Podcasts about first world war

Today, we are exploring a topic that doesn't get talked about much — the British tanks that ended up serving with the Red Army during the Second World War. We often think about the Soviet Union producing huge numbers of its own tanks like the T-34, but in the early years of the war—and even before it—the Soviets were looking abroad for armoured vehicles to strengthen their forces. Britain, with its long history of tank development stretching back to the First World War, was one of the countries they turned to. Joining me is Peter Samsonov, who's spent a lot of time researching Soviet armoured warfare and is the author of 'British Tanks of the Red Army'.   patreon.com/ww2podcast  

Unlocked after 1 year for patrons only: We review the diplomatic landscape of Europe on the eve of war in the summer of 1914—and then trace the dizzying cascade of events that followed after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. We get a handle on the ensuing crisis that ricocheted through embassies, banquet halls, and barracks all across Europe, and plunged all the great powers of the continent into a war that soon spread around the world. Suggested further reading: Christopher Clark, “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914”; Margaret MacMillan, “The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914”; Barbara Tuchman, “The Guns of August.” Image: Photograph of nine kings (George V of Britain seated, center; Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany standing, in red), at Windsor, for funeral of Edward VII of Britain, May, 1910. Please sign up to hear all patron-only lectures, including recent series on the Dead Sea Scrolls & the Epic of Gilgamesh: https://www.patreon.com/c/user?u=5530632

In this episode we take our study of the French Army into the final, decisive Allied offensive of 1918. How did the French army finally weather the storm of the German spring offensives, and how did it turn the tide at the Second Battle of the Marne? James Book Recommendations: Doughty, Robert A. 2008. Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goya, Michel. 2018. Flesh and Steel during the Great War: The Transformation of the French Army and the Invention of Modern Warfare. Translated by Andrew Uffindell. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military. Greenhalgh, Elizabeth. 2014. The French Army and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krause, Jonathan. 2013a. Early Trench Tactics in the French Army: The Second Battle of Artois, May-June 1915. Farnham: Ashgate. Join Our Community: ⁠https://not-so-quiet.com/⁠ Use our code: Dugout and get one month free as a Captain. Support via Paypal:⁠ https://battleguide.co.uk/nsq-paypal⁠ Do you like our podcast? Then please leave us a review, it helps us a lot! E-Mail: ⁠nsq@battleguide.co.uk⁠ Battle Guide YouTube Channel:⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@BattleGuideVT⁠ Our WW2 Podcast:⁠ https://battleguide.co.uk/bsow⁠ If you want to keep your finger on the pulse of what the team at Battle Guide have been getting up to, why not sign up to our monthly newsletter:⁠ ⁠https://battleguide.co.uk/newsletter⁠ Twitter: @historian1914 @DanHillHistory @BattleguideVT Credits: - Host: Dr. Spencer Jones & Dan Hill - Production: Linus Klaßen - Editing: Hunter Christensen & Linus Klaßen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good Sunday morning to you,I am just on a train home from Glasgow, where I have been gigging these past two nights. I've had a great time, as I always seem to do when I go north of the wall.But Glasgow on a Saturday night is something else. My hotel was right next to the station and so I was right in the thick of it. If I ever get to make a cacatopian, end-of-days, post-apocalyptic thriller, I'll just stroll through Glasgow city centre on a Friday or Saturday night with a camera to get all the B roll. It was like walking through a Hieronymus Bosch painting only with a Scottish accent. Little seems to have changed since I wrote that infamous chapter about Glasgow in Life After the State all those years ago. The only difference is that now it's more multi-ethnic. So many people are so off their heads. I lost count of the number of randoms wandering about just howling at the stars. The long days - it was still light at 10 o'clock - make the insanity all the more visible. Part of me finds it funny, but another part of me finds it so very sad that so many people let themselves get into this condition. It prompted me to revisit said chapter, and I offer it today as your Sunday thought piece.Just a couple of little notes, before we begin. This caught my eye on Friday. Our favourite uranium tech company, Lightbridge Fuels (NASDAQ:LTBR), has taken off again with Donald Trump's statement that he is going to quadruple US nuclear capacity. The stock was up 45% in a day. We first looked at it in October at $3. It hit $15 on Friday. It's one to sell on the spikes and buy on the dips, as this incredible chart shows.(In other news I have now listened twice to the Comstock Lode AGM, and I'll report back on that shortly too). ICYMI here is my mid-week commentary, which attracted a lot of attentionRight - Glasgow.(NB I haven't included references here. Needless to say, they are all there in the book. And sorry I don't have access to the audio of me reading this from my laptop, but, if you like, you can get the audiobook at Audible, Apple Books and all good audiobookshops. The book itself available at Amazon, Apple Books et al).How the Most Entrepreneurial City in Europe Became Its SickestThe cause of waves of unemployment is not capitalism, but governments …Friedrich Hayek, economist and philosopherIn the 18th and 19th centuries, the city of Glasgow in Scotland became enormously, stupendously rich. It happened quite organically, without planning. An entrepreneurial people reacted to their circumstances and, over time, turned Glasgow into an industrial and economic centre of such might that, by the turn of the 20th century, Glasgow was producing half the tonnage of Britain's ships and a quarter of all locomotives in the world. (Not unlike China's industrial dominance today). It was regarded as the best-governed city in Europe and popular histories compared it to the great imperial cities of Venice and Rome. It became known as the ‘Second City of the British Empire'.Barely 100 years later, it is the heroin capital of the UK, the murder capital of the UK and its East End, once home to Europe's largest steelworks, has been dubbed ‘the benefits capital of the UK'. Glasgow is Britain's fattest city: its men have Britain's lowest life expectancy – on a par with Palestine and Albania – and its unemployment rate is 50% higher than the rest of the UK.How did Glasgow manage all that?The growth in Glasgow's economic fortunes began in the latter part of the 17th century and the early 18th century. First, the city's location in the west of Scotland at the mouth of the river Clyde meant that it lay in the path of the trade winds and at least 100 nautical miles closer to America's east coast than other British ports – 200 miles closer than London. In the days before fossil fuels (which only found widespread use in shipping in the second half of the 19th century) the journey to Virginia was some two weeks shorter than the same journey from London or many of the other ports in Britain and Europe. Even modern sailors describe how easy the port of Glasgow is to navigate. Second, when England was at war with France – as it was repeatedly between 1688 and 1815 – ships travelling to Glasgow were less vulnerable than those travelling to ports further south. Glasgow's merchants took advantage and, by the early 18th century, the city had begun to assert itself as a trading hub. Manufactured goods were carried from Britain and Europe to North America and the Caribbean, where they were traded for increasingly popular commodities such as tobacco, cotton and sugar.Through the 18th century, the Glasgow merchants' business networks spread, and they took steps to further accelerate trade. New ships were introduced, bigger than those of rival ports, with fore and aft sails that enabled them to sail closer to the wind and reduce journey times. Trading posts were built to ensure that cargo was gathered and stored for collection, so that ships wouldn't swing idly at anchor. By the 1760s Glasgow had a 50% share of the tobacco trade – as much as the rest of Britain's ports combined. While the English merchants simply sold American tobacco in Europe at a profit, the Glaswegians actually extended credit to American farmers against future production (a bit like a crop future today, where a crop to be grown at a later date is sold now). The Virginia farmers could then use this credit to buy European goods, which the Glaswegians were only too happy to supply. This brought about the rise of financial institutions such as the Glasgow Ship Bank and the Glasgow Thistle Bank, which would later become part of the now-bailed-out, taxpayer-owned Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).Their practices paid rewards. Glasgow's merchants earned a great deal of money. They built glamorous homes and large churches and, it seems, took on aristocratic airs – hence they became known as the ‘Tobacco Lords'. Numbering among them were Buchanan, Dunlop, Ingram, Wilson, Oswald, Cochrane and Glassford, all of whom had streets in the Merchant City district of Glasgow named after them (other streets, such as Virginia Street and Jamaica Street, refer to their trade destinations). In 1771, over 47 million pounds of tobacco were imported.However, the credit the Glaswegians extended to American tobacco farmers would backfire. The debts incurred by the tobacco farmers – which included future presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (who almost lost his farm as a result) – grew, and were among the grievances when the American War of Independence came in 1775. That war destroyed the tobacco trade for the Glaswegians. Much of the money that was owed to them was never repaid. Many of their plantations were lost. But the Glaswegians were entrepreneurial and they adapted. They moved on to other businesses, particularly cotton.By the 19th century, all sorts of local industry had emerged around the goods traded in the city. It was producing and exporting textiles, chemicals, engineered goods and steel. River engineering projects to dredge and deepen the Clyde (with a view to forming a deep- water port) had begun in 1768 and they would enable shipbuilding to become a major industry on the upper reaches of the river, pioneered by industrialists such as Robert Napier and John Elder. The final stretch of the Monkland Canal, linking the Forth and Clyde Canal at Port Dundas, was opened in 1795, facilitating access to the iron-ore and coal mines of Lanarkshire.The move to fossil-fuelled shipping in the latter 19th century destroyed the advantages that the trade winds had given Glasgow. But it didn't matter. Again, the people adapted. By the turn of the 20th century the Second City of the British Empire had become a world centre of industry and heavy engineering. It has been estimated that, between 1870 and 1914, it produced as much as one-fifth of the world's ships, and half of Britain's tonnage. Among the 25,000 ships it produced were some of the greatest ever built: the Cutty Sark, the Queen Mary, HMS Hood, the Lusitania, the Glenlee tall ship and even the iconic Mississippi paddle steamer, the Delta Queen. It had also become a centre for locomotive manufacture and, shortly after the turn of the 20th century, could boast the largest concentration of locomotive building works in Europe.It was not just Glasgow's industry and wealth that was so gargantuan. The city's contribution to mankind – made possible by the innovation and progress that comes with booming economies – would also have an international impact. Many great inventors either hailed from Glasgow or moved there to study or work. There's James Watt, for example, whose improvements to the steam engine were fundamental to the Industrial Revolution. One of Watt's employees, William Murdoch, has been dubbed ‘the Scot who lit the world' – he invented gas lighting, a new kind of steam cannon and waterproof paint. Charles MacIntosh gave us the raincoat. James Young, the chemist dubbed as ‘the father of the oil industry', gave us paraffin. William Thomson, known as Lord Kelvin, developed the science of thermodynamics, formulating the Kelvin scale of absolute temperature; he also managed the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable.The turning point in the economic fortunes of Glasgow – indeed, of industrial Britain – was WWI. Both have been in decline ever since. By the end of the war, the British were drained, both emotionally and in terms of capital and manpower; the workers, the entrepreneurs, the ideas men, too many of them were dead or incapacitated. There was insufficient money and no appetite to invest. The post-war recession, and later the Great Depression, did little to help. The trend of the city was now one of inexorable economic decline.If Glasgow was the home of shipping and industry in 19th-century Britain, it became the home of socialism in the 20th century. Known by some as the ‘Red Clydeside' movement, the socialist tide in Scotland actually pre-dated the First World War. In 1906 came the city's first Labour Member of Parliament (MP), George Barnes – prior to that its seven MPs were all Conservatives or Liberal Unionists. In the spring of 1911, 11,000 workers at the Singer sewing-machine factory (run by an American corporation in Clydebank) went on strike to support 12 women who were protesting about new work practices. Singer sacked 400 workers, but the movement was growing – as was labour unrest. In the four years between 1910 and 1914 Clydebank workers spent four times as many days on strike than in the whole of the previous decade. The Scottish Trades Union Congress and its affiliations saw membership rise from 129,000 in 1909 to 230,000 in 1914.20The rise in discontent had much to do with Glasgow's housing. Conditions were bad, there was overcrowding, bad sanitation, housing was close to dirty, noxious and deafening industry. Unions grew quite organically to protect the interests of their members.Then came WWI, and inflation, as Britain all but abandoned gold. In 1915 many landlords responded by attempting to increase rent, but with their young men on the Western front, those left behind didn't have the means to pay these higher costs. If they couldn't, eviction soon followed. In Govan, an area of Glasgow where shipbuilding was the main occupation, women – now in the majority with so many men gone – organized opposition to the rent increases. There are photographs showing women blocking the entrance to tenements; officers who did get inside to evict tenants are said to have had their