How did you get into journalism?

I actually got started in high school, so I’ve been doing journalism as long as you’ve been doing journalism, or as far back. I went to college and was a history major, and when I got out of college I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and I ended up working at a news station in Los Angeles and the history degree actually came in handy for working in journalism, there’s that old line that journalism is the first draft of history, and a lot of the news people that I worked with and that I really respected had been history majors. You know it’s funny, sometimes you get on these life paths, and you start going down it and it wasn’t anything I thought when I was a little kid that this is what I wanted to do, but you turn around and you’ve been there 10 years on this certain path, and that’s sort of how I got into journalism and other opportunities sort of sprung up from there.

So you’d say that your history degree has helped you a lot in your professional life?

Yeah and I think that runs counter to what a lot of people think, people think history is a degree that’s a little like philosophy or art or some of those things where there doesn’t seem to be much practical use for it unless you’re going to go into teaching, but I’ve found that its really helped organize my world. I have an opportunity to give a lot of context to news stories, and an idea of how things got to be the way they are, and so yeah, I’ve found it to be absolutely invaluable.

You worked in radio news for a number of years, correct?

Actually I was a radio talk show host when I was in radio news, yeah I had a three hour a day, five day a week talk show on and off for about 15 years.

Why did you make the switch from broadcasts to podcasts?

Well for years people in the audience Id spoke to suggested that we get out of radio. Radio had changed a lot over the last 15 or so years and it wasn’t quite as fun or as interesting as when I got into it. Luckily, a high tech guy during the high tech boom in the 1990s said he was going to invent a way to do my show on the internet, so I joined his company and we started working on lots of stuff – this was before there was podcasting – and eventually when podcasting came around, we had been looking for something like that for a long time, and originally when we started I kind of did the same show I was doing on radio, but I did it on podcasting, and eventually we saw the creative ways we could use this, and this history show idea came about, and it was a wonderful way to exploit the new technology, it’s not a show I could have done in radio.

Do you think that originally people were supportive of your decision?

Well I think the people in radio, my co-workers, thought I was crazy, but I was a lot younger than many of them. When I was in radio I was about 27, and the other talk show radio hosts were all in their late 40s, and those people when I talked about doing things on the internet, they didn’t really understand what that meant. Even today when I go talk to the people I used to work with, my old colleagues, who are still older than I am, they still don’t understand the podcasting and how it works, so they did think I was a little crazy, and they were rolling their eyes at me, but I sort of had the last laugh with that.

How long did it take for you to gain steam in terms of gaining new listeners?

You know the funny thing about it is that we never had a good idea for what a good number was. The first ever report on how many people were listening, and this was in 2005 so there just weren’t that many podcasts out there, and I think the number was a little over 1,000, and I thought that was pretty decent, but at the time nobody knew what a podcast was, and I remember thinking all the time, wouldn’t it be great if we could get this many people, or whatever the number was, and sometimes we would see a nice quick growth to that number and sometimes we would hit a plateau where it seemed to be hard to get past a certain number for a while, but once you get, and I don’t know what the number is, but once you get a certain number you reach a kind of critical mass where it becomes easier to kind of go viral, and I’m not quite sure what that number was, but I remember the hardest part was getting from 0 to 1,000, I think nothing was quite as hard as that.

Could you trace specific booms and busts to certain events?

Absolutely, and it was more we would get some publicity or we would get some exposure on something and you could kind of watch the numbers tick up, i remember doing appearances on peoples radio shows and stuff probably back in 2007 or 2008, and you know you could watch the numbers move, and the funny thing is now with as many listeners as we have, it takes a lot to notice the numbers moving, but when we had 5, 8, thousand people listening it didn’t take too much, because if you got 4-500 new people because of a radio show you went on, that was a noticeable uptick, now a 500 person uptick we wouldn’t be able to measure very easily.

What was the biggest single boom in listenership?

I’d say Joe Rogan, going on Joe Rogan’s podcast was a big help, I don’t know if it was the biggest one we ever had, but it was certainly big.

What do you think of the state of journalism today in the age of new media?

