Why Dan Carlin Believes That The End is Always Near

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2020

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

With the endless talk of COVID-19, many think we are facing an unprecedented threat of the collapse of our civilization. But Dan Carlin, host of Hardcore History, doesn’t believe anything we are facing is unprecedented. He’s spent years looking at apocalyptic moments from the past as a way to understand the challenges of the future.

Dan joins us on today’s episode to discuss some of the biggest questions in history. Do tough times create tougher people? Can humanity handle the power of its weapons without destroying itself? Will human technology or capabilities ever peak or regress? Will our world ever become a ruin for future archaeologists to dig up and explore? The questions themselves are both philosophical and like something out of The Twilight Zone.

We go all over the place in this episode, from the collapse of the Bronze Age to the challenges of the nuclear era the issue, which has hung over humanity like a persistent Sword of Damocles. But just as he does on his own show, Dan manages to make the most complicated stories engaging and entertaining.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	History is just a bunch of names and dates and facts.
0:15.6	It's the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explained how and why
0:19.4	we got here.
0:21.0	Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange,
0:26.1	and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is.
0:29.9	I'm your host, Scott Rank.
0:31.7	If you're a fan of History Podcasts at all, there's almost a sure chance you've listened
0:44.0	to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, the original History Podcast.
0:48.3	Dan has been doing this a long time.
0:50.2	He's famous for his interstate-length episodes.
0:52.8	He's been working for four hours, six hours.
0:55.1	No one really dives in as deep as he does.
0:57.4	He is a career broadcaster and he manages to make history digestible, but also isn't afraid
1:04.8	to look at one topic across the swath of thousands and thousands of years.
1:08.9	And a lot of historians aren't too comfortable going more beyond a few decades.
1:13.1	So Dan does a great job of that.
1:14.7	That's why I'm so pleased to have him on the show.
1:16.8	He was actually on it a couple of years ago, talking about the differences between Germany's
1:22.0	World War I and World War II armies.
1:24.7	But this time he is here to discuss the topic of his new book, The End is Always Near,
1:30.3	Apocalyptic Moments from the Bronze Age Collapsed to Nuclear Near Misses.
1:34.6	So this is a really fun episode because we buy off a lot.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Unplugged, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of History Unplugged and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.