trousers pulled down.The landlords were attacked for being unpatriotic. Placards read: ‘While our men are fighting on the front line,the landlord is attacking us at home.' The strikes spread to other cities throughout the UK, and on 27 November 1915 the government introduced legislation to restrict rents to the pre-war level. The strikers were placated. They had won. The government was happy; it had dealt with the problem. The landlords lost out.In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, more frequent strikes crippled the city. In 1919 the ‘Bloody Friday' uprising prompted the prime minister, David Lloyd George, to deploy 10,000 troops and tanks onto the city's streets. By the 1930s Glasgow had become the main base of the Independent Labour Party, so when Labour finally came to power alone after WWII, its influence was strong. Glasgow has always remained a socialist stronghold. Labour dominates the city council, and the city has not had a Conservative MP for 30 years.By the late 1950s, Glasgow was losing out to the more competitive industries of Japan, Germany and elsewhere. There was a lack of investment. Union demands for workers, enforced by government legislation, made costs uneconomic and entrepreneurial activity arduous. With lack of investment came lack of innovation.Rapid de-industrialization followed, and by the 1960s and 70s most employment lay not in manufacturing, but in the service industries.Which brings us to today. On the plus side, Glasgow is still ranked as one of Europe's top 20 financial centres and is home to some leading Scottish businesses. But there is considerable downside.Recent studies have suggested that nearly 30% of Glasgow's working age population is unemployed. That's 50% higher than that of the rest of Scotland or the UK. Eighteen per cent of 16- to 19-year-olds are neither in school nor employed. More than one in five working-age Glaswegians have no sort of education that might qualify them for a job.In the city centre, the Merchant City, 50% of children are growing up in homes where nobody works. In the poorer neighbourhoods, such as Ruchill, Possilpark, or Dalmarnock, about 65% of children live in homes where nobody works – more than three times the national average. Figures from the Department of Work and Pensions show that 85% of working age adults from the district of Bridgeton claim some kind of welfare payment.Across the city, almost a third of the population regularly receives sickness or incapacity benefit, the highest rate of all UK cities. A 2008 World Health Organization report noted that in Glasgow's Calton, Bridgeton and Queenslie neighbourhoods, the average life expectancy for males is only 54. In contrast, residents of Glasgow's more affluent West End live to be 80 and virtually none of them are on the dole.Glasgow has the highest crime rate in Scotland. A recent report by the Centre for Social Justice noted that there are 170 teenage gangs in Glasgow. That's the same number as in London, which has over six times the population of Glasgow.It also has the dubious record of being Britain's murder capital. In fact, Glasgow had the highest homicide rate in Western Europe until it was overtaken in 2012 by Amsterdam, with more violent crime per head of population than even New York. What's more, its suicide rate is the highest in the UK.Then there are the drug and alcohol problems. The residents of the poorer neighbourhoods are an astounding six times more likely to die of a drugs overdose than the national average. Drug-related mortality has increased by 95% since 1997. There are 20,000 registered drug users – that's just registered – and the situation is not going to get any better: children who grow up in households where family members use drugs are seven times more likely to end up using drugs themselves than children who live in drug-free families.Glasgow has the highest incidence of liver diseases from alcohol abuse in all of Scotland. In the East End district of Dennistoun, these illnesses kill more people than heart attacks and lung cancer combined. Men and women are more likely to die of alcohol-related deaths in Glasgow than anywhere else in the UK. Time and time again Glasgow is proud winner of the title ‘Fattest City in Britain'. Around 40% of the population are obese – 5% morbidly so – and it also boasts the most smokers per capita.I have taken these statistics from an array of different sources. It might be in some cases that they're overstated. I know that I've accentuated both the 18th- and 19th-century positives, as well as the 20th- and 21st-century negatives to make my point. Of course, there are lots of healthy, happy people in Glasgow – I've done many gigs there and I loved it. Despite the stories you hear about intimidating Glasgow audiences, the ones I encountered were as good as any I've ever performed in front of. But none of this changes the broad-brush strokes: Glasgow was a once mighty city that now has grave social problems. It is a city that is not fulfilling its potential in the way that it once did. All in all, it's quite a transformation. How has it happened?Every few years a report comes out that highlights Glasgow's various problems. Comments are then sought from across the political spectrum. Usually, those asked to comment agree that the city has grave, ‘long-standing and deep-rooted social problems' (the words of Stephen Purcell, former leader of Glasgow City Council); they agree that something needs to be done, though they don't always agree on what that something is.There's the view from the right: Bill Aitken of the Scottish Conservatives, quoted in The Sunday Times in 2008, said, ‘We simply don't have the jobs for people who are not academically inclined. Another factor is that some people are simply disinclined to work. We have got to find something for these people to do, to give them a reason to get up in the morning and give them some self-respect.' There's the supposedly apolitical view of anti-poverty groups: Peter Kelly, director of the Glasgow-based Poverty Alliance, responded, ‘We need real, intensive support for people if we are going to tackle poverty. It's not about a lack of aspiration, often people who are unemployed or on low incomes are stymied by a lack of money and support from local and central government.' And there's the view from the left. In the same article, Patricia Ferguson, the Labour Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for Maryhill, also declared a belief in government regeneration of the area. ‘It's about better housing, more jobs, better education and these things take years to make an impact. I believe that the huge regeneration in the area is fostering a lot more community involvement and cohesion. My real hope is that these figures will take a knock in the next five or ten years.' At the time of writing in 2013, five years later, the figures have worsened.All three points of view agree on one thing: the government must do something.In 2008 the £435 million Fairer Scotland Fund – established to tackle poverty – was unveiled, aiming to allocate cash to the country's most deprived communities. Its targets included increasing average income among lower wage-earners and narrowing the poverty gap between Scotland's best- and worst-performing regions by 2017. So far, it hasn't met those targets.In 2008 a report entitled ‘Power for The Public' examined the provision of health, education and justice in Scotland. It said the budgets for these three areas had grown by 55%, 87% and 44% respectively over the last decade, but added that this had produced ‘mixed results'. ‘Mixed results' means it didn't work. More money was spent and the figures got worse.After the Centre for Social Justice report on Glasgow in 2008, Iain Duncan Smith (who set up this think tank, and is now the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions) said, ‘Policy must deal with the pathways to breakdown – high levels of family breakdown, high levels of failed education, debt and unemployment.'So what are ‘pathways to breakdown'? If you were to look at a chart of Glasgow's prosperity relative to the rest of the world, its peak would have come somewhere around 1910. With the onset of WWI in 1914 its decline accelerated, and since then the falls have been relentless and inexorable. It's not just Glasgow that would have this chart pattern, but the whole of industrial Britain. What changed the trend? Yes, empires rise and fall, but was British decline all a consequence of WWI? Or was there something else?A seismic shift came with that war – a change which is very rarely spoken or written about. Actually, the change was gradual and it pre-dated 1914. It was a change that was sweeping through the West: that of government or state involvement in our lives. In the UK it began with the reforms of the Liberal government of 1906–14, championed by David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, known as the ‘terrible twins' by contemporaries. The Pensions Act of 1908, the People's Budget of 1909–10 (to ‘wage implacable warfare against poverty', declared Lloyd George) and the National Insurance Act of 1911 saw the Liberal government moving away from its tradition of laissez-faire systems – from classical liberalism and Gladstonian principles of self-help and self-reliance – towards larger, more active government by which taxes were collected from the wealthy and the proceeds redistributed. Afraid of losing votes to the emerging Labour party and the increasingly popular ideology of socialism, modern liberals betrayed their classical principles. In his War Memoirs, Lloyd George said ‘the partisan warfare that raged around these topics was so fierce that by 1913, this country was brought to the verge of civil war'. But these were small steps. The Pensions Act, for example, meant that men aged 70 and above could claim between two and five shillings per week from the government. But average male life- expectancy then was 47. Today it's 77. Using the same ratio, and, yes, I'm manipulating statistics here, that's akin to only awarding pensions to people above the age 117 today. Back then it was workable.To go back to my analogy of the prologue, this period was when the ‘train' was set in motion across the West. In 1914 it went up a gear. Here are the opening paragraphs of historian A. J. P. Taylor's most celebrated book, English History 1914–1945, published in 1965.I quote this long passage in full, because it is so telling.Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state, who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913–14, or rather less than 8% of the national income.The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries,from working excessive hours.The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman's food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the Second World war was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.Since the beginning of WWI , the role that the state has played in our lives has not stopped growing. This has been especially so in the case of Glasgow. The state has spent more and more, provided more and more services, more subsidy, more education, more health care, more infrastructure, more accommodation, more benefits, more regulations, more laws, more protection. The more it has provided, the worse Glasgow has fared. Is this correlation a coincidence? I don't think so.The story of the rise and fall of Glasgow is a distilled version of the story of the rise and fall of industrial Britain – indeed the entire industrial West. In the next chapter I'm going to show you a simple mistake that goes on being made; a dynamic by which the state, whose very aim was to help Glasgow, has actually been its ‘pathway to breakdown' . . .Life After the State is available at Amazon, Apple Books and all good bookshops, with the audiobook at Audible, Apple Books and all good audiobookshops. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.theflyingfrisby.com/subscribe

In this episode we discuss the improvised gas masks used by British and Commonwealth soldiers in 1915, the advancement in medical treatment during the Great War, whether soldiers were told in advance about the explosion of mines on the battlefield and the use of soldiers packs in WW1.Our episode on Gas Warfare in WW1 is available here: Gas! Gas! Gas!JD Hutt's YouTube Channel: The History Underground.Got a question about this episode or any others? Drop your question into the Old Front Line Discord Server or email the podcast.Send us a textSupport the show

Tonight sees the 70th Ivor Novello awards taking place at Grosvenor House in London.  They are coveted in the UK music industry because they specifically celebrate songwriting. Singer-songwriter Lola Young leads the nominations this year including one for 'best song musically and lyrically' for her breakthrough hit Messy, which spent a month at number one in the UK earlier this year.  Does this spell good news for women in the music industry? Anita Rani is joined by Linda Coogan-Byrne to discuss. If you've ever had the bad luck of getting a UTI - or Urinary Tract Infection - you'll know how painful they can be. It's a bacterial infection which can affect the bladder, urethra or kidneys and give a burning or stinging sensation when you urinate. Yesterday, in a powerful parliamentary session, the Labour MP Allison Gardner spoke through tears as she described her experiences of chronic UTIs. The MP for Stoke on Trent is now hoping to launch a cross-party parliamentary group to look at chronic UTIs - Allison joins Anita, as does the GP Ellie Cannon. A major new exhibition opens this week at The Imperial War Museum in London. Called Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict, it looks at the atrocities inflicted during war and conflict from the First World War until the present day. Helen Upcraft is the exhibition's lead curator and Sara Bowcutt is the Managing Director of Women for Women International, one of the NGOs working in the field of sexual violence in conflict, who've also contributed to this exhibition. They join Anita in the studio.Women and listening... how do women listen? How good a listener are you? Two books out this month focus on listening, from listening to sounds to listening more deeply to other people. Anita speaks to writers Alice Vincent, and Emily Kasriel.Presenter: Anita Rani Producer: Corinna Jones

In this lecture from the Mises Institute's recent Conference on War Revisionism, McMaken looks at how classical liberals' pro-peace foreign policy was defeated by a century of war propaganda beginning with the First World War. Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at https://Mises.org/RadioRothbardRadio Rothbard mugs are available at the Mises Store. Get yours at https://Mises.org/RothMug PROMO CODE: RothPod for 20% off