Oh I think it’s awesome, obviously, and I think it corresponds to journalism losing a lot of what made it so valuable, so I think as we watch journalism get taken over by fewer and fewer major companies, and when I say journalism I mean like the old line journalism. It’s so important that there are other avenues out there for information to reach the public, and what’s really strange is that anyone who is a blogger or a podcaster has an ability to reach a public that only a network used to reach. I mean, and I told someone this the other day, in radio in the old days in the United States the ultimate promotion would be to get a job say in New York City, which is the number one media market in the country, but if you told me today you were going to give me a job in NYC it would seem like a demotion because right now. Because of podcasting, my shows reach all over the world. When I was in radio, every radio station used to have a map with a little transmitter on it, and you would see this ever widening band of circles that would show you how far the signal at the radio station would reach, but with podcasting there is no limit to how the signals could reach. If I do a show about Iran, when I talk about Iran on the program, there’s going to be people in Iran who write me about it, and so that gives me the same power that an NBC has or an ABC has, and that’s pretty much unprecedented in human history. Now do we have as many people listening? No, but there’s no barriers to prevent us from having that. So this is the whole media landscape shifted onto its head, and we’re still very early into this. I mean this is what’s happened over the past eight or nine years, what’s going to happen in another eight or nine? We had none of this eight or nine years ago.

If you were to guess, would you say that in the future we’d probably see more of this sort of thing; do you think it’s working?

Oh yeah, I think it’s absolutely working, and I think now not only will you see more, but I think if the growth continues the way it is I think you’ll see some entities be very large entities indeed, I mean we’re not NBC or ABC yet, but how much growth do you have before you have something like that? I mean I joke all the time, and I always use CNN as an example because CNN’s actual viewers are so small when you realize how much they spend on production and everything else, we have a lot more people listening to our history podcast then listen to CNN, which is crazy to me, and again it’s not so much that we’re so big but the fractioning media has just torn apart the audience of these companies. When there were only three networks when I was a kid, those three networks split up the audience’s time, now there are hundreds of networks competing for the same listeners or viewers, so everybody has a smaller amount, which opens up the door for people like us. We have three million people who listen to the podcast, which was a very small number 20 years ago for a television station but now it’s not.

Speaking of CNN, you say all the time that if you had control of CNN you’d change the world, if I gave you control of CNN, what specifically would you do?

Well I think you’d stop focusing on titillating stories, and you start focusing on trying to uncover news. There’s a leaf among some of the executives in the news business that it’s not cost effective to do investigative reporting, where you send someone to go uncover big news, I mean like the famous Watergate Story from the early 1970s, I mean the classic chase of investigative reporting, but that takes a long time, and uses up the resources of a lot of people, and the executives think that it’s much more valuable to take that news reporter who would be working on that one big story for a long time, and get him to do three stories a day, but you can’t do three really good meaty stories in a day, and you sacrifice one for the other, the efficiency of trying to have more people churning out more work sacrifices the really good juicy stories but the thing is when you get your hands on a story like Watergate, or when Glenn Greenwald got the Edward Snowden story, that generates such incredible interest and so many spin off stories that it ends up justifying all the work you put into it. So if I took over CNN, I would revert back to trying to uncover real, original, investigative reporting, and I think people are intensely interested in that, and what’s more I think it has a subsidiary effect that helps the whole democracy. That’s when the press begins to play its constitutional role as the watchdog.

Of all the mainstream news sources, which do you think is the least bad?

I can’t view single news sources one way or the other, I judge them more on a story by story basis. Sometimes my favorite news sources are online, sometimes they’re foreign, I like the British newspaper The Independent, I check all of these sources out every day. I read the New York Times, I used to like the Los Angeles Times a lot, the point is on any given day you can get a really wonderful story out of someone. In terms of who does consistently good work, I’m not sure there’s a lot of mainstream news sources that do do consistently good work, but I don’t think that’s a realistic standard to hold anyone to so I take the stories on a sort of a la carte, case by case basis.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that foreign newspapers are consistently better than American newspapers, would you agree with that?

