As time went on I’d been confronted with additional sources and arguments, not least from my listeners who argued very generously with me, considering how blatantly wrong and ignorant I was. Thankfully, when it came time to tackle the July Crisis again, I surrounded myself with the best narratives and analyses of the war I could get my hot little hands on, as I attempted to do some desperate and frantic reading in the weeks before our project began. Before long, confronted with the reams of new evidence and the logical shattering to tired old arguments, I started to sweat a little bit. Pretty soon it became abundantly clear what I was facing into. Not only was about to take on the most challenging project yet, but I was going to craft it from the ground up with no completely clear conclusions, no fully formed opinions and a belief system which in many respects turned out to be false.

The palpable nerves and hesitation you can hear in that Introduction episode were all real – I honestly didn’t know, right up to the point that we finished, whether we would be able to make it or if I would be able to even wrap my head around everything that happened in the allotted time. As time went on of course, I came to mature greatly in my views. By the end of the whole project I had a deeper sense of what had gone down in summer 1914, and it was while armed with this knowledge that I contemplated using what I had learned to somehow make the whole process of doing a dissertation easier. The September after I finished the project was when my masters began in UCD, and so I entered that new chapter in my life at least confident in my abilities to take on and create complicated, challenging projects, and bring them to life for my listeners. Little did I know exactly what I had started…

#1: I had no idea it would be the making of When Diplomacy Fails

If the July Crisis was a watershed moment in human history, then the July Crisis Anniversary Project was a watershed moment in the lifecycle of WDF. Before I began the project I had a general idea of where the podcast was going and what I had in mind for it. By the end of the project my scope and vision grew alongside the absolute flood of positive responses to what I had done. I remember having some time to relax in Wexford for a few days after the project had been finished, and thinking to myself that it had all gone surprisingly well, all things considered. By doing what I said I was going to do and taking the project on and finishing it satisfactorily, I think I opened some eyes and of course some ears to what I was capable of.

From that point on I knew that whenever I returned with the podcast after our break, I would have the project behind me, but I would also have the expectations of my listeners behind as they waited to see what I could do next. Had I only realised how much new attention I received in the interim I would have made proper use of it and maybe tackled the Second World War or something really crazy like that, but instead I was more like ‘Oh that’s cool, people really seem to like it, now what obscure war can I cover next?’ It was so typically Zack, but it wasn’t exactly the best way to cultivate new listeners.