In this lecture from the Mises Institute's recent Conference on War Revisionism, McMaken looks at how classical liberals' pro-peace foreign policy was defeated by a century of war propaganda beginning with the First World War. Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at https://Mises.org/RadioRothbardRadio Rothbard mugs are available at the Mises Store. Get yours at https://Mises.org/RothMug PROMO CODE: RothPod for 20% off

Yesterday, the self-styled San Francisco “progressive” Joan Williams was on the show arguing that Democrats need to relearn the language of the American working class. But, as some of you have noted, Williams seems oblivious to the fact that politics is about more than simply aping other people's language. What you say matters, and the language of American working class, like all industrial working classes, is rooted in a critique of capitalism. She should probably read the New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy's excellent new book, Capitalism and its Critics, which traces capitalism's evolution and criticism from the East India Company through modern times. He defines capitalism as production for profit by privately-owned companies in markets, encompassing various forms from Chinese state capitalism to hyper-globalization. The book examines capitalism's most articulate critics including the Luddites, Marx, Engels, Thomas Carlisle, Adam Smith, Rosa Luxemburg, Keynes & Hayek, and contemporary figures like Sylvia Federici and Thomas Piketty. Cassidy explores how major economists were often critics of their era's dominant capitalist model, and untangles capitalism's complicated relationship with colonialism, slavery and AI which he regards as a potentially unprecedented economic disruption. This should be essential listening for all Democrats seeking to reinvent a post Biden-Harris party and message. 5 key takeaways* Capitalism has many forms - From Chinese state capitalism to Keynesian managed capitalism to hyper-globalization, all fitting the basic definition of production for profit by privately-owned companies in markets.* Great economists are typically critics - Smith criticized mercantile capitalism, Keynes critiqued laissez-faire capitalism, and Hayek/Friedman opposed managed capitalism. Each generation's leading economists challenge their era's dominant model.* Modern corporate structure has deep roots - The East India Company was essentially a modern multinational corporation with headquarters, board of directors, stockholders, and even a private army - showing capitalism's organizational continuity across centuries.* Capitalism is intertwined with colonialism and slavery - Industrial capitalism was built on pre-existing colonial and slave systems, particularly through the cotton industry and plantation economies.* AI represents a potentially unprecedented disruption - Unlike previous technological waves, AI may substitute rather than complement human labor on a massive scale, potentially creating political backlash exceeding even the "China shock" that contributed to Trump's rise.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Full TranscriptAndrew Keen: Hello, everybody. A couple of days ago, we did a show with Joan Williams. She has a new book out, "Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back." A book about language, about how to talk to the American working class. She also had a piece in Jacobin Magazine, an anti-capitalist magazine, about how the left needs to speak to what she calls average American values. We talked, of course, about Bernie Sanders and AOC and their language of fighting oligarchy, and the New York Times followed that up with "The Enduring Power of Anti-Capitalism in American Politics."But of course, that brings the question: what exactly is capitalism? I did a little bit of research. We can find definitions of capitalism from AI, from Wikipedia, even from online dictionaries, but I thought we might do a little better than relying on Wikipedia and come to a man who's given capitalism and its critics a great deal of thought. John Cassidy is well known as a staff writer at The New Yorker. He's the author of a wonderful book, the best book, actually, on the dot-com insanity. And his new book, "Capitalism and its Critics," is out this week. John, congratulations on the book.So I've got to be a bit of a schoolmaster with you, John, and get some definitions first. What exactly is capitalism before we get to criticism of it?John Cassidy: Yeah, I mean, it's a very good question, Andrew. Obviously, through the decades, even the centuries, there have been many different definitions of the term capitalism and there are different types of capitalism. To not be sort of too ideological about it, the working definition I use is basically production for profit—that could be production of goods or mostly in the new and, you know, in today's economy, production of services—for profit by companies which are privately owned in markets. That's a very sort of all-encompassing definition.Within that, you can have all sorts of different types of capitalism. You can have Chinese state capitalism, you can have the old mercantilism, which industrial capitalism came after, which Trump seems to be trying to resurrect. You can have Keynesian managed capitalism that we had for 30 or 40 years after the Second World War, which I grew up in in the UK. Or you can have sort of hyper-globalization, hyper-capitalism that we've tried for the last 30 years. There are all those different varieties of capitalism consistent with a basic definition, I think.Andrew Keen: That keeps you busy, John. I know you started this project, which is a big book and it's a wonderful book. I read it. I don't always read all the books I have on the show, but I read from cover to cover full of remarkable stories of the critics of capitalism. You note in the beginning that you began this in 2016 with the beginnings of Trump. What was it about the 2016 election that triggered a book about capitalism and its critics?John Cassidy: Well, I was reporting on it at the time for The New Yorker and it struck me—I covered, I basically covered the economy in various forms for various publications since the late 80s, early 90s. In fact, one of my first big stories was the stock market crash of '87. So yes, I am that old. But it seemed to me in 2016 when you had Bernie Sanders running from the left and Trump running from the right, but both in some way offering very sort of similar critiques of capitalism. People forget that Trump in 2016 actually was running from the left of the Republican Party. He was attacking big business. He was attacking Wall Street. He doesn't do that these days very much, but at the time he was very much posing as the sort of outsider here to protect the interests of the average working man.And it seemed to me that when you had this sort of pincer movement against the then ruling model, this wasn't just a one-off. It seemed to me it was a sort of an emerging crisis of legitimacy for the system. And I thought there could be a good book written about how we got to here. And originally I thought it would be a relatively short book just based on the last sort of 20 or 30 years since the collapse of the Cold War and the sort of triumphalism of the early 90s.But as I got into it more and more, I realized that so many of the issues which had been raised, things like globalization, rising inequality, monopoly power, exploitation, even pollution and climate change, these issues go back to the very start of the capitalist system or the industrial capitalist system back in sort of late 18th century, early 19th century Britain. So I thought, in the end, I thought, you know what, let's just do the whole thing soup to nuts through the eyes of the critics.There have obviously been many, many histories of capitalism written. I thought that an original way to do it, or hopefully original, would be to do a sort of a narrative through the lives and the critiques of the critics of various stages. So that's, I hope, what sets it apart from other books on the subject, and also provides a sort of narrative frame because, you know, I am a New Yorker writer, I realize if you want people to read things, you've got to make it readable. Easiest way to make things readable is to center them around people. People love reading about other people. So that's sort of the narrative frame. I start off with a whistleblower from the East India Company back in the—Andrew Keen: Yeah, I want to come to that. But before, John, my sense is that to simplify what you're saying, this is a labor of love. You're originally from Leeds, the heart of Yorkshire, the center of the very industrial revolution, the first industrial revolution where, in your historical analysis, capitalism was born. Is it a labor of love? What's your family relationship with capitalism? How long was the family in Leeds?John Cassidy: Right, I mean that's a very good question. It is a labor of love in a way, but it's not—our family doesn't go—I'm from an Irish family, family of Irish immigrants who moved to England in the 1940s and 1950s. So my father actually did start working in a big mill, the Kirkstall Forge in Leeds, which is a big steel mill, and he left after seeing one of his co-workers have his arms chopped off in one of the machinery, so he decided it wasn't for him and he spent his life working in the construction industry, which was dominated by immigrants as it is here now.So I don't have a—it's not like I go back to sort of the start of the industrial revolution, but I did grow up in the middle of Leeds, very working class, very industrial neighborhood. And what a sort of irony is, I'll point out, I used to, when I was a kid, I used to play golf on a municipal golf course called Gotts Park in Leeds, which—you know, most golf courses in America are sort of in the affluent suburbs, country clubs. This was right in the middle of Armley in Leeds, which is where the Victorian jail is and a very rough neighborhood. There's a small bit of land which they built a golf course on. It turns out it was named after one of the very first industrialists, Benjamin Gott, who was a wool and textile industrialist, and who played a part in the Luddite movement, which I mention.So it turns out, I was there when I was 11 or 12, just learning how to play golf on this scrappy golf course. And here I am, 50 years later, writing about Benjamin Gott at the start of the Industrial Revolution. So yeah, no, sure. I think it speaks to me in a way that perhaps it wouldn't to somebody else from a different background.Andrew Keen: We did a show with William Dalrymple, actually, a couple of years ago. He's been on actually since, the Anglo or Scottish Indian historian. His book on the East India Company, "The Anarchy," is a classic. You begin in some ways your history of capitalism with the East India Company. What was it about the East India Company, John, that makes it different from other for-profit organizations in economic, Western economic history?John Cassidy: I mean, I read that. It's a great book, by the way. That was actually quoted in my chapter on these. Yeah, I remember. I mean, the reason I focused on it was for two reasons. Number one, I was looking for a start, a narrative start to the book. And it seemed to me, you know, the obvious place to start is with the start of the industrial revolution. If you look at economics history textbooks, that's where they always start with Arkwright and all the inventors, you know, who were the sort of techno-entrepreneurs of their time, the sort of British Silicon Valley, if you could think of it as, in Lancashire and Derbyshire in the late 18th century.So I knew I had to sort of start there in some way, but I thought that's a bit pat. Is there another way into it? And it turns out that in 1772 in England, there was a huge bailout of the East India Company, very much like the sort of 2008, 2009 bailout of Wall Street. The company got into trouble. So I thought, you know, maybe there's something there. And I eventually found this guy, William Bolts, who worked for the East India Company, turned into a whistleblower after he was fired for finagling in India like lots of the people who worked for the company did.So that gave me two things. Number one, it gave me—you know, I'm a writer, so it gave me something to focus on a narrative. His personal history is very interesting. But number two, it gave me a sort of foundation because industrial capitalism didn't come from nowhere. You know, it was built on top of a pre-existing form of capitalism, which we now call mercantile capitalism, which was very protectionist, which speaks to us now. But also it had these big monopolistic multinational companies.The East India Company, in some ways, was a very modern corporation. It had a headquarters in Leadenhall Street in the city of London. It had a board of directors, it had stockholders, the company sent out very detailed instructions to the people in the field in India and Indonesia and Malaysia who were traders who bought things from the locals there, brought them back to England on their company ships. They had a company army even to enforce—to protect their operations there. It was an incredible multinational corporation.So that was also, I think, fascinating because it showed that even in the pre-existing system, you know, big corporations existed, there were monopolies, they had royal monopolies given—first the East India Company got one from Queen Elizabeth. But in some ways, they were very similar to modern monopolistic corporations. And they had some of the problems we've seen with modern monopolistic corporations, the way they acted. And Bolts was the sort of first corporate whistleblower, I thought. Yeah, that was a way of sort of getting into the story, I think. Hopefully, you know, it's just a good read, I think.William Bolts's story because he was—he came from nowhere, he was Dutch, he wasn't even English and he joined the company as a sort of impoverished young man, went to India like a lot of English minor aristocrats did to sort of make your fortune. The way the company worked, you had to sort of work on company time and make as much money as you could for the company, but then in your spare time you're allowed to trade for yourself. So a lot of the—without getting into too much detail, but you know, English aristocracy was based on—you know, the eldest child inherits everything, so if you were the younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, you actually didn't inherit anything. So all of these minor aristocrats, so major aristocrats, but who weren't first born, joined the East India Company, went out to India and made a fortune, and then came back and built huge houses. Lots of the great manor houses in southern England were built by people from the East India Company and they were known as Nabobs, which is an Indian term. So they were the sort of, you know, billionaires of their time, and it was based on—as I say, it wasn't based on industrial