I think if you made me choose one way or the other it would depend on the foreign newspaper, but I certainly notice that I go to a lot of foreign newspapers to double check and triple check, but they have tabloid media everywhere, they have biased media everywhere, and one of the wonderful things about looking at multiple sources is that you get to compare and contrast and it allows you to three-dimensionalize news stories, if you’re just getting your news from one source, you’re kind of at the mercy of that one source. One of the wonderful things of the internet is that it allows you to say, if you find a story that’s interesting to you, to read multiple versions of it, see how different news writers frame it. One of the other sides in news these days is that so many places piggyback on top of so many other places that sometimes at ground zero on a news story everybody is taking their information from the same reporter, so in the old days, say if you’re taking a story from the middle east, you would have multiple newspapers and multiple TV stations who had news bureaus there, so you would be able to get four or five or 10 separate accounts from people viewing the same story. As a cost cutting measure, now you’ll have one reporter on the scene if a bomb explodes in Damascus, Syria for example, and then everybody is basically getting their news from that same individual. If that one individual slants the story at ground zero, everybody’s reprinting that same slant. When I was reading news as a kid, you would have been able to have multiple versions of that story. Now the downside is that you didn’t have an internet to simply click a button and see them all, you would have had to actually buy multiple papers, which I used to do when I was in news, or make sure you switched back and forth between multiple TV stations. So you give some to get others I guess.

What is the process of making a show?

It differs for the two shows. Common Sense, the political current events podcast, is certainly easier and much less in depth and I think I can sort of collect materiel and think about it and draw more for it, and do it relatively easily where you walk in the studio and you kind of discuss these things, not off the top of your head per se, but it certainly sounds a bit more like that, whereas the history show is huge. I mean it didn’t start this way, but it has evolved into a huge project with lots of reading and lots of recording. So to me that’s become much more like a movie in terms of amounts of effort we have to put into it, where the Common Sense podcast is still I think more like doing a blend of a radio talk show and a written news editorial. For me, because it’s not quite live, and it’s not quite unedited, but by the time we put it out to you it’s the way we want it to sound, just like how these editorials are written. By the time the public reads them, they’ve been crafted and edited so that the person who wrote it is giving the audience exactly what they intended. When I was live on the radio, sometimes you said things that were not very well thought out because somebody’s talking to you at the same time, or you had people in the studio, or you’re waiting for this ad to come up, or a million things that I remember on the radio, wishing I could more accurately craft what I was doing so by the time the public heard it, it was really what I wanted them to hear. So that’s what I love about the podcast, we really have the ability to say when we put it out, this is what I wanted you to hear, it’s not full of revamping or me trying to focus while 25 things are happening in the studio, this is really a production crafted to sound like it does, and the history show is like that on steroids.

Do you have to remake a lot of material for big productions?

Well there’s no script, so we don’t write anything. But what I’ll do is I’ll go in , and we’ll cut a chunk of it. I mean if we’re doing a four hour show a chunk might be 15 or 20 minutes, and then we’ll listen to that chunk and decide, is that the best I can do? Or can I go in there and do a better job? Were there any mistakes? Were there any historical inaccuracies? When you’re not writing a script sometimes your mouth goes off and does what it wants to do, and usually you go off afterwards and you say, wait a minute, that’s not right, so when we make mistakes we correct them. I used to say that when I was a talk show host, I was a really fantastic talk show host two days out of the week; the only problem was that I was on the radio five days a week. But if you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, or you’re not in the particular mood to talk, or you’ve got a cold, or whatever, it can really impact the way that you sound. The wonderful thing about the podcast is that you can walk into the studio and do 15 or 20 minutes, and you go oh god, I know I can do a better job than that tomorrow. Like in golf, if you do poorly today, you say ‘I’ll do that tomorrow more concisely’ or ‘with more energy’ or whatever it might be. So what’s wonderful is the ability to take those two days out of the five that I used to be a pretty good talk show host and I make sure you only hear those recordings. You don’t get to hear me on my worst days.

How do you research for the history shows?

