YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Carlin

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2020-11-03
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2020-11-03
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  1. “Let me cut you off and just say you've done a wonderful job. This has been fun for me. The questions and more importantly, the questions can come from anybody, the counter statements. Your responses have been wonderful. You made this a very fun intellectual discussion for me. Thank you”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Now you're into Elon Musk and I talked about this simulation thing, right? Nick Bostrom's, yeah, the idea that there's some kid and we're the equivalent of an alien's ant farm, you know, and we hope he doesn't throw it to Rantula in just to see what happens. I think the wise elude us. And I think that what makes philosophy and religion and those sorts of things so interesting is that they grapple with the wise. But I'm not wise enough to propose a theory myself, but I'm interested enough to read all the other ones out there. Let's put it this way. I don't think there's any definitive why that's been agreed upon, but the various theories are fascinating.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Like it helps me flesh out a little bit more who we are in the long timeline, not who we are today specifically, but who we've always been. It's a personal quest. It's not meant to educate anybody else. It's something that fascinates me.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “That's the part that always makes history sound like it rhymes, you know, and when you put the constant, the human element, and you mix it with systems that are similar. So one of the reasons that the ancient Roman Republic is something that people point to all the time as something that seems like we're repeating histories because you have the two con, you have humans, just like you had then, and you have a system that resembles the one we have here. So you throw the constant in with a system that is somewhat similar and you begin to see things that look like they rhyme a little. So for me, I'm always trying to figure out more about us. And when you show us in 500 years ago in Asia and 800 years ago in Africa, and you look at all these different places that you put the guinea pig in and you watch how the guinea pig responds to the different stimuli and challenges, I feel...”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “What I look at sometimes that I find interesting is certain consistencies that we have over time. History doesn't repeat, but it has a constant and the constant is us. Now, we change. I mentioned earlier the wickedly weird time we live in with what social media is doing to us is guinea pigs, and that's a new element. But we're still people who are motivated by love, hate, greed, envy, sex. I mean, all these things that would have connected us with the ancients, right?”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “If I said he was real, people would say, No, he's not. And if I said he was, if he wasn't real, they would say yes, he is. So it's a Santa Claus Easter bunny kind of vibe there.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Didn't know what you're talking about That for an Asking me, is Harvey the white rabbit reel? I don't know. There's carrots all around the production room, but I don't know what that means.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yes, and you want that because the historiography, people love that. And that was a byproduct of my lack of credentials where we thought we're going to bring in the historians. We call them audio footnotes right away for me to say, listen, I'm not a historian, but I'll quote this guy who is so you can trust him. But then we would quote other people who had different views. And people didn't realize that if they're not history majors, that historians don't always agree on this stuff and that they have disagreements and they loved that. So I love the fact that there's more stuff out there because it allows us to then bring in other points of view and sort of maybe three-dimensionalize or flesh out the story a little bit more.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “You would think that this was information that was out in the rise and fall of the Third Reich, but it wasn't. And so this goes along with that stuff about new stuff coming out all the time. Alexander, new stuff coming out all the time”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The Finnish general Mannerheim, right? And he's just in a very normal conversation of the sort we're having now. And the Hitler tapes, when you hear him normally he's ranting and raving, but this was a very sedate, and I wish I'd understood the German well enough to really get a feel because I was reading what Germans said. And they said, wow, you can really hear the Southern accent. You know, little things that only a native speaker would hear. And I remember thinking, this is such a different side of this twisted character. And you would think you would always”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Oh, and there's listen, I've got three books at home. I'm on all the publishers lists now, and they just say young Hitler, there's this Hitler, there's that. I mean, I've been reading these books and I've read about Hitler. I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. My mother thought I needed to go to a psychologist because I read it when I was six. And she said, there's something wrong with the boy. She was right. But she was absolutely right. But you would think that something like that is pretty established fact. And yet there's new stuff coming out all the time. And needless to say, Germany's been investigating this guy forever. And sometimes it takes years to get the translations. I took five years of German in school. I can't read any of it. So, I mean, and he is, when you talk about fascinating figures, he's so, the whole thing is so twistedly weird. There was a, it came out a couple years ago. Somebody found a tape of him talking to.