capitalism, it was based on mercantile capitalism.Andrew Keen: Yeah, the beginning of the book, which focuses on Bolts and the East India Company, brings to mind for me two things. Firstly, the intimacy of modern capitalism, modern industrial capitalism with colonialism and of course slavery—lots of books have been written on that. Touch on this and also the relationship between the birth of capitalism and the birth of liberalism or democracy. John Stuart Mill, of course, the father in many ways of Western democracy. His day job, ironically enough, or perhaps not ironically, was at the East India Company. So how do those two things connect, or is it just coincidental?John Cassidy: Well, I don't think it is entirely coincidental, I mean, J.S. Mill—his father, James Mill, was also a well-known philosopher in the sort of, obviously, in the earlier generation, earlier than him. And he actually wrote the official history of the East India Company. And I think they gave his son, the sort of brilliant protégé, J.S. Mill, a job as largely as a sort of sinecure, I think. But he did go in and work there in the offices three or four days a week.But I think it does show how sort of integral—the sort of—as you say, the inheritor and the servant in Britain, particularly, of colonial capitalism was. So the East India Company was, you know, it was in decline by that stage in the middle of the 19th century, but it didn't actually give up its monopoly. It wasn't forced to give up its monopoly on the Indian trade until 1857, after, you know, some notorious massacres and there was a sort of public outcry.So yeah, no, that's—it's very interesting that the British—it's sort of unique to Britain in a way, but it's interesting that industrial capitalism arose alongside this pre-existing capitalist structure and somebody like Mill is a sort of paradoxical figure because actually he was quite critical of aspects of industrial capitalism and supported sort of taxes on the rich, even though he's known as the great, you know, one of the great apostles of the free market and free market liberalism. And his day job, as you say, he was working for the East India Company.Andrew Keen: What about the relationship between the birth of industrial capitalism, colonialism and slavery? Those are big questions and I know you deal with them in some—John Cassidy: I think you can't just write an economic history of capitalism now just starting with the cotton industry and say, you know, it was all about—it was all about just technical progress and gadgets, etc. It was built on a sort of pre-existing system which was colonial and, you know, the slave trade was a central element of that. Now, as you say, there have been lots and lots of books written about it, the whole 1619 project got an incredible amount of attention a few years ago. So I didn't really want to rehash all that, but I did want to acknowledge the sort of role of slavery, especially in the rise of the cotton industry because of course, a lot of the raw cotton was grown in the plantations in the American South.So the way I actually ended up doing that was by writing a chapter about Eric Williams, a Trinidadian writer who ended up as the Prime Minister of Trinidad when it became independent in the 1960s. But when he was younger, he wrote a book which is now regarded as a classic. He went to Oxford to do a PhD, won a scholarship. He was very smart. I won a sort of Oxford scholarship myself but 50 years before that, he came across the Atlantic and did an undergraduate degree in history and then did a PhD there and his PhD thesis was on slavery and capitalism.And at the time, in the 1930s, the link really wasn't acknowledged. You could read any sort of standard economic history written by British historians, and they completely ignored that. He made the argument that, you know, slavery was integral to the rise of capitalism and he basically started an argument which has been raging ever since the 1930s and, you know, if you want to study economic history now you have to sort of—you know, have to have to address that. And the way I thought, even though the—it's called the Williams thesis is very famous. I don't think many people knew much about where it came from. So I thought I'd do a chapter on—Andrew Keen: Yeah, that chapter is excellent. You mentioned earlier the Luddites, you're from Yorkshire where Luddism in some ways was born. One of the early chapters is on the Luddites. We did a show with Brian Merchant, his book, "Blood in the Machine," has done very well, I'm sure you're familiar with it. I always understood the Luddites as being against industrialization, against the machine, as opposed to being against capitalism. But did those two things get muddled together in the history of the Luddites?John Cassidy: I think they did. I mean, you know, Luddites, when we grew up, I mean you're English too, you know to be called a Luddite was a term of abuse, right? You know, you were sort of antediluvian, anti-technology, you're stupid. It was only, I think, with the sort of computer revolution, the tech revolution of the last 30, 40 years and the sort of disruptions it's caused, that people have started to look back at the Luddites and say, perhaps they had a point.For them, they were basically pre-industrial capitalism artisans. They worked for profit-making concerns, small workshops. Some of them worked for themselves, so they were sort of sole proprietor capitalists. Or they worked in small venues, but the rise of industrial capitalism, factory capitalism or whatever, basically took away their livelihoods progressively. So they associated capitalism with new technology. In their minds it was the same. But their argument wasn't really a technological one or even an economic one, it was more a moral one. They basically made the moral argument that capitalists shouldn't have the right to just take away their livelihoods with no sort of recompense for them.At the time they didn't have any parliamentary representation. You know, they weren't revolutionaries. The first thing they did was create petitions to try and get parliament to step in, sort of introduce some regulation here. They got turned down repeatedly by the sort of—even though it was a very aristocratic parliament, places like Manchester and Leeds didn't have any representation at all. So it was only after that that they sort of turned violent and started, you know, smashing machines and machines, I think, were sort of symbols of the system, which they saw as morally unjust.And I think that's sort of what—obviously, there's, you know, a lot of technological disruption now, so we can, especially as it starts to come for the educated cognitive class, we can sort of sympathize with them more. But I think the sort of moral critique that there's this, you know, underneath the sort of great creativity and economic growth that capitalism produces, there is also a lot of destruction and a lot of victims. And I think that message, you know, is becoming a lot more—that's why I think why they've been rediscovered in the last five or ten years and I'm one of the people I guess contributing to that rediscovery.Andrew Keen: There's obviously many critiques of capitalism politically. I want to come to Marx in a second, but your chapter, I thought, on Thomas Carlyle and this nostalgic conservatism was very important and there are other conservatives as well. John, do you think that—and you mentioned Trump earlier, who is essentially a nostalgist for a—I don't know, some sort of bizarre pre-capitalist age in America. Is there something particularly powerful about the anti-capitalism of romantics like Carlyle, 19th century Englishman, there were many others of course.John Cassidy: Well, I think so. I mean, I think what is—conservatism, when we were young anyway, was associated with Thatcherism and Reaganism, which, you know, lionized the free market and free market capitalism and was a reaction against the pre-existing form of capitalism, Keynesian capitalism of the sort of 40s to the 80s. But I think what got lost in that era was the fact that there have always been—you've got Hayek up there, obviously—Andrew Keen: And then Keynes and Hayek, the two—John Cassidy: Right, it goes to the end of that. They had a great debate in the 1930s about these issues. But Hayek really wasn't a conservative person, and neither was Milton Friedman. They were sort of free market revolutionaries, really, that you'd let the market rip and it does good things. And I think that that sort of a view, you know, it just became very powerful. But we sort of lost sight of the fact that there was also a much older tradition of sort of suspicion of radical changes of any type. And that was what conservatism was about to some extent. If you think about Baldwin in Britain, for example.And there was a sort of—during the Industrial Revolution, some of the strongest supporters of factory acts to reduce hours and hourly wages for women and kids were actually conservatives, Tories, as they were called at the time, like Ashley. That tradition, Carlyle was a sort of extreme representative of that. I mean, Carlyle was a sort of proto-fascist, let's not romanticize him, he lionized strongmen, Frederick the Great, and he didn't really believe in democracy. But he also had—he was appalled by the sort of, you know, the—like, what's the phrase I'm looking for? The sort of destructive aspects of industrial capitalism, both on the workers, you know, he said it was a dehumanizing system, sounded like Marx in some ways. That it dehumanized the workers, but also it destroyed the environment.He was an early environmentalist. He venerated the environment, was actually very strongly linked to the transcendentalists in America, people like Thoreau, who went to visit him when he visited Britain and he saw the sort of destructive impact that capitalism was having locally in places like Manchester, which were filthy with filthy rivers, etc. So he just saw the whole system as sort of morally bankrupt and he was a great writer, Carlyle, whatever you think of him. Great user of language, so he has these great ringing phrases like, you know, the cash nexus or calling it the Gospel of Mammonism, the shabbiest gospel ever preached under the sun was industrial capitalism.So, again, you know, that's a sort of paradoxical thing, because I think for so long conservatism was associated with, you know, with support for the free market and still is in most of the Republican Party, but then along comes Trump and sort of conquers the party with a, you know, more skeptical, as you say, romantic, not really based on any reality, but a sort of romantic view that America can stand by itself in the world. I mean, I see Trump actually as a sort of an effort to sort of throw back to mercantile capitalism in a way. You know, which was not just pre-industrial, but was also pre-democracy, run by monarchs, which I'm sure appeals to him, and it was based on, you know, large—there were large tariffs. You couldn't import things in the UK. If you want to import anything to the UK, you have to send it on a British ship because of the navigation laws. It was a very protectionist system and it's actually, you know, as I said, had a lot of parallels with what Trump's trying to do or tries to do until he backs off.Andrew Keen: You cheat a little bit in the book in the sense that you—everyone has their own chapter. We'll talk a little bit about Hayek and Smith and Lenin and Friedman. You do have one chapter on Marx, but you also have a chapter on Engels. So you kind of cheat. You combine the two. Is it possible, though, to do—and you've just written this book, so you know this as well as anyone. How do you write a book about capitalism and its critics and only really give one chapter to Marx, who is so dominant? I mean, you've got lots of Marxists in the book, including Lenin and Luxemburg. How fundamental is Marx to a criticism of capitalism? Is most criticism, especially from the left, from progressives, is it really just all a footnote to Marx?John Cassidy: I wouldn't go that far, but I think obviously on the left he is the central figure. But there's an element of sort of trying to rebuild Engels a bit in this. I mean, I think of Engels and Marx—I mean obviously Marx wrote the great classic "Capital," etc. But in the 1840s, when they both started writing about capitalism, Engels was sort of ahead of Marx in some ways. I mean, the sort of materialist concept, the idea that economics rules everything, Engels actually was the first one to come up with that in an essay in the 1840s which Marx then published in one of his—in the German newspaper he worked for at the time, radical newspaper, and he acknowledged openly that that was really what got him thinking seriously about economics, and even in the late—in 20, 25 years later when he wrote "Capital," all three volumes of it and the Grundrisse, just these enormous outpourings of analysis on capitalism.He acknowledged Engels's role in that and obviously Engels wrote the first draft of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 too, which Marx then topped and tailed and—he was a better writer obviously, Marx, and he gave it the dramatic language that we all know it for. So I think Engels and Marx together obviously are the central sort of figures in the sort of left-wing critique. But they didn't start out like that. I mean, they were very obscure, you've got to remember.You know, they were—when they were writing, Marx was writing "Capital" in London, it never even got published in English for another 20 years. It was just published in German. He was basically an expat. He had been thrown out of Germany, he had been thrown out of France, so England was last resort and the British didn't consider him a threat so they were happy to let him and the rest of the German sort of left in there. I think it became—it became the sort of epochal figure after his death really, I think, when he was picked up by the left-wing parties, which are especially the SPD in Germany, which was the first sort of socialist mass party and was officially Marxist until the First World War and there were great internal debates.And then of course, because Lenin and the Russians came out of that tradition too, Marxism then became the official doctrine of the Soviet Union when they adopted a version of it. And again there were massive internal arguments about what Marx really meant, and in fact, you know, one interpretation of the last 150 years of left-wing sort of intellectual development is as a sort of argument about what did Marx really mean and what are the important bits of it, what are the less essential bits of it. It's a bit like the "what did Keynes really mean" that you get in liberal circles.So yeah, Marx, obviously, this is basically an intellectual history of critiques of capitalism. In that frame, he is absolutely a central figure. Why didn't I give him