First I start with topic that I already know a bunch about, because there’s no way to learn enough in the period of time that we have to make it sound like you know what you’re talking about. You have to start with something that you already have a foundation for, and then you build off of that. So for the last history show, I know a lot about the First World War, which is the topic we’ve been tackling for awhile now, so I think I’ve read 50 books, and that’s 50 books on top of the books from the old days, so I went back and read some books from the old days, but obviously there’s a lot of materiel that’s come out since I was last deeply engrossed in this, and so what you’re doing is building on top of that foundation you used to have to make sure your information is current and to get multiple perspectives, so you’re not just getting, for example, works by Americans, you’re getting a chance to read things from other countries and different views that let you three-dimensionalize the story.

What do you think your favorite source you’ve ever used?

There are history books, and then there are primary sources. Primary sources are stuff written by people who were there, and those are always the most unbelievably moving, and then there are history books, like there’s this book I’ve used for this history series we’re on now by a guy named Peter Hart, who’s a wonderful historian, and Peter Hart often sprinkles his books with lots of primary source quotes so he’ll be talking about an event and all of a sudden he’ll break away and you’ll hear a paragraph from someone who was there. Those are always the most jarring, because it’s an abstract thing to hear somebody who’s actually writing, like some of this stuff is diaries, and you read what people were writing while their under, for example, an artillery bombardment. That’s very powerful stuff, and while I love reading the history books also, it’s hard to top the stuff from the people who are living the experience while they’re writing about it, so the primary sources were always my favorite materiel. One of my favorites and one that I’ve used in more than just this latest show is a guy named Ernst Junger who wrote a book called Storm of Steel, and that’ s always extremely jarring to read his accounts of First World War encounters, and he’s such a good writer, and he experiences it so viscerally, I mean that book’s been read by generations of people, so those are the kinds of things that not only do I find moving, but those are the kinds of things that really hit the audience.

That’s something that I’ve noticed about history is that people really don’t change

That’s supposed to be what makes history valuable. History doesn’t really teach the kind of lessons that some people think they do, like you watch some of the news programs and you’ll hear some talk shows or somebody saying, well, you can’t appease dictators, we learned that from the Second World War. Those are the kinds of lessons history really doesn’t teach, because what that taught us was you can’t appease Hitler. It doesn’t mean you can’t appease some other guy, I mean the variables change all the time, but what doesn’t change are human beings. So we tend to be the part of history that history can teach us something about, not specific situations, but the fact that the human condition remains relatively stable going back all the way to caveman times. The variables change, the costumes change, the tech changes, but the individual human is pretty consistent.

What is your favorite response you’ve gotten to one of your shows?

I don’t know, that’s a question I would have to think about, I mean to be honest, I’ve been overwhelmed by all the response. Most people are so positive and so enthusiastic that I’m just bowled over by it, and so grateful and surprised that I couldn’t pick out individual responses, if you go to iTunes and you read the reviews people write, it’s just humbling. I couldn’t pick out one, the whole thing just knocks me over. The entire response that people had to the work is daily shocking to me, so I couldn’t pick out one particular thing; id say the fact that people like this as much as they do is incredible to me.

How would you describe your shows to someone who has never heard of you before?

I think I might have changed that description over time, but I mean like now I think the history podcast we do right now is like an audio book. We do a dramatic retelling, a very detailed dramatic retelling of historical events, mixed with kind of twilight zone type musings and these weird views of history’s weird ideas that pop into my head that we work into the story and the people seem to like. I’ve always called them history major ideas because those are the kinds of things I used to talk about with other history majors, we’d have lunch together and say isn’t it weird that this happened? Wasn’t this guy interesting? We’d have these little debates, and those are the kinds of things I try to bring into the show, and I think that’s the part that makes them unique, because these are stories that have been told not just by lots of other people but people who in many cases are more qualified to tell them. What I bring to the table that makes them unique are my own little spins and my own little weird views, and what I think about them. When we started the podcast that’s all they were, we didn’t used to give you narrative, we didn’t used to tell you the story, I just used to give you the weird stuff, and assume that the people that were listening already knew this story. Part of the reason the show isn’t 15 minutes anymore like the very first episode was is over time we realized that the audience needs to get a little more background to enjoy the strange twilight zone musings. So we moved from there to give the audience as much as they need to enjoy that stuff. Of course now we have this thing that it evolved into, which was nothing that we ever planned. You’ll find that that’s like a lot of things you’ll start, you have some idea on paper and then as you do it more and more it kind of crystallizes and embalms and takes a path that maybe you never intended it to take, and say if you watch your favorite TV series maybe and you go back and watch the first episode, it’s not really the show you like yet. It has to grow into that a little bit, and that’s what happened with the history podcast too.