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Of Stalin is totally out of it's outdated because there's all this new stuff from the former Soviet Union. And you do, you turn around and you go, okay, they're right. And so when you talk about Hitler, It's very interesting to think about how I would do a Hitler show today versus how I did one 10 years ago. And you would think, well, what's new? I mean, it happened so long, but there's lots of new stuff. And there's lots of new scholarship. And so, yeah, I would think that would be an interesting one to do someday. I haven't thought about that. That's not in the back pocket. But yeah, that'd be interesting.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “It's funny because I talked earlier about how I don't like to go back to the old shows because our standards have changed so much. Well, a long time ago, one of my standards for not getting five hour podcasts done or not getting too deeply into them was to flip around the interesting points. We didn't realize we were going to get an audience that wanted the actual history. We thought we could just go with assume the audience knew the details and just talk about the weird stuff that only makes up one part of the show now. So we did a show called Nazi Tidbits. And it was just little things about, you know, it's totally out of date now. Like, you know, you can still buy them, but they're out of date. Where we dealt a little with it, you know, it would be interesting, but I'll give you another example. I mean, history is not stagnant, as you know. And we had talked about Stalin earlier. And ghosts of the Ostront was done years ago, and people will write me from Russia now and say, well, you're portrayed.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Oh, the Alexander the Great podcast. I've talked around. I talked to somebody the other day. He said, do you know that the very first word in your very first podcast, in the title, the very first thing that anybody ever saw with hardcore history is the word Alexander, because the show's entitled Alexander vs. Hitler. I have talked around the career, I've done show after, I talked about his mother in one episode. I talked about the funeral games after his death. I've talked around this. I've specifically left this giant Alexandrian-sized hole in the middle because we're going to do that show one day and I'm going to lovingly enjoy talking about this crazy interesting figure of Alexander the Great. So that's one of the ones that's on the back pocket list. And what we try to do is whenever this we're doing Second World War in Asia and the Pacific now, I'm on part five, whenever the heck we finish this, the tendency is to then pick a very different period because we've had it and the audience has had it.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I would have kept that book working in my study for months more And the pandemic would have happened. And that would have looked like a chapter I wrote after the fact. I would have had to rewrite the whole thing. It would have been so that argues for what you said at the same time. I would have spent months more working on it because to me it didn't look the way I wanted it to look yet, you know.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “That's what I meant about the audience doesn't understand what a history podcast you can't just riff and be wrong. So let me both oppose what you just said and back up what you just said. Excellent. So I have a book that I wrote, right? And in a book, you have a hard deadline. So Harper Collins had a hard deadline on that book. So when I released it, I was mad because I would have worked on it a lot longer, which is my style, right? Get it right. But we had a chapter in that book entitled Pandemic Prologue Question Mark. And it was the book about the part about the Black Death and the 1918 flu and all that kind of stuff. And I was just doing an interview with a Spanish journalist this morning who said, Did you ever think how lucky you got on that, you know, and first of all, lucky on a pandemic? It strikes you. But had I had my druthers”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “They always say, I read all these things, it's very important you have a release schedule. Well, it's not more important than putting out a good piece of work. And the audience will. Forgive me if it takes too long, but it's really good when you get it. They will not forgive me if I rush it to get it out on time and it's a piece of crap. So for us, and this is why when you brought up a Spotify dealer or anything else, they can't interfere with this at all because my job here, as far as I'm concerned, is quality and everything else goes by the wayside. Because the only thing people care about long term, the only thing that gives you longevity is how good is it, right? How good is that book? If you read JRR Tolkien's work tomorrow, you don't care how long it took him to write it. All you care is how good it is today. And that's what we try to think too. And I feel like if it's good, if it's really good, everything else falls into place and takes care of itself.