardscrabble peasants farming, dying of childhood illnesses. The past is not a particularly pleasant place to write.
Chris: Yeah, you make me smile. When I think about things like the trend of the Paleo diet, for example, it's like no, actually, you're not eating the way that people ate in that era, you're just kind of convincing yourself that you are. So you must get a laugh out of some of these historical references as well but just have no relevant context.
Mike: Yep.
Tracy: Cool. Is there anything, any last thoughts that you'd like to leave our audience with? Or anything that we didn't ask you that you expected of us?
Mike: Oh, probably. I plugged the book, right?
Tracy: Yeah, plug it again.
Mike: As long as I plug the book. The book is going to be called The Storm Before The Storm, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, then in about three weeks, or I don't know when the show is going to post but I'll say December the sixth, I will come back and start doing the Haitian Revolution, which the Haitian Revolution is one of the greatest stories that people have never heard, like, nobody knows the actual, like the process of what happened in Haiti. We're not aware of it at all. Some of it is probably purposefully that we sort of, for a long time, just ignored what was going on down there. But we've been talking about reading history, and then looking at current events, reading through the history of the Haitian Revolution, and then turning around and reading about contemporary American politics, like, man, we are locked in to a series of decisions that were made in the 1700s, that has really affected all of how our society has stratified itself in the last 200, 250 years. These were actual choices that people made. And so I'm gonna talk a lot about that European colonial policy in the new world, and then especially in Haiti, created the framework within which we live today. And so this is one of those things people say, Oh, well, you know, why haven't we just gotten over it yet? Because we really rigidly rocked ourselves into it. And it's really difficult to untangle ourselves from it. So come back, we'll talk about Haiti. It'll be a great story.
Tracy: See, you just made history sound super exciting to me.
Mike: I can promise there, I would not have wanted to live through the Haitian Revolution.
Chris: Mike, thanks so much. This is really fascinating. And I can't wait to drive the listeners, including myself to your podcast to check it out. And just have a new way of thinking about history in a way that's much more story-centric and exciting.
Tracy: And I'll be seeing you on the next History of Rome tour.
Mike: Yeah, come to Spain.
Tracy: Sounds good.
That was awesome. I knew that he was really successful and all that he's done with his podcasting work. And I was really curious to hear how he approaches it, both as a lifestyle, but also just how he designs the past for people.
Chris: Yeah, I think it's so new and fresh to just hear, it sounds like a contradiction, but just to think about how a new and fresh approach to history, and how so many people are turned on to it. I hadn't thought about it for a long time. But the way that we deliver history is broken. And so it reminds me of Khan Academy are these new ways of introducing material that's a lot more compelling to different learning styles. And the fact that he brings the story in a compelling way with a lot of passion as well, you can just hear it is really new and different and fresh. It's also cool to hear that that's happening on a very modern platform, you know, known as podcasting. It's like blending the very old with the very new.
Tracy: Yeah, I know, I was thinking, I mean, for schools where you do have that dispassionate history teacher, would it just be better to have some curated podcasts to do that storytelling. I mean, the one thing I was really interested in was the fact that his teacher didn't have all these hands-on activities, or building things or time traveling back, it was just simple storytelling. And the power of that is amazing to me.
Chris: And I also appreciated his point of view on that classic, you know, don't let history repeat itself is that the context is always going to be different. But you can glean some insight from the past. That's really helpful. Yeah.
Tracy: And I think that actually matches what Kyra Bobinet was talking about in one of our previous episodes about how you design for this thing for groups of people, and it's really it's about the individual designing the best thing for themselves. And your point about looking to the past as analogous examples to design against I think we tend to focus on recency and don't understand or take advantage of all of the knowledge that we have from the past. And that each one sort of lends itself to this new context. Like you can look at that and apply it in a new context.
Chris: Yeah, and just looking at how other people, we talk a lot about constraints, their constraints for people's individualized design, like time and energy and family responsibilities and career and money. And but when I look back and say, well, let's look at someone who had a design breakthrough, where they had even less time, even less money, even fewer resources, and use that as fodder for both personal inspiration, but whatever it might be a startup idea, or a business idea, or just innovation in general. Yeah. So I think that's really fascinating. I also just love there's certainly a bunch of patterns emerging around people moving from hobby to suddenly this becoming their full-time scenarios, such as Andy with the Martian, and even Kyra and her shift and what she went through and man, Jessica, and Aaron, even Aaron, just kind of going into the bandwidth just embarking on it. So I think what's interesting about that is no matter who we talk to, no one ever says, it didn't cause me any emotional strife, there's always fear. And the fact that he talks about that fear being there even now is interesting, or as he wonders what the future of podcasting is, and he's not on stable ground. And I think that despite the fact that from the outside, it looks like he's on incredibly stable ground. So I think that people having comfort with that fear, that's just sort of always gonna be there seems to be a big takeaway, and to lower the bar is to just do it in a smaller way. So his idea of what we can learn from is sending the podcast out Sunday night, no matter what, I love that this is like a guiding principle that kept him chipping away at this thing.
Tracy: I know, you're right. We haven't created a regular schedule yet. But when he said, not putting out the Game of Thrones on time, I had a very visceral experience. I was like, no, that is not acceptable.
Chris: Or, like, you know, the evening news comes out and Anderson Cooper just says, like, you know, we just didn't get it done.
Tracy: We're still working on it. Well, that was another amazing, insightful episode, where I just, I feel like we're meeting so many amazing people, that the thread that runs through all of them is that they're doing things that they love, and designing their lives to be what they want it to be intentionally, sometimes not always, but that we can learn so many lessons from them. But I love that they're all in such different industries and have such different interests.
Chris: I agree. And I'm also impressed by the backgrounds of people that we know. And we didn't go into much detail, but you're, I'm just picturing you and Mike and Scott walking around and just did to history, some of the best in their field just absolutely geeking out as you're wandering down the streets with them. Super fun.
Tracy: That was kind of how it was, it was more than I mean, there were probably about 15 to 20 people on that trip. And so I had always wanted Scott and me to go to Italy together because I'd spent a summer there when I was younger in college learning Italian and so I thought, oh, it'd be so romantic to go with my husband. And yeah, I was like, just looking around buying gelato, I think I brought my camera so that I could focus on taking pictures to engage while they were talking to deep, deep history. It was still a wonderful trip. Totally glad that I did it. But yeah, they're just there on a different level.
Chris: Which is somebody who's a black belt, you're like you can't go in and say something like, can you tell me the history of the Colosseum, they all just roll their eyes like, really?
Tracy: I like thinking of them as historical black belts. That's about right. All right, that's a wrap! Thanks so much for listening. Our dream is to build a community of people who can create and take advantage of any opportunity that interests them. To do this really well, we'd love for you to participate. Try out and share back your own life design experiments. Or if you've already got a great story of how you've designed your life, we'd love to hear from you on our Facebook page, or resultsmayvarypodcast.com. Our website is also where you'll find show notes and links to all the things we mentioned in the episode. And if you wouldn't be so kind, subscribe to the show, and share your favorite episodes with friends. that'll let even more people start designing their own lives. A big thanks to the folks who helped us make the show possible. Composer and filmmaker HP Mendoza for the results may vary theme music, graphic designer Annessa Braymer for our logo, David Glazier for sound mixing, and team podcast for editing. And of course, thank you so much for listening to Results May Vary.