What do you think is your best show or your favorite show that you’ve ever done?

You’re asking the wrong guy, because when I go back and listen to anything from like two weeks ago, I always think of all the ways I could have improved it. So my favorite show is always the last show, and sometimes it’s the next show. I’m hyper critical of my work, so when I go back and listen to something six months ago all I hear are the mistakes and the things I can do better, and if you had given me a year I really could have made it better, things like that.

My personal favorite was the Prophets of Doom episode, it was also my first episode, and it really got me hooked

If you heard that you’ll notice I put a little disclaimer at the end saying I wasn’t happy with it, and the reason why is it’s such a great story, and I had been holding on to that story for a long time. When you start with a story that’s that great, it’s going to be good regardless. If I do a good job, I make it really great, and I’m not sure it was really great, I think it’s a great story. You don’t want to waste a story that’s that great, I mean I feel the same way about the First World War, it’s such an incredibly interesting tale, that I would really have to be an idiot to not be able to at least do a pretty interesting job of it, and I think that’s a great advantage we have, we can sit here and take the best, most interesting, wildest stories from history, and you already have a wonderful thing before you even start talking, so with that story I just remember thinking, if you screw this up, you’ve wasted one of the really wild stories from history, so in my mind I think it could have been even better, like I said give me a year and let me throw out a bunch of versions I don’t like and I think I would have done it even better. So I have all the best material in the world to work from, I don’t have to invent it, I just have to figure out a good way to relate it.

I’ve found that generally a lot of content creators feel that way, it seems sort of a natural feeling, the constant need to improve

Let’s look at it another way, if you don’t have that feeling, what does that mean? If you’re not trying to get better all the time, or if you’re satisfied with your work, maybe I’m only looking at this from my own viewpoint, but it seems to me a recipe for eventually falling off your game, I think if you have this attitude that you always want to improve, and you’re never quite satisfied, hopefully that keeps you always getting a little bit better, I mean sometimes I think maybe you’ll reach a limit where you can’t get any better, but I think you want to have the attitude that you’re going to continually try to improve, like I say from my own viewpoint, I can’t imagine thinking about it otherwise.

How did you get interested in history in the first place?

I was born interested, my mom told me. There’s no real way to explain why I was reading grown up history books when I was six years old and having mom explain all the big words to me, she used to joke that I must have been in some big history event or something in another lifetime. It’s kind of like you get kids that are good at math, or good at music right from the get go and it doesn’t make any sense really. It’s almost like it’s hardwired into you, and this was kind of hardwired into me, that’s kind of what makes it so fun to be able to be able to make a living doing it. When it’s been a central feature in your whole life like this has been for me, to be able to do it for a living is like a dream come true, and at the same time you wonder how it could almost have been otherwise. If you’re born at a great musician, not that I’m a great history person, but if music was a part of your life since you were a little teeny kid, then you shouldn’t find it surprising that you would work in it one day. So this is hardwired, is the best way that I can describe it.

What was your first favorite historical story?

I don’t remember, probably Native Americans, or it might have been the Second World War. I was a toy soldier fanatic when I was a little kid, and when you’re into that you start reading up on whatever the stories were connected to, like the cowboys and Indians I was playing with, or whatever it might have been, we’re talking like five to six years old. I read the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was seven! Who does that? I was some weird and twisted little child! But if you’re hard wired that way then you can’t really take any credit, it’s just sort of strange. I think all kids have something that they find that appeals to them, for me it was just history.

In your shows you say that you are biased towards certain groups, what’s your favorite civilization?