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “No. But here's the thing. Our show is a little different than other people's. Joe Rogan called it Evergreen content. In other words, my political show is like a car you buy. And the minute you drive it off the lot, it loses half its value, right? Because it's not current anymore. These shows are just as good or just as bad. Five years from now as they are when we do them, although the standards on the internet change. So when I listen to my old shows, I cringe sometimes because the standards are so much higher now. But when you're creating evergreen content, you have two audiences to worry about. You have the audience that's waiting for the next show and they've already heard the other ones and they're impatient and they're telling you on Twitter where is it? But you have show. The show is also for people five years from now who haven't discovered it yet and who don't care a whit for how long it took because they're going to be able to download the whole and all they care about is quality. And so what I always tell new podcasters is”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Two months ago, and I listened to it and I just went, you know what? It's not right. Boom, out the window. There goes six weeks of work, right? But here's the problem.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I always say we make it like they made things like spinal tap and some of those other things where the material. So I do have notes about things like on page 427 of this book you have this quote so that I know aha I'm at the point where I can drop that in and sometimes I'll write notes saying here's where you left off yesterday. So I remember. But in the improvisation, you end up throwing a lot out. And so it allows us to go off on tangents. Like we'll try things. Like I'll sit there and go, I wonder what this would sound like and I'll spend two days going down that road and then I'll listen to him and go, doesn't work. But that's, you know, like writers do this all the time. It's called killing your babies, right? You can't, you know, but people go, so this guy goes, I'm not seeing the dedication. He has no idea how many things were thrown out. I did an hour and a half. I had an hour and a half into the current show about it.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Gonna say, if that's a good thing, though, because that, you know, and I think we said during the show that was the feeling that the people at the time have, and I think in it at one point we said, if this is starting to seem gruesomely repetitive, now you know how the people at the time felt. So in other words, that had sort of inadvertently, because when you improvise a show, some of these things are inadvertent, but it had inadvertently created the right climate for having a sense of empathy with the storyline. And to me, those are the serendipitous moments that make this art and not some sort of paint by the numbers kind of endeavor, you know? And that's to me, that wouldn't have happened had we scripted it out.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Just, you know, when you get to these, I think I'm guessing here. I think it's 26 hours, all pieces together. Think about, and we don't do scripts, it's improvised. So think about what I had somebody write on Twitter just yesterday saying, he said something like, I'm not seeing the dedication here. You're only getting 2.5 shows out a year. And I wanted to say, man, you have no idea what the only people who understand really are other history podcasters. And even they don't generally do 26 hours. You know, that was a two-year endeavor. As I said, the first show we ever did was like 15 minutes. I could crank out one of those a month. But when you're doing, I mean, the last show we did on the fall of the Roman Republic was five and a half hours. That's a book, right? And it was part six or something.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Oh yeah, we have things we keep in our back pocket for later. So blueprint for Armageddon, the First World War series we did, that was in my back pocket the whole time. And when the centennial of the war happened, it just seemed to be the likely time to bring out what was...”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I think you have to try to maintain flexibility, and especially if they can mitigate the downside risk, I think you have to be an idiot to not at least try to stay up on the current trends. And look, I'm watching Joe. I'm going, okay, let's see how it goes for Joe. I mean, if he's like, this is terrible. I'm getting out of this. You go, okay, those people are off. So Joe's Joe's put himself out as a guinea pig and the rest of us guinea pigs appreciate it.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “But listen, at the same time, I love my audience and it sounds like a cliche, but they're literally the reason I'm here. So I want to make sure that whatever I do, if I can, is in keeping with a relationship that I've developed with these people over 15 years. But like you said, no matter what you do, you are good. Because see, here's the thing. If you don't sign up with one of those companies to make it easier for them to get your stuff on this hand, they might yell at you for how difficult it is because the new operating system just updated and you said, I can't get your. So either way you're opening yourself up to ridicule at this point. All of that makes it easier to go, well, if the right deal came along and they weren't screwing me and they weren't screwing my audience and blah, blah. You know, I mean, again, in this business, when you're talking about cutting-edge technology that is ever changing, and as you said, a million podcasts and growing.