more space than a chapter and a chapter and a half with Engels? There have been a million books written about Marx. I mean, it's not that—it's not that he's an unknown figure. You know, there's a best-selling book written in Britain about 20 years ago about him and then I was quoting, in my biographical research, I relied on some more recent, more scholarly biographies. So he's an endlessly fascinating figure but I didn't want him to dominate the book so I gave him basically the same space as everybody else.Andrew Keen: You've got, as I said, you've got a chapter on Adam Smith who's often considered the father of economics. You've got a chapter on Keynes. You've got a chapter on Friedman. And you've got a chapter on Hayek, all the great modern economists. Is it possible, John, to be a distinguished economist one way or the other and not be a critic of capitalism?John Cassidy: Well, I don't—I mean, I think history would suggest that the greatest economists have been critics of capitalism in their own time. People would say to me, what the hell have you got Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in a book about critics of capitalism? They were great exponents, defenders of capitalism. They loved the system. That is perfectly true. But in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, middle of the 20th century, they were actually arch-critics of the ruling form of capitalism at the time, which was what I call managed capitalism. What some people call Keynesianism, what other people call European social democracy, whatever you call it, it was a model of a mixed economy in which the government played a large role both in propping up demand and in providing an extensive social safety net in the UK and providing public healthcare and public education. It was a sort of hybrid model.Most of the economy in terms of the businesses remained in private hands. So most production was capitalistic. It was a capitalist system. They didn't go to the Soviet model of nationalizing everything and Britain did nationalize some businesses, but most places didn't. The US of course didn't but it was a form of managed capitalism. And Hayek and Friedman were both great critics of that and wanted to sort of move back to 19th century laissez-faire model.Keynes was a—was actually a great, I view him anyway, as really a sort of late Victorian liberal and was trying to protect as much of the sort of J.S. Mill view of the world as he could, but he thought capitalism had one fatal flaw: that it tended to fall into recessions and then they can snowball and the whole system can collapse which is what had basically happened in the early 1930s until Keynesian policies were adopted. Keynes sort of differed from a lot of his followers—I have a chapter on Joan Robinson in there, who were pretty left-wing and wanted to sort of use Keynesianism as a way to shift the economy quite far to the left. Keynes didn't really believe in that. He has a famous quote that, you know, once you get to full employment, you can then rely on the free market to sort of take care of things. He was still a liberal at heart.Going back to Adam Smith, why is he in a book on criticism of capitalism? And again, it goes back to what I said at the beginning. He actually wrote "The Wealth of Nations"—he explains in the introduction—as a critique of mercantile capitalism. His argument was that he was a pro-free trader, pro-small business, free enterprise. His argument was if you get the government out of the way, we don't need these government-sponsored monopolies like the East India Company. If you just rely on the market, the sort of market forces and competition will produce a good outcome. So then he was seen as a great—you know, he is then seen as the apostle of free market capitalism. I mean when I started as a young reporter, when I used to report in Washington, all the conservatives used to wear Adam Smith badges. You don't see Donald Trump wearing an Adam Smith badge, but that was the case.He was also—the other aspect of Smith, which I highlight, which is not often remarked on—he's also a critic of big business. He has a famous section where he discusses the sort of tendency of any group of more than three businessmen when they get together to try and raise prices and conspire against consumers. And he was very suspicious of, as I say, large companies, monopolies. I think if Adam Smith existed today, I mean, I think he would be a big supporter of Lina Khan and the sort of antitrust movement, he would say capitalism is great as long as you have competition, but if you don't have competition it becomes, you know, exploitative.Andrew Keen: Yeah, if Smith came back to live today, you have a chapter on Thomas Piketty, maybe he may not be French, but he may be taking that position about how the rich benefit from the structure of investment. Piketty's core—I've never had Piketty on the show, but I've had some of his followers like Emmanuel Saez from Berkeley. Yeah. How powerful is Piketty's critique of capitalism within the context of the classical economic analysis from Hayek and Friedman? Yeah, it's a very good question.John Cassidy: It's a very good question. I mean, he's a very paradoxical figure, Piketty, in that he obviously shot to world fame and stardom with his book on capital in the 21st century, which in some ways he obviously used the capital as a way of linking himself to Marx, even though he said he never read Marx. But he was basically making the same argument that if you leave capitalism unrestrained and don't do anything about monopolies etc. or wealth, you're going to get massive inequality and he—I think his great contribution, Piketty and the school of people, one of them you mentioned, around him was we sort of had a vague idea that inequality was going up and that, you know, wages were stagnating, etc.What he and his colleagues did is they produced these sort of scientific empirical studies showing in very simple to understand terms how the sort of share of income and wealth of the top 10 percent, the top 5 percent, the top 1 percent and the top 0.1 percent basically skyrocketed from the 1970s to about 2010. And it was, you know, he was an MIT PhD. Saez, who you mentioned, is a Berkeley professor. They were schooled in neoclassical economics at Harvard and MIT and places like that. So the right couldn't dismiss them as sort of, you know, lefties or Trots or whatever who're just sort of making this stuff up. They had to acknowledge that this was actually an empirical reality.I think it did change the whole basis of the debate and it was sort of part of this reaction against capitalism in the 2010s. You know it was obviously linked to the sort of Sanders and the Occupy Wall Street movement at the time. It came out of the—you know, the financial crisis as well when Wall Street disgraced itself. I mean, I wrote a previous book on all that, but people have sort of, I think, forgotten the great reaction against that a decade ago, which I think even Trump sort of exploited, as I say, by using anti-banker rhetoric at the time.So, Piketty was a great figure, I think, from, you know, I was thinking, who are the most influential critics of capitalism in the 21st century? And I think you'd have to put him up there on the list. I'm not saying he's the only one or the most eminent one. But I think he is a central figure. Now, of course, you'd think, well, this is a really powerful critic of capitalism, and nobody's going to pick up, and Bernie's going to take off and everything. But here we are a decade later now. It seems to be what the backlash has produced is a swing to the right, not a swing to the left. So that's, again, a sort of paradox.Andrew Keen: One person I didn't expect to come up in the book, John, and I was fascinated with this chapter, is Silvia Federici. I've tried to get her on the show. We've had some books about her writing and her kind of—I don't know, you treat her critique as a feminist one. The role of women. Why did you choose to write a chapter about Federici and that feminist critique of capitalism?John Cassidy: Right, right. Well, I don't think it was just feminist. I'll explain what I think it was. Two reasons. Number one, I wanted to get more women into the book. I mean, it's in some sense, it is a history of economics and economic critiques. And they are overwhelmingly written by men and women were sort of written out of the narrative of capitalism for a very long time. So I tried to include as many sort of women as actual thinkers as I could and I have a couple of early socialist feminist thinkers, Anna Wheeler and Flora Tristan and then I cover some of the—I cover Rosa Luxemburg as the great sort of tribune of the left revolutionary socialist, communist whatever you want to call it. Anti-capitalist I think is probably also important to note about. Yeah, and then I also have Joan Robinson, but I wanted somebody to do something in the modern era, and I thought Federici, in the world of the Wages for Housework movement, is very interesting from two perspectives.Number one, Federici herself is a Marxist, and I think she probably would still consider herself a revolutionary. She's based in New York, as you know now. She lived in New York for 50 years, but she came from—she's originally Italian and came out of the Italian left in the 1960s, which was very radical. Do you know her? Did you talk to her? I didn't talk to her on this. No, she—I basically relied on, there has been a lot of, as you say, there's been a lot of stuff written about her over the years. She's written, you know, she's given various long interviews and she's written a book herself, a version, a history of housework, so I figured it was all there and it was just a matter of pulling it together.But I think the critique, why the critique is interesting, most of the book is a sort of critique of how capitalism works, you know, in the production or you know, in factories or in offices or you know, wherever capitalist operations are working, but her critique is sort of domestic reproduction, as she calls it, the role of unpaid labor in supporting capitalism. I mean it goes back a long way actually. There was this moment, I sort of trace it back to the 1940s and 1950s when there were feminists in America who were demonstrating outside factories and making the point that you know, the factory workers and the operations of the factory, it couldn't—there's one of the famous sort of tire factory in California demonstrations where the women made the argument, look this factory can't continue to operate unless we feed and clothe the workers and provide the next generation of workers. You know, that's domestic reproduction. So their argument was that housework should be paid and Federici took that idea and a couple of her colleagues, she founded the—it's a global movement, but she founded the most famous branch in New York City in the 1970s. In Park Slope near where I live actually.And they were—you call it feminists, they were feminists in a way, but they were rejected by the sort of mainstream feminist movement, the sort of Gloria Steinems of the world, who Federici was very critical of because she said they ignored, they really just wanted to get women ahead in the sort of capitalist economy and they ignored the sort of underlying from her perspective, the underlying sort of illegitimacy and exploitation of that system. So they were never accepted as part of the feminist movement. They're to the left of the Feminist Movement.Andrew Keen: You mentioned Keynes, of course, so central in all this, particularly his analysis of the role of automation in capitalism. We did a show recently with Robert Skidelsky and I'm sure you're familiar—John Cassidy: Yeah, yeah, great, great biography of Keynes.Andrew Keen: Yeah, the great biographer of Keynes, whose latest book is "Mindless: The Human Condition in the Age of AI." You yourself wrote a brilliant book on the last tech mania and dot-com capitalism. I used it in a lot of my writing and books. What's your analysis of AI in this latest mania and the role generally of manias in the history of capitalism and indeed in critiquing capitalism? Is AI just the next chapter of the dot-com boom?John Cassidy: I think it's a very deep question. I think I'd give two answers to it. In one sense it is just the latest mania the way—I mean, the way capitalism works is we have these, I go back to Kondratiev, one of my Russian economists who ended up being killed by Stalin. He was the sort of inventor of the long wave theory of capitalism. We have these short waves where you have sort of booms and busts driven by finance and debt etc. But we also have long waves driven by technology.And obviously, in the last 40, 50 years, the two big ones are the original deployment of the internet and microchip technology in the sort of 80s and 90s culminating in the dot-com boom of the late 90s, which as you say, I wrote about. Thanks very much for your kind comments on the book. If you just sort of compare it from a financial basis I think they are very similar just in terms of the sort of role of hype from Wall Street in hyping up these companies. The sort of FOMO aspect of it among investors that they you know, you can't miss out. So just buy the companies blindly. And the sort of lionization in the press and the media of, you know, of AI as the sort of great wave of the future.So if you take a sort of skeptical market based approach, I would say, yeah, this is just another sort of another mania which will eventually burst and it looked like it had burst for a few weeks when Trump put the tariffs up, now the market seemed to be recovering. But I think there is, there may be something new about it. I am not, I don't pretend to be a technical expert. I try to rely on the evidence of or the testimony of people who know the systems well and also economists who have studied it. It seems to me the closer you get to it the more alarming it is in terms of the potential shock value that there is there.I mean Trump and the sort of reaction to a larger extent can be traced back to the China shock where we had this global shock to American manufacturing and sort of hollowed out a lot of the industrial areas much of it, like industrial Britain was hollowed out in the 80s. If you, you know, even people like Altman and Elon Musk, they seem to think that this is going to be on a much larger scale than that and will basically, you know, get rid of the professions as they exist. Which would be a huge, huge shock. And I think a lot of the economists who studied this, who four or five years ago were relatively optimistic, people like Daron Acemoglu, David Autor—Andrew Keen: Simon Johnson, of course, who just won the Nobel Prize, and he's from England.John Cassidy: Simon, I did an event with Simon earlier this week. You know they've studied this a lot more closely than I have but I do interview them and I think five, six years