I switch on this. I’ve always loved the people of the steppe, the Turks, the Mongols, the Huns, all those people who are in the land mass of Eurasia, they were always interesting to me, and the knights and Vikings were always interesting to me, and Native Americans were always interesting to me, the Second World War. The reason I have all these foundations when I was telling you I don’t do something that I don’t know something about already, is that I’ll get into things really intensely for like a year or two or whatever and read whatever and just become this nut about something for awhile, and then move on to another subject to become fanatical about, but I wouldn’t forget what I learned before. Then I’d get interested again several years later and go back. So I have all these loves, and I think if you looked at the subject matter of the history shows we’ve done, most of them represent subjects or peoples or events that one time or another absolutely obsessed me. You know, Greeks, and Persians from antiquity obsessed me for awhile. You’d have to ask me what’s my one thing today, and I would have said the First World War, but I’m getting a little tired of it as you might imagine, ready to move on to the next thing.

Why do you personally think people aren’t interested in history?

I don’t know that they aren’t it depends on the individual, I hear from a lot of people, or read the reviews that people write on iTunes, a lot of times they say that they didn’t know that they were interested in history. But I’ve always thought if you take the elements in history that are standard things that any TV producer or playwright or anyone like that would walk in there and put on their play, and tell everybody that it’s a true story, I think people like it, I think history can be very dry the way it’s written, but it isn’t very dry if you pull out all of the drama and all of the romance and all of the strangeness. It’s a Shakespeare play, it really is. When we do it we try to pick stories that highlight those obvious dramatic or interesting or entertaining elements, and I think when you do that people go ‘I didn’t know I was interested in history,’ like that. I think what makes what we do valuable, if there’s any value to it at all, is we’re not trying to take the place of historians, as a matter of fact we use historians to make it possible to do what we do, we’re simply trying to reach people who don’t know they’re interested in history, and show them that these are all people stories. History is the autobiography of a mad man, is a quote we’ve used before, and if you could read the autobiography of that man, it would be interesting, it depends on how you word it, and that’s where the story telling comes in. But I’m not sure that people are interested in history, if you wanted to say whets the most gratifying part of this show it would be hearing people say ‘gosh I didn’t know I was interested in that until I heard these programs,’ I didn’t know I could do that until we did it, and I’m still a little surprised by the reaction as I told you earlier. So I’m not sure people are interested in history, except the small percentage that I’m part of, us strange history lovers, but I think there’s a lot of untapped audience out there. People who watch like Game of Thrones or any of those things, I mean I haven’t seen it but people tell me that’s very much like a historical story, so why make it a fantasy tale? Why not just pick the part of history that’s very much like that anyway? People say that our Wrath of the Khans series is quite a bit like that, so why not tell that? If you pick a good enough story, you don’t have to make up any parts.

Do you like historical movies? What’s your favorite historical movie?

In general I don’t because I’m one of those purists that get upset when they mess with the facts. I like concepts in movies more than how they actually carry them out, so like one of the movies I always remember when people ask me this question is a terrible movie, it’s just not even a good movie at all, but the concept tweaks that part of my brain that likes history. it was a movie from 1980 called ‘The Final Countdown,’ and the idea of the movie is that a modern American aircraft carrier gets sucked back in time to right before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and you get to watch the USS Nimitz dealing with Japanese Zeroes and trying to figure out how the Second World War is going to start, and it’s a stupid story, it’s all just dumb, but for my history oriented brain, I just love that stuff! Even if they do a crappy job executing the story I’m still into the concept, I don’t care. So I’m much more of a concepts person then I am, say, Oliver Stone made Alexander the Great not that long ago and he botched it terribly, and it messed with me. It’s such a wonderful story that when somebody botches it you realize they’re not going to make another movie about Alexander for another decade or a dozen years, so when someone botches it they really screw it up for everyone. So I’m not so concerned with how they execute these things. Take a really weird, twisted enough angle, the angle is enough to get me interested, and that’s why I like that time travel story.

I actually feel pretty similarly, though I like a lot of historical movies. I have actually heard of that Final Countdown, I’ve been meaning to look it up

Again, when you see it you’ll know exactly what I mean, you’ll think even if they don’t carry it out well it’s such a perverse concept that that drags you in. They stopped it too soon for me; they stopped it just where the story was getting to what I wanted to see how the Nimitz stops Pearl Harbor. I use this with my history show, and it goes back to what you said about Prophets of Doom, if you pick a perverse enough subject, that’s enough to hook me, and Prophets of Doom was just one of those subjects where I’d have to be an idiot to screw that up.