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “If some of the downside risk is mitigated, and if you eliminate the problem of trying to monetize and stay up with the latest tech, then it might be worth it. I'm scared of things like that, but at the same time, I'm trying to not be an idiot about it. And I can be an idiot about it. And when you've been doing it as independently for as long as I have the inertia of that has a force all its own, but I'm inhibited enough in what I'm trying to do on this other end that it's opened me at least to listening to people.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “When you get to the level of Spotify to just pick them out, there's other players, but you brought up Spotify specifically. These are people who can potentially, potentially enhance your audience over time. And so the risk to you is lower because if you decide in a year or two, whatever the licensing agreement's term is, that you're done with them and you want to leave, instead of how you would have been with some of these smaller walled gardens where you're walking away with a fraction of the audience you walked in with, you have the potential to walk out with whatever you got in the original deal plus a larger audience because their algorithms and everything are designed to push people to your content if they think you'd like. So it takes away some of the downside risk, which alleviates, and if you can write an agreement like Joe Rogan, I mean, where you've protected your freedom to put the content out the way you want.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “So let me bring up something that let's make a distinction because not all companies who do this are the same. And you brought up YouTube and Spotify, but to me, YouTube is at least more like Spotify than some of these smaller. The term is walled garden, right? You've heard the term walled garden. Okay. So I've been around podcasting so long now that I've seen rounds of consolidation over the years and they come in waves. And then all of a sudden, so you'll get, and I'm not going to mention any names, but up and”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “The problems that literally, I mean, just all the operating systems, all the podcatchers, every time some new podcatcher comes out makes it easier to get the podcast, that's something we have to account for on the back end. And I'm not exactly the technological wizard of all time. I think it is maybe the short answer is that as the medium develops, it's becoming something that you have to consider, not because you want to sell out, but because you want to keep going. And it's becoming harder and harder to be pirate-like in this environment.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “There's a case to be made, I guess, is what I'm saying that if a partnership with some outside firm enhances your ability to do the art without disenhancing your ability to do the art, it's the word I'm looking for here is it's enticing. I don't like big companies. So I'm afraid of whatever strings might come with that. And if I'm Joe Rogan and I'm talking about subjects that can make company, public companies, you know, a little nervous, I would certainly be careful. But at the same time, people who are not in this game don't understand”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “You shouldn't call yourself an artist because that's something to be decided by other people. But I mean, we're trying to do art. And there's something very satisfying in that. But the part that I can't stand is the increasing amount of time, the monetization question takes on us. And so”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “But it's becoming onerous to me day to day anyway. And so if somebody were to come in and say, hey, we'll pick that up for you. We will not interfere with your content at all. We won't, and in my case, you can't say we need to show a month because that ain't happening, right? So, I mean, everybody's design is different, right? So it doesn't, you know, there's not one size fits all. But I guess as a longtime pirate podcaster, we've been looking to partner with people, but nobody's right for us to partner with. I mean, so. I'm always looking for ways to take that side of it off my plate because I'm not interested in that side. All I want to do is the shows and the, you know, it's really at this point.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Began to skyrocket. So to get back to your Spotify question, to use just one example, there's a lot of people who are doing similar things. In this day and age, we just sell MP3 files. And all you had to have was an MP3 player. It was cheap and dirty. Now every time there's an OS upgrade, something breaks for us. So we're having, I mean, my choices are at this point to start hiring staff, more staff, you know, people and then be a human resources manager. I mean, the pirate radio side of this was the pirate radio side of this because you didn't need anybody, but you or you and another, I mean, you could just do this lean and mean. And it's becoming hard to do it lean and mean now. So if somebody like a Spotify comes in and says, hey, we'll handle that stuff for you. In the past, I would just say F off. We don't need you. I don't mind. And I definitely am not making what we could make on this, but what we would have to do to make that is onerous to me.