ago they were sort of optimistic that you know this could just be a new steam engine or could be a microchip which would lead to sort of a lot more growth, rising productivity, rising productivity is usually associated with rising wages so sure there'd be short-term costs but ultimately it would be a good thing. Now, I think if you speak to them, they see since the, you know, obviously, the OpenAI—the original launch and now there's just this huge arms race with no government involvement at all I think they're coming to the conclusion that rather than being developed to sort of complement human labor, all these systems are just being rushed out to substitute for human labor. And it's just going, if current trends persist, it's going to be a China shock on an even bigger scale.You know what is going to, if that, if they're right, that is going to produce some huge political backlash at some point, that's inevitable. So I know—the thing when the dot-com bubble burst, it didn't really have that much long-term impact on the economy. People lost the sort of fake money they thought they'd made. And then the companies, obviously some of the companies like Amazon and you know Google were real genuine profit-making companies and if you bought them early you made a fortune. But AI does seem a sort of bigger, scarier phenomenon to me. I don't know. I mean, you're close to it. What do you think?Andrew Keen: Well, I'm waiting for a book, John, from you. I think you can combine dot-com and capitalism and its critics. We need you probably to cover it—you know more about it than me. Final question, I mean, it's a wonderful book and we haven't even scratched the surface everyone needs to get it. I enjoyed the chapter, for example, on Karl Polanyi and so much more. I mean, it's a big book. But my final question, John, is do you have any regrets about anyone you left out? The one person I would have liked to have been included was Rawls because of his sort of treatment of capitalism and luck as a kind of casino. I'm not sure whether you gave any thought to Rawls, but is there someone in retrospect you should have had a chapter on that you left out?John Cassidy: There are lots of people I left out. I mean, that's the problem. I mean there have been hundreds and hundreds of critics of capitalism. Rawls, of course, incredibly influential and his idea of the sort of, you know, the veil of ignorance that you should judge things not knowing where you are in the income distribution and then—Andrew Keen: And it's luck. I mean the idea of some people get lucky and some people don't.John Cassidy: It is the luck of the draw, obviously, what card you pull. I think that is a very powerful critique, but I just—because I am more of an expert on economics, I tended to leave out philosophers and sociologists. I mean, you know, you could say, where's Max Weber? Where are the anarchists? You know, where's Emma Goldman? Where's John Kenneth Galbraith, the sort of great mid-century critic of American industrial capitalism? There's so many people that you could include. I mean, I could have written 10 volumes. In fact, I refer in the book to, you know, there's always been a problem. G.D.H. Cole, a famous English historian, wrote a history of socialism back in the 1960s and 70s. You know, just getting to 1850 took him six volumes. So, you've got to pick and choose, and I don't claim this is the history of capitalism and its critics. That would be a ridiculous claim to make. I just claim it's a history written by me, and hopefully the people are interested in it, and they're sufficiently diverse that you can address all the big questions.Andrew Keen: Well it's certainly incredibly timely. Capitalism and its critics—more and more of them. Sometimes they don't even describe themselves as critics of capitalism when they're talking about oligarchs or billionaires, they're really criticizing capitalism. A must read from one of America's leading journalists. And would you call yourself a critic of capitalism, John?John Cassidy: Yeah, I guess I am, to some extent, sure. I mean, I'm not a—you know, I'm not on the far left, but I'd say I'm a center-left critic of capitalism. Yes, definitely, that would be fair.Andrew Keen: And does the left need to learn? Does everyone on the left need to read the book and learn the language of anti-capitalism in a more coherent and honest way?John Cassidy: I hope so. I mean, obviously, I'd be talking my own book there, as they say, but I hope that people on the left, but not just people on the left. I really did try to sort of be fair to the sort of right-wing critiques as well. I included the Carlyle chapter particularly, obviously, but in the later chapters, I also sort of refer to this emerging critique on the right, the sort of economic nationalist critique. So hopefully, I think people on the right could read it to understand the critiques from the left, and people on the left could read it to understand some of the critiques on the right as well.Andrew Keen: Well, it's a lovely book. It's enormously erudite and simultaneously readable. Anyone who likes John Cassidy's work from The New Yorker will love it. Congratulations, John, on the new book, and I'd love to get you back on the show as anti-capitalism in America picks up steam and perhaps manifests itself in the 2028 election. Thank you so much.John Cassidy: Thanks very much for inviting me on, it was fun.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your hosts are Paul Marden and Andy Povey.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website SkiptheQueue.fm.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. Show references:  Anna Preedy, Director M+H Showhttps://show.museumsandheritage.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/annapreedy/Jon Horsfield, CRO at Centegra, a Cinchio Solutions Partnerhttps://cinchio.com/uk/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-horsfield-957b3a4/Dom Jones, CEO, Mary Rose Trust https://maryrose.org/https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominicejones/https://www.skipthequeue.fm/episodes/dominic-jonesPaul Woolf, Trustee at Mary Rose Trusthttps://maryrose.org/https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-woolf/Stephen Spencer, Ambience Director, Stephen Spencer + Associateshttps://www.stephenspencerassociates.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/customerexperiencespecialist/https://www.skipthequeue.fm/episodes/stephen-spencerSarah Bagg, Founder, ReWork Consultinghttps://reworkconsulting.co.uk/https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahbagg/https://www.skipthequeue.fm/episodes/sarah-baggJeremy Mitchell, Chair of Petersfield Museum and Art Galleryhttps://www.petersfieldmuseum.co.uk/https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-mitchell-frsa-4529b95/Rachel Kuhn, Associate Director, BOP Consultinghttps://www.bop.co.uk/https://www.linkedin.com/in/kuhnrachel/  Transcriptions:Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, the podcast for people working in and working with visitor attractions. You join me today, out and about yet again. This time I am in London at Olympia for the Museums and Heritage Show. Hotly anticipated event in everybody's diary. We all look forward to it. Two days of talks and exhibitions and workshops. Just a whole lot of networking and fun. And of course, we've got the M and H awards as well. So in this episode, I am going to be joined by a number of different people from across the sector, museum and cultural institution professionals, we've got some consultants, we've got some suppliers to the industry, all pretty much giving us their take on what they've seen, what they're doing and what their thoughts are for the year ahead. So, without further ado, let's meet our first guest. Andy Povey: Hi, Anna. Welcome to Skip the Queue. Thank you for giving us some of your time on what must be a massively busy day for you. I wonder if you could just tell the audience who you are, what you do, a little bit about what museums and heritage is, because not everyone listening to the podcast comes from the museum sector. Anna Preedy: Andy, thanks. This is a great opportunity and always really lovely to see your happy smiley face at the Museums and Heritage Show. So M and H, as we're often referred to as, stands for Museums and Heritage and we're a small business that organises the principal trade exhibition for the Museums and Heritage sector that could be broadened, I suppose, into the cultural sector. We also have the awards ceremony for the sector and an online magazine. So we are Museums and Heritage, but we're often referred to as M and H and we've been around for a very long time, 30 plus years. Andy Povey: Oh, my word. Anna Preedy: I know. Andy Povey: And what's your role within the organisation? Your badge says Event Director today. That's one of many hats. Anna Preedy: I'm sure it is one of many hats because we're a very small team. So I own and manage the events, if you like. M and H is my baby. I've been doing it for a very long time. I feel like I'm truly immersed in the world of museums and heritage and would like to think that as a result of that, I kind of understand and appreciate some of the issues and then bring everyone together to actually get in the same room and to talk them through at the show. So, yeah, that's what we're about, really. Andy Povey: In a shorthand and obviously the show. We're in the middle of West London. It's a beautifully sunny day here at Olympia. The show is the culmination, I suppose of 12 months of work. So what actually goes in? What does a normal day look like for you on any month other than May? Anna Preedy: Yeah, it was funny actually. Sometimes people, I think, well, what do you do for the rest of the year? You just turn up to London for a couple of days, just turn up delivering an event like this. And also our award scheme is literally three, six, five days of the year job. So the moment we leave Olympia in London, we're already planning the next event. So it really is all encompassing. So I get involved in a lot. As I say, we're a small team, so I'm the person that tends to do most of the programming for the show. So we have 70 free talks. Everything at the show is free to attend, is free to visit. So we have an extensive programme of talks. We have about 170 exhibitors. Anna Preedy: So I'm, although I have a sales team for that, I'm managing them and looking after that and working with some of those exhibitors and then I'm very much involved in our awards. So the Museums and Heritage Awards look to celebrate and reward the very best in our sector and shine the spotlight on that not just in the UK but around the world. So we have a judging panel and I coordinate that. So pretty much every decision, I mean you look at the colour of the carpet, that which incidentally is bright pink, you look at the colour of the carpet here, who made the decision what colour it would be in the aisles this year it was me. So I, you know, I do get heavily involved in all the nitty gritty as well as the biggest strategic decisions. Andy Povey: Fantastic. Here on the show floor today it is really busy, there are an awful lot of people there. So this is all testament to everything that you've done to make this the success that it is. I'm sure that every exhibitor is going to walk away with maybe not a full order book, but definitely a fistful of business cards. Anna Preedy: I think that's it, what we really want. And we sort of build this event as the big catch up and we do that for a reason. And that is really to kind of give two days of the year people put those in their diary. It's a space where people can come together. So you know, there'll be people here standing on stands who obviously and understandably want to promote their product or service and are looking to generate new business. And then our visitors are looking for those services and enjoying the talks and everyone comes together and it's an opportunity to learn and network and connect and to do business in the broadest possible sense. Really. Andy Povey: No, I think that the line, the big catch up really sums the show up for me. I've been. I think I worked out on the way in this morning. It's the 15th time I've been to the show. It's one of my favourite in the year because it is a fantastic mix of the curatorial, the commercial, everything that goes into running a successful museum or heritage venue. Anna Preedy: I mean, it's funny when people ask me to summarise. I mean, for a start, it's quite difficult. You know, really, it should be museums, galleries, heritage, visitor, attractions, culture. You know, it is a very diverse sector and if you think about everything that goes into making a museum or a gallery or a historic house function, operate, engage, it's as diverse as the organisational types are themselves and we try and bring all of that together. So, you know, whether you are the person that's responsible for generating income in your organisation, and perhaps that might be retail or it might be catering, it could be any. Any stream of income generation, there's going to be content for you here just as much as there's going to be content for you here. Anna Preedy: If you are head of exhibitions or if you are perhaps wearing the marketing hat and actually your job is, you know, communications or audience development, we try and represent the sector in its broadest scope. So there is something for everyone, quite. Andy Povey: Literally, and that's apparent just from looking on the show floor. So with all of your experience in the museum sector, and I suppose you get to see. See quite an awful lot of new stuff, new products. So what are you anticipating happening in the next sort of 6 to 12 months in our sector? Anna Preedy: I mean, that's a big question because, you know, going back to what were just saying, and the kind of different verticals, if you like, that sit within the sector, but I think the obvious one probably has to be AI, and the influence of that. I'm not saying that's going to change everything overnight. It won't, but it's. You can see the ripples already and you can see that reflected out here on the exhibition floor with exhibitors, and you can also see it in our programme. So this sort of AI is only, you know, one aspect of, you know, the bigger, wider digital story. But I just think it's probably more about the sector evolving than it is about, you know, grand sweeping changes in any one direction. Anna Preedy: But the other thing to say, of course, is that as funding gets more the sort of the economic landscape, you know, is tough. Undeniably so. So generating revenue and finding new ways to do that and prioritising it within your organisation, but not at the expense of everything else that's done. And it should never be at the expense of everything else that's done. And it's perfectly possible to do both. Nobody's suggesting that