Eugene weekly., December 24, 2014, Page 21, Image 21

C U LT U R E
B Y A L E X V. C I P O L L E
LIVING HISTORY
Catching up with Dan Carlin, host of the award-winning
podcast Hardcore History recorded in Eugene
F
ormer KVAL reporter Dan Carlin lives in the past. That is, at least
when he’s working on Hardcore History, the podcast he delves into
with fanboy fervor, humanizing the past with episodes about
everything from Ancient Greece (“The Macedonian Soap Opera”) to
World War I (“Blueprint for Armageddon”). Hardcore History, which
he records in his home studio in Eugene, has been downloaded almost 3
million times and was recently named Best Classic Podcast in iTunes’ Best
of 2014 awards. Carlin squeezed in a quick phone chat with EW in-between
recording the 5th installment of the “Blueprint for Armageddon” (it’s due
out before the end of December) and producing his other podcast, the
current events-centered Common Sense.
To read the extended interview, including Carlin’s thoughts on the
torture report and American mythologies, his favorite historical figures and
Hollywood’s take on history, visit eugeneweekly.com.
You grew up in California and went to the University of Colorado Boulder. Why Eugene?
I actually came up here for a job as a television reporter way back in 1992. I always tell
people, if you had put a map down in front of me in Los Angeles 20 years ago and said,
“Where do you want to end up?” I’m not sure I would have picked Eugene, Oregon.
It’s not a bad place to land. I did television reporting here, got into podcasting really a
long time ago with the classic story of the overnight success that took 20 years. The
really cool thing is I remember in what I was doing before — TV or radio reporting
— the only way to get promoted was to continually go to a bigger city and continue to
move every couple of years, and that just sounded so horrible to me. To be able to have
sort of an international audience and to grow like this and not have to leave wonderful
little Eugene is wild.
What was your initial draw to the subject of history?
My mother — she thinks I was something in a past life — she said, “You were born
obsessed with this.” I don’t understand it. It’s always been, whether it was playing with
soldiers as a little kid or reading grown-up history books as a little kid. I was behind in
school on a number of subjects but I was always in the advanced class when it came to
history. … It’s why I became a history major. It just seemed the most natural thing in
the world.
Then you went into broadcasting?
As a news reporter, what’s that old line? That journalism is the first draft of history? I
always looked at that as a way to use your history love, and all those reporters that I
liked when I was learning the ropes were all history majors. … Common Sense kind of
grew out of radio work that I was doing here in Eugene. For years I had had listeners
who said that we need to put this show on the internet, even before people were doing
podcasts … so when the technology sort of caught up with that, I’ve had people
whispering in my ear for years, “Let’s get you a bigger audience. Let’s get you a wider
distribution.” The podcasting thing came around at just the right time.
What year was Common Sense started?
You’re going to love this — 2005.
So you were an early adopter?
Yeah, and I think that’s really kind of helped us, too. I told my broadcast partner here
that when we started we were going to treat it a little like the Oklahoma land rush, and
we were going to run and claim our little piece of territory. Then as everybody arrived
after us we were going to try to defend our little piece of turf. … When all of the big
corporate entities started getting involved, we looked at that as a coming of age. I knew
when ESPN started advertising their podcast, that what they were really doing was
creating new podcast listeners. … The other thing that helped us, and it’s connected to
that same thing, was Apple and iTunes. I talk to the folks at Apple a lot about this, and
I’m always so thankful because a standard business model, if they weren’t who they
were, would have been to separate professional content from amateur content. So you
have your ESPN stuff over here and then you have all these guys doing the show out
of the garage over there. But Apple early on decided that they were going to let you rise
or fall based on your merits and throw you all together.
What’s the story behind Hardcore History?
I used to always sort of regale my family with these horrifying history stories and my
mother-in-law, of all people, said to me one day, “Why can’t you do a podcast about
this?” Because I was already doing [Common Sense] on news and currents events. And
she said, “Well why don’t you do one on history?” And I said, “Oh, you can’t do that.
You have to be a historian to do that. Let me tell you, I love historians and I’m not a
historian and I can’t do it.” She knocked me dead when she said, “I didn’t realize you
had to be a historian to tell stories.” I thought to myself, Oh yeah, if you put it that way.
[Laughs.]
You recently said of upcoming Hardcore History “Blueprint for Armageddon V”: “Never have
I challenged myself more than with this upcoming episode.” Why was it so challenging?
I was just talking to my wife about this today, about how everyone sort of thinks that I
plan this all out meticulously in advance. You have this sort of snapshot on paper about
what you’re going to do, but that’s not how we do it here. It’s so much more jazz-like
and improvisational. You’ll say to yourself, “I think it’d be great to do a World War I
series.” Then you jump into it and usually the first show is not that difficult, but then
you’re in the middle now and it’s complex and so quicksand-like that you don’t even
know how you’re going to get out of this.
Was there anything specifically about World War I that made it challenging?
This is a war with a dozen or 15 countries in it. Everyone has got their own written
material, their own point of view. It’s also a recent historical event, so there’s tons of
stuff written on it. It’s also the 100th anniversary of the event, which means everyone
is cranking out even more books lately. I’ve not quite had the amount of reading
material for any other show that we’ve done. … It’s certainly the most enormous topic
we’ve ever tried to pick so I knew I was going to drown in it at some point, but it’s one
thing to know it in advance, it’s another thing to experience the actual drowning.
[Laughs.] ■
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
eugeneweekly.com • December 24, 2014
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