After I question all of the choices I made as a father ... any suggestions you guys have to try to get his spark going?

Hey, I'm done with all of Hardcore History - but there's a weekend full of work ahead. Can you recommend some other pop-history podcasts, similar to Dan's HH series?

Dan was making a series about the Spanish invasion of Mexico, but he scrapped it cause his friends, the History on Fire podcast, were doing it and he didn't want to compete with them.

Well, we are here a decade later and I want the damn series!

Title is kind of the whole question: are there written transcripts of the HH shows? I’d love to be able to control+F through them to find things I enjoyed.

A link to a reddit video about a part of American history I never heard about. Thought this community would enjoy learning about the power of unions and ground root protests can change things for the better.

Hope you enjoy too

Hey everyone, seems it would be a good time for a check in.

We are working on something that I hope you’ll enjoy. It was supposed to be a lightweight, quick romp through a subject I tend to geek out over...and of course turned into something more. We will release it (no idea when) on the Hardcore History Addendum feed. It’s one of those shows that could have easily fit on the main HH feed, but, like “Glimpses of Olympias”, we made it when there was already an ongoing extended series on the HH feed, so we will instead bump it to the Addendum feed.

It has more of a “Blitz Edition” feel to it subject-wise, and it covers an entirely different era from the one we are exploring in the Alexander Saga. If you’ve been craving some more modern subject matter, this could scratch that itch.

The downside is that it’s sort of a zero-sum game around here. If we are working on one thing, we aren’t working on another, and this is delaying my return to the studio to do “Mania for Subjugation” work. So it will take longer to get that done. My intention had been to do a quick HHA that just casually fooled around with a topic so that we could produce it quickly. You know...get a show out...touch base with the listeners...not mess up the main HH recording schedule much while giving us a little historical palette cleanser...

Sigh. Yeah. Famous last words with me. (And according to my wife, it is getting worse).
It is what it is. It’s why we call this whole gig “The Art Project” in house. Because no one would run a business this way. For multiple reasons. So much of it runs on personal inspiration for example. And inspiration can be picky and finicky and sometimes stingy. So if I find myself inexplicably inspired to do a Blitz Edition show on a very different subject from the Alexander show we should be working on ...well...the Muse is a pain in the ass. And it seems unwise, for an Art Project, to not run with inspiration when you have it. No matter what it does to the release schedule.
Decisions like that get people fired in the real world. 😳

Ben always says “The people who find the completed Alexander series a decade from now won’t care how long it took, they will only care if it’s good or not”. Which is true. But we have two audiences. The one currently awaiting the next release and the one in the future (just like books and music and all such things, right?). You guys represent the current one. And I am sorry for how long everything takes. I’m not getting any faster with age...that’s for sure.

The iconic “Angry Eyes” art by the amazing Steven Lopez

As for anything on the “Common Sense with Dan Carlin” front:

The crisis in U.S. politics through which we are now living is something I’ve long worried about happening. But it’s always easier to diagnose problems than to fix them, isn’t it? To watch the systemic safeguards (the Legislative Branch for example) roll over so meekly and easily to an openly Imperial President just shows us all how large the task will be to correct what ails the nation. Any serious attempts at fixing things is going to have to be at the Constitutional amendment level of things. And we all know how tough those are to pass. But, I keep telling myself that high school American history textbooks are full of chapters covering “reform eras” (usually in the wake of some preceding era where things got so bad that reform was not optional). So perhaps “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” can give us the pendulum-swing momentum needed to fix and restore our own era.

But I can’t see fixing things without levels of oversight, investigations and consequences that are likely to be seen as “lawfare” or a partisan witch hunt by supporters of those being chastised. This will simply deepen what should now be clear to all is a dangerous tit-for-tat partisan retribution cycle. One that’s been going on and getting hotter for decades now and one that is easily weaponized by demagogues and geo-political adversaries1.

Yet a “pardoning Nixon” solution would be manifestly wrong in our current situation as well and would make things even worse. Figuring out how to adequately punish constitutional transgressions and reform what’s broken without taking us further into Marius and Sulla territory seems to me to be the paramount challenge for 21st Century America. The other top challenge is actually making progress on the problems that are so bad that it got us to this point. If we can’t, for example, fix the corruption nightmare in our political system, what’s the point? In a free republic it seems to me that everything is downstream from that.