How would you teach history in schools to make more people interested in it?

I think you have to make it relevant to them, and different people are going to find different things relevant. I think that what’s difficult about history as a subject is I don’t think we agree on why people need it, and this is the really thorny issue when it comes to history. A long time ago we used to think that you need it to be a good citizen or civics, or all these different reasons that sound like poppycock today. The best thing that history provides people is the ability to understand how things got to where they are now. So you can teach people that by taking whatever subject they’re interested in, and let them follow the developments, what I was trying to argue was instead of saying to somebody you need to learn about the War of 1812 and this and that and the other thing, when they might think that’s the most boring thing in the world, when they get out of high school are they going to remember that fact? If they don’t remember that fact, then does whatever reason you thought they needed to learn that matter? If you don’t keep it with you and use it, whets the point of making them learn that? You could have spent that time on some more important subject, but if you’re trying to teach them cause and effect and how things progressed to where they are now, they can learn about anything. History is the history of everything. I try to tell people if you’re into dentistry and teeth, there’s a history of dentistry and teeth. Why not just tell the students, pick whatever you’re into, if you’re into motorcycles, read when motorcycles started and how they got to where they are today. I had a history teacher once who said that the reason history is important is because it’s like deciding that you’re going to start watching a soap opera on TV that’s already been running for 20 years. You turn it on and you’re just totally lost, you don’t know who these characters are, you don’t know why this person is mad at that person, who adopted this kid, nothing makes sense until you go back and watch the older episodes and see how it got to where it is. That’s why history is good, it teaches you context. If you’re trying to teach context, then none of the specific facts matter. You could pick any subject you want, you don’t have to learn these 20 things that on your syllabus, you could learn about anything to learn context. So I say the best way to learn history is to pick up a subject you’re already interested in and explain to me, if I am the history teacher, how this developed from its very beginnings to how it is today. That history may not be important to some standards board and what they decided you needed to know, but it teaches you the most important part of history, and that’s how things get from where they started to where they are.

What do you think are the biggest challenges that will face my generation when we take the helm?

I don’t know. I think we’re in a state of flux right now, and it’s hard to see the way things are going to go. I think there are a lot of trends that have been going on for a long time in US current events but have sped up in the past 15 years or so and it’s difficult to see where things are going. There’s an old double edged Chinese proverb that says ‘may you live in interesting times.’ We live in interesting times, but part of what makes it so scary is we don’t know where we’re going, and I think the future is always scary that way, but I think there are interesting times and there are more interesting times, and we live in more interesting times right now, I don’t know what kind of world you’re going to find when you get the reins. I’ll be very interested to see how much control we have in changing it, I think the big question about current events right now is how much of a difference can we make to change things, and I don’t know the answer to that. If the answer to that is ‘not much,’ then you guys are going to fall into the same wagon wheel ruts that the generations before you were in. If the answer is you can change things a lot and if you’re inclined to do so, then we might see something different. Generations do come around every now and again that really shake things up. I think there’s all different kinds of historical theories, one of them revolves around trends and forces, the idea that we are all shaped by the forces around us and what’s impacting our society, and the force is very powerful, and certain times they are. For example, the Second World War, those are very powerful forces that are difficult to resist. If we live in one of those accelerated eras, your generation may have very little option in what they can do in change. On the other hand, sometimes events happen that open up the door to big course changes. I mean think about 9/11, that’s a big course change for better or worse, and those are unpredictable in terms of when they come around, you can’t predict 9/11 is going to happen at any given time and you can’t predict what’s going to happen when it does. But you know those things come around, like tsunamis. We don’t know when a tsunami is coming, we don’t know where it’s coming, and we don’t know what it’s going to do, but if you look at the past record of performance you know there’ll be another one. Those are historical opportunities, and those are historical turning points. You may get caught in the wagon wheels that were formed by the generation before and then all of the sudden more of those historical tsunamis come around and shifts you in a completely different path with no wagon wheel ruts to fall into at all. “The future is uncertain and the end is always near,” as Jim Morrison once said.