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Notes -
My impression of Rogan has always been a variant of that old joke about D&D: "twenty minutes of fun packed into four hours".
Every time Rogan has ever been recommended to me, my impression has been that it's 15-20 minutes of interesting conversation spread throughout hours of dull, meandering small-talk. I do not think that Rogan respects my time as a potential listener, and so I do not give it to him.
I don't think you can get those nuggets of value without the meandering.
Rogan needs to create an environment where the person is drawn in, talks about a bunch of off topic stuff, gets relaxed, and gets to to share some of their "texture."
If he had a 15-20 interview the person would just stay on message and do the press junket thing.
But the ratio feels disrespectful to listeners who aren't already invested fans willing to sift through hours of filler for 15 good minutes. The meandering is the main event, loaded with Rogan specific easter eggs that his guest had clearly rehearsed for. I'll take the press junket thing.
Sure! Some people go to Rogan so that they get to have the "access," if that's not for you well that's that clips are for.
A lot of podcasts have variable model where some people watch the whole thing, some people watch the sound bytes, some watch clips that vary in size from a few minutes to big ass chunks.
In order to get all of those you need the base thing though.
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I don’t criticize him for failing to live up to my preferences given that his show isn’t targeted at people like me. But it’s a staple of his podcast unlike say Dan Carlin’s, in that you have to wade through 1 or 2 or sometimes 3 hours just to find a valuable nugget in it. That’s something I’m less willing to do. Podcasts are a useful stepping stone to kicking it up a notch, but I’m still someone who prefers to read a book or listen to it in audio format when I have free time.
If you listen to Mike Duncan’s History of Rome podcast, it’s amateur history done well. The conversational format that summarized his work was done well, even though it still caters more to junk food intellectualism. His work hasn’t been received well by historians. Academics that have read The Storm Before the Storm for instance have reviewed it and said “… he’s just aping what Appian and Plutarch have said…” “Pop” history isn’t “history.” In fact, actual “history” is very boring IMO. It’s learning foreign languages, academics debating dry, arcane details that are inaccessible to the understanding of a lay audience. So even then, it’d be unfair and biased for me to knock on Rogan, because I also enjoy people like Duncan, despite knowing much of what he’s done is flawed.
Are you sure about this or just convinced by their argument? I think academics are arguing in bad faith here. I think they’re insanely jealously of people like Duncan. These “amateurs” that are able to get an audience and minor celebrity while they toil away. I sense extreme resentment. I don’t know if Mike Duncan’s history is good or bad from a technical perspective. I do know I don’t trust an academic to assess it fairly.
I don’t get the vibe that many historians are simply failed fame diggers. And even if some secretly harbored envy for the notoriety of someone like Duncan, they’ve given intellectual reasons and made the case for why his work is not historically reliable. And I’ve read enough about the period to detect when Duncan is simply repeating the classics and isn’t aware of critical scholarship surrounding the reliability of the conclusions he draws. So in that sense whatever historians feel about him is still irrelevant to the merits of the case they make. “They just hate us cause they anus,” is a personal judgment, not a scholarly conclusion.
People have said the same about Carlin. And that’s why Carlin calls himself a “fan” of history and is careful not to make himself out to be a historian. He’s fully aware that he’s doing much the same thing Duncan is, whenever he’s doing a podcast.
Yeah, I see the criticisms of Carlin and Duncan that they simply repeat what the ancient sources say, and they're not wrong necessarily. But then you look at their own work and it's... not better. I'd rather read someone uncritically relaying the biases of ancient Romans than someone uncritically relaying the biases of some German socialist. Most academic history of ancient Rome, especially anything touching on the Republic, is so fundamentally tainted with marxist historiography as to be almost unreadable in my opinion.
If all they led with was simply telling the story of the Romans as the ancient sources say, I think historians wouldn’t have an issue with that. That’s different from a historical portrait of the period. Ancient sources are still of supreme importance in telling that account, except in the obvious and numerous cases where history departs from them. And that’s where historiography begins.
I have no idea what this even means. This just seems like some right-wing slur or glib remark. If you’re referring to the reality that modern historiography commits itself to ‘something’ like the materialist conception of history, then you’re right; only in the sense that material realities play a significant if not dominant role in the development of historical events. That’s uncontroversial except for the fact that you used the word “tainted.”
Modern cultural anthropology is the only discipline I’m aware of that maintains explicit links to Marxist historiography. And there’s good reason for doing that, though it’s been recognized to have problems.
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History podcasting has also evolved a ton since the Carlin/Duncan days. It's sort of split off into two directions - one, exemplified by The Cost of Glory, is being upfront about being a retelling and explanation of the ancient sources. Cost of Glory is as much about Plutarch as it is about the characters, and I think it's a better podcast for it (it's my favourite of the current crop. Listen in the gym and hit PRs). Then, there are podcasts like History of Byzantium, History of the Germans, and above all When Diplomacy Fails, which blend narrative history with an overview of the historiographical debates and a proper examination of the sources.
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Accidental double-post
My bad. I'm in a hotel on bad wifi.
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"Pop" history isn't "history" if it gets stuff seriously wrong. But history as a discipline isn't just an arcane hobby for a gaggle of ivory-tower academics - a huge part of the point of those academics' existence is to inform (or to write) works that educate the public about history. And Mike Duncan pretty much gives you the background you need to read academic Roman history without getting lost. Papers can be abstruse and difficult but academic books are generally written with enough background to be readable outside a specialist niche, even if you need to have some experience in the discipline. Just as an example, I recently read Emanuel Mayer's The Ancient Middle Classes. Mostly a very dry read going through the details of Roman tombs and houses and making arguments from there about the existence of a Roman "middle class", but the book contains enough background that someone generally familiar with Roman history can read it all - after all, an academic writing a book like that will expect it to be used by scholars in other aspects of ancient history, or economic historians studying class throughout history, or historians working on urbanization, etc. etc.
I think this is a place where a lot of academics sort of create their own problems. When they sort of hold out the idea that you have to be able to read dry academic texts and have a university degree to do real [subject] it creates two problems.
First, it opens the door to frauds who want to play fast and loose with facts in order to create pseudo-academic lite texts. Most of the Pop-Physics and Pop-Philosophy stuff contains serious enough distortions that you are likely to end up with a false sense of how these subjects actually work. A lot of woo has come out of pop physics books trying to explain quantum mechanics or astronomy, particularly around things like time travel or quantum mechanics or space travel. Michio Kakaku is simply terrible at telling people what physically is actually possible and realistic as a possible future.
Second, it creates a situation where most people think of those subjects as impossible to understand and study. People think history is boring because they think it’s dry historical texts and dates.
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