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “To donate like a PBS kind of model, and that was that was the original model. So then once we started down that, we figured out other models, there's the advertising thing and we sell the old shows. And so all these became ways for us to support ourselves. But as podcasting matured and as more operating systems developed and phones were developed and all these kinds of things, every one of those developments, which actually made it easier for people to get the podcast, actually made it more complex to make money off of them. So while our audience was building, the amount of time and effort we had to put into the monetization side,”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “That we're talking about scale here. If you have millions of pieces of content being made every week, a small percentage is going to be good no matter what, right? 16 year olds will know what other 16 year olds like. And I kept pushing this and nobody bit. But the podcast grew out of that because if you're talking about amateur content in 1999, well, then you're already the game in terms of not seeing where it's going to go financially, but seeing where it's going to go technologically. And so when we started the podcast in 2005, and it was the political one, not hardcore history, which was an outgrowth of the old radio show, we didn't have any financial ideas. We were simply trying to get our handle on the technology and how you distribute it to people and all that. And it was years later that we tried to figure out, okay, how can we get enough money to just support us while we're doing this? And the cheap and the easy way was just to ask listeners.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “So, my history of how I got involved in podcasting is interesting. I was in radio. And then I started a company back in the era where the dot com boom was happening and everybody was being bought up and it just seemed like a great idea, right? I did it with six other people. And the whole goal of the company was, and we had to invent the term. I'm sure everybody, there's other places that invented it at the same time. But what we were pitching to investors was something called amateur content. So this is before YouTube, before podcasting, before all this stuff. My job was to be the evangelist. And I would go to these people and sing the praises of all the ways that amateur content was going to be great.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “But that's the genius of it. That's what makes it work, right? That's what Joe's brand is, right? I guess what I'm saying is, is by the time you reach the stage that you're at or Joe's at, or they don't need, they have figured this out. The people that sometimes need help are brand new people trying to figure out what do I do with my first show and how do I talk to them. And I have standard answers for that. But you found your niche. I mean, you don't need me to tell you what to do. As a matter of fact, I might ask you questions about how you do what you do, right?”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Well, I'm often asked for advice by new podcasters, people just starting out. And so I have sort of a tried and true list of do's and don'ts. But I don't have advice or suggestions for you or for Joe. Joe doesn't need anything from me. Joe's figured it out, right? I mean,”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “I think anything that is successful like that, like Elon stuff, too, it becomes bigger than you. And that's what you're hoping for, right? Yeah.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “You're never going to, in my opinion, grab that great mass of people that are only in it for their interest and whatever. But if meeting girls for a young teenage guy requires you to feign empathy, requires you to read deeper subjects because that's what people are into, you can almost as a silly way to be trendy. You could make maybe empathy trendy, love trendy, solutions that are the opposite of that, the kind of things that people inherently will not put up with you. In other words, the possibility exists to change the zeitgeist. and reoriented in a way that even if most of the people aren't serious about it, the results are the same. Does that make sense?”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Okay, so let me build on that because I think there's a way to see this. I think you're right. And so it has to do with the story about the 1960s. In the vast scheme of things, the 1960s looks like a revival of neo-Romantic ideas, right? I had a buddy of mine several years, well, two decades older than I was who was in the 60s, went to the protest, did all those kind of things. And we were talking about it, and I was All they were there was to meet girls and have a good time. And, you know, it wasn't so. But. It became in vogue to have all. In other words, let's talk about your empathy and love.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Different from Gandhi government, and I don't mean to interrupt you, but I'll forget my train of thought. I'm getting old, but I mean, how do you deal with the fact that already governments who are afraid of this are walling off their own internet systems as a way to create firewalls Simply to prevent you from doing what you're talking about. In other words, if there's an old line that if voting really changed anything, they'd never allow it. If love through a modern day successor to Twitter would really do what you want it to do, and this would destabilize governments, do you think that governments would take countermeasures to squash that love before it got too dangerous?”