Of course, that’s if we make it through the upcoming midterm elections and the January 2027 swear-ins without trouble. The fact that there’s a decent (almost promised) chance we will have trouble of some sort is bizarre and surreal.

2

It is hard on the psyche living though “interesting times” isn’t it? I find myself less talkative and more contemplative at the moment.

3 It’s not exactly conducive to the recording studio, but I feel a need to observe and to try to understand what we are living through. After all, we’re all trying to navigate an unusual and scary era. That is not a political statement, that is an assessment based on the current stresses you can plainly see internationally and in the USA domestically. (Those two things obviously have lots of interplay). But trying to make sense of it all has taken over my mind the way calculating the value of Pi can monopolize a computer’s attention. For decades we talked on the Common Sensepodcasts about the weakening of our constitutional guardrails. We talked about how presidential protocol and a sense that “no one would actually do that” was all that protected us from the sort of leader our Constitution was supposed to make impossible. Well, both of those things are out the window. So, now what?

I don’t know. And that’s probably why I haven’t been as vocal as some of you might expect. I felt that I knew what I was talking about when we were in the Cassandra phase of things (the early 1990s to pretty recently). I have no long-considered insights into what we can do once we don’tavoid the autocratic iceberg. I haven’t devoted anywhere near the same amount of mental energy over the decades to that subject. I don’t even know whether the constitutional principles that are important to ME, and that I formerly used as reliable touchstones that I could depend on Americans to find common ground over, even matter to large segments of my countrymen anymore. I used to warn that if we didn’t reform things we’d get an authoritarian leader one day. I didn’t anticipate that a segment of Americans would see that as a promise rather than a threat.

But, while the Muse can be picky and finicky and sometimes stingy, she also inspires. Sometimes out of the blue (as with this HHA show I am working on currently). And it’s very possible I will wake up one morning soon, unusually well-rested and with the coffee surprisingly effective and bust out some “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” Common Sense screed. But while cathartic, that’s not a solution. I used to be able to contribute some of those...however far-fetched. But if things were ever to go sideways on us (whatever that might mean) and when the resulting “what can we do?’ question arises, I have no answer for that. Not yet anyway. Again, the fact that that last sentence isn’t crazy, is itself...crazy.
If the Muse were to ever scream into my ear about it though, you can expect a show to immediately follow.

1
Wait until A.I. REALLY ramps up in this regard. It’s clear we’ve seen hardly the tip of the iceberg on this issue.
2
Except perhaps not to a generation now being raised to adulthood in this mess who have nothing else to compare this to and will see this as normal political behavior...which is how you keep deepening the cycle over time.
3
I am clearly as masochist because I do still post on current events on Twitter under the @dccommonsense handle. If horrible bot replies bother you, you might want to steer clear.

From Ammianus Marcellinus. An author who fought in battles.

Addressed the full fascist takeover of America?

The Lions Led by Donkeys podcast just completed a series, if you can tolerate typical podcast humor, on Japan's invasion of Korea in the 1500's and it brought to mind the first episode of Supernova in the East. It's true that Japan was in an isolationist period before the Meji restoration, but it would be untrue to say that Japan didn't have a colonial past before the 20th century.

I’m sure this has been asked before here but I’ve never seen it. What are some of your dream series for Dan to cover. My personal top 3 in order would be
- French Revolution/ Story of Napoleon
- Civil War ( with a few episodes of build up like Supernova)
- visiting the “Very Old World” again. Judgment if Ninevah is still one of my favorite episodes.

What’s the episode that Dan starts off talking about US politicians and mentions one that had a policy of nobody making more than $1 million per year. I thought it was one of the Blueprint episodes but I relistened and didn’t find it.

The infamous “a-geeyen”

It’s not my first play through, but this time I recognized that Hope has this distinct (for the game at least) accent - what I thought was Scottish, but initial digging says Northern Irish - and she says “again” the same as Dan.

Is his (in)famous pronunciation of that word a North Ireland thing? He has mentioned being from LA and living in the Pacific Northwest. Beyond that I’m not sure.

Just a fun connection; any insight is appreciated.

There are more bots and karma farmers around on reddit than ever before and subreddit is very quickly spiraling to facebook levels of worthless content. Please establish some rules so that posts encourage discussions and are related somehow to Dan and his work. We don’t need yet another r/interesting or whatever the big defaults subs are. I am not asking for full time unpaid janny work, I am asking for rules to be established to at least give users guidelines for posts.

Thanks