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I think a three year old child could build a better plan that this is not to denigrate your, I'm sure yours would be better than a three year old, but Twitter is so, and listen, Facebook too, they're really awful platforms for intellectual discussion and meaningful discussion.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “One could make a case about. I mean, if you want to talk about the long term value of a Jesus, a Gandhi. Yes, those people's ripples are still affecting people today. I agree with you.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “And when they're killed, the effectiveness is diminished. Why are they killed? Because they're effective. And the only way to stop them is to eliminate them because they're charismatic leaders who don't come around every day. And if you eliminate them from the scene, the odds are you're not going to get another one for a while. I guess what I'm saying is the very things you're talking about, which would have the effect you think it would, right? They would destabilize systems in a way that most of us would consider positive. But those systems have a way of protecting themselves, right? And so I feel like. History shows. See, history is pretty pessimistic, I think, by and large, if only because we can find so many examples that just sound pessimistic. But I feel like people who are dangerous to the way things are tend to be removed.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Yourself, okay, this is something that people who are in positions of what you were discussing earlier never had to deal with. Let me ask you something. And boy, this is the ultimate Doomcaster thing of all time to say. When you think of historical figures that push things like love and peace and creating bridges between enemies, when you think of what happened to those people, first of all, they're very dangerous. Every society in the world has a better time, easier time dealing with violence and things like that than they do nonviolence. Nonviolence is really difficult for governments to deal with, for example. What happens to Gandhi and Jesus and Martin Luther King? And you think about all those people, right? When they're that day, it's ironic, isn't it, that these people who push for peaceful solutions are so often killed, but it's because they're effective.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “And I, of course, am trying to figure out how, if this is how we have always been as people, right, we've always been this way, but we've never had the means to post our feelings publicly about it, or if the environment and the social media and everything else has provided a change and changed us into something else. Either way, when one reads how we treat one another and the horrible things we say about one another online, which seems like it shouldn't be that big of a deal, they're just words, but they have a cumulative effect. I mean, when you, I was reading Megan Markle, who I don't know a lot about because it's too much of the pop side of culture for me to pay, but I read a story the other day where she was talking about the abuse she took online and how incredibly overwhelming it was and how many people were doing it. And you think to yourself,”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “The most upsetting part about all that is reading how people treat each other online. And, you know, there's lots of theories about this, the fact that some of it is just for trolling laughs, that some of it is just people are not interacting face to face.”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “I'm watching this experiment with social media right now, and I don't even mean social media, will he expand that out to, I mean, I feel like we're all guinea pigs right now watching, you know, I have two kids and just watching, and there's a three-year space between the two of them. One's 18, the other's 15. And just, you know, when I was a kid, a person who was 18 and 15 would not be that different. Just three years difference, more maturity. But their life experiences, you would easily classify those two people as being in the same generation. Now, because of the speed of technological change, there is a vast difference between my 18-year-old and my 15-year-old, and not in a maturity question, just in what apps they use, how they relate to each other, how they deal with their peers, their social skills, all those kinds of things where you turn around and go, this is uncharted territory. We've never been here, so it's going to be interesting to see what effect that has on society. Now, as that relates to your question,”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Yes, and it creates a momentum of its own, which leads fundamentally if you follow the chain of events down there to some form of dictatorial government as the only way to create stability, right? You want to destroy the republic and have a dictator? That's how you do it. And there are parallels to Nazi Germany, the burning of the Reichstag, blah, blah, blah. I'm the Doomcaster again, aren't I?”

    2020-11-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #136 – Dan Carlin: Hardcore History · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source