it's easy, nothing's easy but, you know, it's possible. Anna Preedy: And I think the show here, and also what we do online in terms of, you know, news and features, all of that, and what other organisations are doing in this sector, of course, and the partners we work with, but I think just helping kind of bridge that gap really, and to provide solutions and to provide inspiration and actually, you know, there's no need to reinvent the wheel constantly. Actually, I think it was somebody that worked in the sector. I'm reluctant to names, but there was somebody I remember once saying, well, know, stealing with glee is kind of, you know, and I think actually, you know, if you see somebody else is doing something great and actually we see that in our wards, you know, that's the whole point. Let's shine a spotlight on good work. Well, that might inspire someone else. Anna Preedy: It's not about ripping something off and it's not absolute replication. But actually, you know, scalable changes in your organisation that may have been inspired by somebody else's is only a good thing as well. Andy Povey: It's all that evolutionary process, isn't it? So, great experience. Thank you on behalf of everybody that's come to the show today. Anna Preedy: Well, thank you very much. I love doing it, I really genuinely do and there is nothing like the buzz of a busy event. Jon Horsfield: Yeah, My name is Jon Horsfield, I'm the Chief Revenue Officer of Cincio Solutions. Andy Povey: And what does Cincio do? Jon Horsfield: We provide F and B technology, so kiosks, point of sale payments, kitchen systems, inventory, self checkout to the museums, heritage zoos, aquariums and hospitality industries. Andy Povey: Oh, fantastic. So I understand this is your first time here at the Museums and Heritage Show. Jon Horsfield: It is our first time. It's been an interesting learning curve. Andy Povey: Tell me more. Jon Horsfield: Well, our background is very much within the hospitality. We've been operating for about 20 to 23 years within the sort of high street hospitality side of things. Some of our London based listeners may have heard of Leon Restaurants or Coco Di Mama, we've been working with them for over 20 years. But we're looking at ways of bringing that high street technology into other industries and other Verticals and the museums and heritage is a vertical that we've identified as somewhere that could probably do with coming into the 21st century with some of the technology solutions available. Andy Povey: I hear what you're saying. So what do you think of the show? What are your first impressions? Give me your top three tips. Learning points. Jon Horsfield: Firstly, this industry takes a long time to get to know people. It seems to be long lead times. That's the first learning that we've had. Our traditional industry in hospitality, people will buy in this industry. It's going to take some time and we're happy about that. We understand that. So for us, this is about learning about know about how the industry works. Everybody's really friendly. Andy Povey: We try. Yeah. Jon Horsfield: That's one of the first things that we found out with this. This industry is everybody is really friendly and that's quite nice. Even some of our competitors, we're having nice conversations with people. Everybody is really lovely. The third point is the fact that I didn't know that there were so many niche markets and I found out where my mother buys her scarves and Christmas presents from. So it's been really interesting seeing the different types of things that people are looking for. We've sort of noticed that it's really about preservation. That's one of the main areas. There's a lot of things about preservation. Another one is about the display, how things are being displayed, and lots of innovative ways of doing that. But also the bit that we're really interested in is the commercialization. Jon Horsfield: There's a real push within the industry to start to commercialise things and bring in more revenue from the same people. Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's all about securing the destiny so that you're not reliant on funding from external parties or government and you taking that control. So what do you do at Centrio that helps? Jon Horsfield: Well, first of all. First of all, I would say the efficiencies that we can bring with back office systems integrations. We're very well aware of what we do, we're also aware of what we don't do. So, for example, we're not a ticketing provider, we're a specialist retail and F and B supplier. So it's about building those relationships and actually integrating. We've got a lot of integrations available and we're very open to that. So that's the first thing. But one of the key things that we're trying to bring to this industry is the way that you can use technology to increase revenue. So the kiosks that we've got here, it's proven that you'll get a minimum average transaction value increase of 10 to 15%. Andy Povey: And what do you put that down to? Jon Horsfield: The ability to upsell. Okay, with kiosks, as long as, if you put, for example, with a burger, if you just have a nice little button, say would you like the bacon fries with that? It's an extra few pounds. Well, actually if you've got an extra few pounds on every single transaction, that makes an incredible difference to the bottom line. From the same number of customers. Some of our clients over in the USA have seen an ATV increase above to 60% with the use of kiosks. Andy Povey: And that's just through selling additional fries. Jon Horsfield: Exactly. People will. I went to a talk many years ago when people started to adopt kiosks and the traditional thing is the fact that people will order two Big Macs and a fries to a kiosk, but when you go face to face, they will not order two Big Macs and a fries. Andy Povey: So you're saying I'm a shy fatty who's basically. Jon Horsfield: Absolutely not. Absolutely not, Andy. Absolutely not. So that's really what it's about. It's about using the sort of the high street technology and applying that to a different industry and trying to bring everybody along with us. Dominic Jones: And you need to listen to the Skip the Queue. It's the best podcast series ever. It'll give you this industry. Paul Marden: Perfect. That was a lovely little sound bite. Dom, welcome. Dominic Jones: It's the truth. It's the truth. I love Skip the Queue. Paul Marden: Welcome back to Skip the Queue. Paul, welcome. For your first time, let's just start with a quick introduction. Dom, tell everybody about yourself. Dominic Jones: So I'm Dominic Jones, I'm the chief executive of the Mary Rose Trust and I'm probably one of Skip the Queue's biggest fans. Paul Marden: I love it. And biggest stars. Dominic Jones: Well, I don't know. At one point I was number one. Paul Marden: And Paul, what about yourself? What's your world? Paul Woolf: Well, I'm Paul Woolf, I've just joined the Mary Rose as a trustee. Dom's been kind of hunting me down politely for a little bit of time. When he found out that I left the King's Theatre, he was very kind and said, right, you know, now you've got time on your hands, you know, would you come over and help? So yeah, so my role is to support Dom and to just help zhuzh things up a bit, which is kind of what I do and just bring some new insights into the business and to develop It a bit. And look at the brand, which is where my skills. Dominic Jones: Paul is underselling himself. He is incredible. And the Mary Rose Trust is amazing. You haven't visited. You should visit. We're in Portsmouth Historic Dock blog. But what's great about it is it's about attracting great people. I'm a trustee, so I'm a trustee for good whites. I'm a trustee for pomp in the community. I know you're a trustee for kids in museums. I love your posts and the fact that you come visit us, but it's about getting the right team and the right people and Paul has single handedly made such a difference to performance art in the country, but also in Portsmouth and before that had a massive career in the entertainment. So we're getting a talent. It's like getting a Premiership player. And we got Paul Woolf so I am delighted. Dominic Jones: And we brought him here to the Museum Heritage show to say this is our industry because we want him to get sucked into it because he is going to be incredible. You honestly, you'll have a whole episode on him one day. Paul Marden: And this is the place to come, isn't it? Such a buzz about the place. Paul Woolf: I've gone red. I've gone red. Embarrassed. Paul Marden: So have you seen some talks already? What's been impressive for you so far, Paul? Paul Woolf: Well, we did actually with the first talk we were listening to was all about touring and reducing your environmental impact on touring, which is quite interesting. And what I said there was that, you know, as time gone by and we had this a little bit at theatre actually. But if you want to go for grant funding today, the first question on the grant funding form, almost the first question after the company name and how much money you want is environmental impact. Paul Marden: Yeah, yeah. Paul Woolf: And so if you're going tour and we're looking now, you know, one of the things that Dom and I have been talking about is, you know, Mary Rose is brilliant. It's fantastic. You know, it's great. It's in the dockyard in Portsmouth and you know, so. And, and the Andes, New York, you know, everywhere. Dominic Jones: Take her on tour. Paul Woolf: Why isn't it on tour? Yeah. Now I know there are issues around on tour. You know, we've got the collections team going. Yeah, don't touch. But nonetheless it was interesting listening to that because obviously you've got to. Now you can't do that. You can't just put in a lorry, send it off and. And so I thought that was quite interesting. Dominic Jones: Two, it's all the industry coming together. It's not about status. You can come here as a student or as a CEO and you're all welcome. In fact, I introduced Kelly from Rubber Cheese, your company, into Andy Povey and now you guys have a business together. And I introduced them here in this spot outside the men's toilets at Museum and Heritage. Paul Woolf: Which is where we're standing, by the way. Everybody, we're outside the toilet. Dominic Jones: It's the networking, it's the talks. And we're about to see Bernard from ALVA in a minute, who'll be brilliant. Paul Marden: Yes. Dominic Jones: But all of these talks inspire you and then the conversations and just seeing you Andy today, I'm so delighted. And Skip the Queue. He's going from strength to strength. I love the new format. I love how you're taking it on tour. You need to bring it to the May Rose next. Right. Paul Marden: I think we might be coming sometimes soon for a conference near you. Dominic Jones: What? The Association of Independent Museums? Paul Marden: You might be doing an AIM conference with you. Dominic Jones: Excellent. Paul Marden: Look, guys, it's been lovely to talk to you. Enjoy the rest of your day here at M and H. Paul Marden: Stephen, welcome back to Skip the Queue. Stephen Spencer: Thank you very much. Paul Marden: For listeners, remind them what you do. Stephen Spencer: So I'm Stephen Spencer. My company, Stephen Spencer Associates, we call ourselves the Ambience Architects because we try to help every organisation gain deeper insight into the visitor experience as it's actually experienced by the visitor. I know it sounds a crazy idea, really, to achieve better impact and engagement from visitors and then ultimately better sustainability in all senses for the organisation. Paul Marden: For listeners, the Ambience Lounge here at M and H is absolutely rammed at the moment. Stephen Spencer: I'm trying to get in myself. Paul Marden: I know, it's amazing. So what are you hoping for this networking lounge? Stephen Spencer: Well, what we're aiming to do is create a space for quality conversations, for people to meet friends and contacts old and new, to discover new technologies, new ideas or just really to come and have a sounding board. So we're offering free one to one advice clinic. Paul Marden: Oh, really? Stephen Spencer: Across a whole range of aspects of the visitor journey, from core mission to revenue generation and storytelling. Because I think, you know, one of the things we see most powerfully being exploited by the successful organisations is that kind of narrative thread that runs through the whole thing. What am I about? Why is that important? Why should you support me? How do I deliver that and more of it in every interaction? Paul Marden: So you're Having those sorts of conversations here with people on a one to one basis. Stephen Spencer: Then we also are hosting the structured networking event. So all of the sector support organisations that are here, they have scheduled networking events when really people can just come and meet their peers and swap experiences and again find new people to lean on and be part of an enriched network. Paul Marden: Absolutely. So we are only half a day in, not even quite half a day into a two day programme. So it's very early to say, but exciting conversations, things are going in the direction that you hoped for. Stephen Spencer: Yes, I think, I mean, we know that the sector is really challenged at the moment, really, the fact that we're in now such a crazy world of total constant disruption and uncertainty. But equally we offer something that is reassuring, that is enriching, it's life enhancing. We just need to find better ways to, to do that and reach audiences and reach new audiences and just keep them coming back. And the conversations that I've heard so far have been very much around that. So it's very exciting. Paul Marden: Excellent. One of themes of this episode that we'll be talking to lots of people about is a little bit of crystal ball gazing. You're right, the world is a hugely, massively disrupted place at the moment. But what do you see the next six or 12 months looking like and then what does it look like for the sector in maybe a five year time horizon? Stephen Spencer: Okay, well, you don't ask easy questions. So I think there will be a bit of a kind of shaking down in what we understand to be the right uses of digital technology, AI. I think we see all the mistakes that were made with social media and what it's literally done to the world. And whilst there are always examples of, let's say, museums using social media very cleverly and intelligently, we know that's against the backdrop of a lot of negativity and harm. So why would we want to repeat that, for example, with generative AI? Paul Marden: Indeed. Stephen Spencer: So I heard a talk about two years ago at the VAT conference about using AI to help the visitor to do the stuff that is difficult for them to do. In other words, to help them build an itinerary that is right for them. And I think until everyone is doing that, then they should be very wary of stepping off the carpet to try and do other things with it. Meanwhile, whilst it's an immersive experience, it is not just sitting in, you know, with all respect to those that do this, A, you know, surround sound visual box, it is actually what it's always been, which is meeting real people in authentic spaces and places, you know, using all the senses to tell stories. So I think we will need to see. Stephen Spencer: I've just been given a great coffee because that's the other thing we're offering in the coffee. It's good coffee. Not saying you can't get anywhere else in the show, just saying it's good here. Yeah. I think just some realism and common sense creeping into what we really should be using these technologies for and not leaving our visitors behind. I mean, for example, you know, a huge amount of the natural audience for the cultural sector. You know, people might not want to hear it, but we all know it's true. It's older people. And they aren't necessarily wanting to have to become digital natives to consume culture. So we shouldn't just say, you know, basically, unless you'll download our app, unless you'll do everything online, you're just going to be left behind. That's crazy. It doesn't make good business sense and it's not right. Stephen Spencer: So I just think some common sense and some. Maybe some regulation that will happen around uses of AI that might help and also, you know, around digital harms and just getting back to some basics. I was talking to a very old colleague earlier today who had just come back from a family holiday to Disney World, and he said, you know, you can't beat it, you cannot beat it. For that is immersive. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. But it's not sealed in a box. Stephen Spencer: No, no. And it really. It's a bit like Selfridges. I always took out. My favourite store is Selfridges. It still does what Harry Gordon Selfridge set out to do. He said, "Excite the mind and the hand will reach for the pocket." I always say. He didn't say excite the eye, he said, excite the mind. Paul Marden: Yeah. Stephen Spencer: The way you do that is through all the senses. Paul Marden: Amazing. Stephen Spencer: And so, you know, digital. I'm sure he'd be embracing that. He would be saying, what about the rest of it? Paul Marden: How do you add the human touch to that? Yeah. I was at Big Pit last week. Stephen Spencer: As they reopened, to see this. Yeah. Paul Marden: And it was such an amazing experience walking through that gift shop. They have so subtly brought the museum into the gift shop and blended the two really well. Stephen Spencer: Yes. And I think that raises the bar. And again, if you want to make more money as a museum, you need to be embracing that kind of approach, because if you just carry on doing what you've always done, your revenue will go down. Paul Marden: Yes. Stephen Spencer: And we all know your revenue needs to go up because other. Other sources of income will be going down. Paul Marden: Sarah, welcome back to Skip the Queue last time you were here, there was a much better looking presenter than, you were in the Kelly era. Sarah Bagg: Yes, we were. Paul Marden: It's almost as if there was a demarcation line before Kelly and after Kelly. Why don't you just introduce yourself for me? Tell the listeners what it is that you do. Sarah Bagg: So I'm Sarah Bagg. I'm the founder of Rework Consulting. The last time I spoke, it wasn't that long after our launch. I think like two and a half years ago. We've just had our third birthday. Paul Marden: Wow. Sarah Bagg: Which is completely incredible. When we first launched rework, were specifically for the visitor attractions industry and focused on ticketing. Paul Marden: Yep. Sarah Bagg: So obviously we are a tech ticketing consultancy business. In the last three and a half years we've grown and now have five verticals. So attractions are one of them. Paul Marden: And who else do you work with then? Sarah Bagg: So the art, the leisure industry. So whether it be activity centres, cinemas, bowling centres and then live entertainment. So it could be anything from sports, festivals etc and the arts, like theatres or. Paul Marden: So closely aligned to your attractions. Then things that people go and do but different kinds of things loosely. Sarah Bagg: Say they're like live entertainment. Paul Marden: I like that. That's a nice description. So this must be Mecca for you to have all of these people brought together telling amazing stories. Sarah Bagg: I think how I would sum up museum and heritage today is that I think we're kind of going through a period of like being transformed, almost like back. People are reconstructing, connecting with real experiences and with people. Paul Marden: Yeah. Sarah Bagg: And I would like to think that tech is invisible and they're just to support the experience. I think there's a lot of things that are going on at the moment around, you know, bit nostalgia and people dragging themselves back to the 90s. And there's a lot of conversations about people and customer service and experience. And although technology plays a huge part in that, I would still like to think that people come first and foremost, always slightly weird from a technology consultant. Paul Marden: Well, nobody goes to a visitor attraction to be there on their own and interact with technology. That's not the point of being there. Yeah. Interesting talks that you've been today. Sarah Bagg: I think one of my favourite was actually one of the first of the day, which was about. Of how do you enhance the visitor experience through either like music and your emotions and really tapping into how you feel through, like all your different senses. Which was one of Stephen's talks which I really enjoyed. Paul Marden: That's really interesting. Sarah Bagg: I think if people like look at the visitor industry and across the board, that's why I'm so keen to stay, like across four different sectors, we can learn so much pulling ideas from like hospitality and restaurants and bars.Paul Marden: Completely. Sarah Bagg: Even if you think about like your best, there's a new bar there, so you can not very far from my home in Brighton and the service is an amazing. And the design of the space really caters for whether you're in there with 10 people or whether you're sat at the bar on your own. It doesn't exclude people, depending on what age you are or why you gone into the bar. And I think we can learn a lot in the visitor attractions industry because there's been a lot of talk about families today. I don't have children and I think that there, you need. Sarah Bagg: We need to think more about actually that lots of other people go to visitor attractions Paul Marden: Completely. Sarah Bagg: And they don't necessarily take children and they might want to go on their own. Yes, but what are we doing to cater for all of those people? There's nothing. Paul Marden: How do you make them feel welcome? How do you make them feel like they're a first class guest? The same as everybody else. Yeah. So where do you see the sector going over the next few years based on what you've seen today? Sarah Bagg: I think there'll be a lot more diversification between sectors. There's definitely a trend where people have got their assets. You know, like if you're looking at things like safari parks and zoos, places that have already got accommodation, but maybe like stately houses where there used to be workers that were living in those cottages or whatever, that they're sweating their assets. I think it would be interesting to see where tech takes us with that because there has been a tradition in the past that if you've got like, if your number one priority to sell is being like your hotel, then you would have like a PMS solution. But if it's the other way around, your number one priority is the attraction or the venue and you happen to have some accommodation, then how is that connecting to your online journey? Sarah Bagg: Because the last thing you want is like somebody having to do two separate transactions. Paul Marden: Oh, completely drives me crazy. Sarah Bagg: One thing I would also love to see is attractions thinking beyond their 10 till 6 opening hours completely. Because some days, like restaurants, I've seen it, you know, maybe they now close on Mondays and Tuesdays so they can give their staff a day off and they have different opening hours. Why are attractions still fixated in like keeping these standard opening hours? Because actually you might attract a completely different audience. There used to be a bit of a trend for like doing museum late. So I was speaking to a museum not very long ago about, you know, do they do like morning tours, like behind the scenes, kind of before it even opens. And I think the museum particularly said to me, like, "Oh, we're fine as we are.". Paul Marden: I've never met a museum that feels fine where it is at the moment. Sarah Bagg: But I guess the one thing I would love to see if I could sprinkle my fairy dus. Paul Marden: Come the revolution and you're in charge. Sarah Bagg: And it's not like, it's not even like rocket science, it's more investment into training and staff because the people that work in our industry are like the gold, you know, it's not tech, it's not pretty set works, it's not like fancy display cases. Yes, the artefacts and stuff are amazing. Paul Marden: But the stories, the people stuff. Yeah. Sarah Bagg: Give them empowerment and training and make the customer feel special. Paul Marden: Yes. Sarah Bagg: When you leave, like you've had that experience, you're only ever going to get that from through the people that you interact with completely. Paul Marden: Jeremy, hello. Welcome to Skip the Queue. We are, we are being slightly distracted by a dinosaur walking behind us. Such is life at M and H show. Jeremy Mitchell: Yeah. Paul Marden: So. Jeremy Mitchell: Well, anything to do with museums and dinosaurs, always great crowd pleasers. Paul Marden: Exactly, exactly. So is this your first time at M and H or have you been before? Jeremy Mitchell: Been before, but probably not for 10 years or more. It was, yes. I remember last time I came the theatres were enclosed so they were partitioned all the way around. Paul Marden: Right. Jeremy Mitchell: But because it's so popular now that would not just not would not work. It's a long time ago. It shows how long I've been volunteering. Paul Marden: In museums, doesn't it? So for our listeners, Jeremy, just introduce yourself and tell everyone about the role that you've got at the Petersfield Museum. Jeremy Mitchell: Okay, so I'm Jeremy Mitchell. I'm a trustee at Petersfield Museum now Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery. I'm actually now chair of trustees. Paul Marden: Paint a little picture for us of Petersfield Museum then. What could someone expect if they came to you? Apart from, as I understand, a very good cup of coffee. Jeremy Mitchell: A very good cup of coffee. Best in Petersfield. And that's not bad when there are 32 competitors. You'll get a little bit of everything you'll get a bit of. You'll get the story of Petersfield, but you'll get so much more. We've got collections of costume going back to the mid 18th century. We've got work of a local artist, Flora Torte, one of those forgotten female artists from between the wars. She's a story that we will be exploring. We've got, in partnership with the Edward Thomas Fellowship, a big archive of books and other artefacts by and about Edward Thomas, who was a poet, writer, literary critic. He's one of the poets killed in the First World War. But he's not well known as a war poet because he was writing about the impact of war on life at home. Jeremy Mitchell: So he's now more well known as a nature poet. Paul Marden: So you're telling the story not just of the place, you're telling the story of the people that have produced great art or had an impact on Petersfield. Jeremy Mitchell: Yes. And their networks and how they might relate to Petersfield in turn. And we've got the costume collection I mentioned going back to the mid 18th century, which came from Bedale School. They've all got stories to them. Paul Marden: Interesting. Jeremy Mitchell: This came from Bedale School, which is a private school on the edge of Petersfield. It was actually collected by their drama teacher between the 1950s and the 1970s. Paul Marden: Wow. Jeremy Mitchell: Because she believed in authenticity. So if she was putting on a 19th century production, she would want genuine 19th century clothes. Paul Marden: Let me tell you, my drama productions in a 1980s comprehensive did not include authentic 19th century costumes. Jeremy Mitchell: If were doing something like that at school, their parents would have been, all right, go down to the jumble sale, buy some material, make something that looks something like it. Paul Marden: Yeah. Jeremy Mitchell: But no, she was, well, if you haven't got anything in your attic that's suitable, please send me some money because there's a sale at Sotheby's in three months. Time off costume from the period. Paul Marden: Excellent. Jeremy Mitchell: And we've got some lovely pieces in there. When we put on the Peggy Guggenheim exhibition, which is what were talking about earlier today here, were able to bring in costume from the 1930s, Chanel dress, other high quality, not. Not necessarily worn by Peggy Guggenheim, but her. Paul Marden: Authentic of the period. Jeremy Mitchell: Authentic of the period. But her son was at Bedale, so she could have been asked to donate. Paul Marden: So. Okay. Jeremy Mitchell: Highly unlikely, but it was similar to items that she had been photographed in or would have been. Would have been wearing. Paul Marden: So tell me about the. The presentation. How was that? Jeremy Mitchell: It went so quickly. Paul Marden: Oh, yes. You get in the zone don't you? Jeremy Mitchell: You get in the zone. But it flowed and Louise was great. Louise had done the bulk of the. The work. She prepared the presentation that visually told the story of the exhibition and its outcomes and impacts. And I filled in the boring book, I call it the BBC, the boring but crucial. How we funded it, how we organised the project, management around it, the planning and getting buy in from the rest of the trustees at the beginning, because it was potentially a big financial commitment if we hadn't been able to fund it. Paul Marden: Isn't it interesting? So coming to an event like this is always. There's always so much to learn, it's always an enriching experience to come. But it's a great opportunity, isn't it, for a small museum and art gallery such as Petersfield? It feels a little bit like you're punching above your weight, doesn't it, to be invited onto this stage to talk about it. But really you're telling this amazing story and it's of interest to everybody that's here. Jeremy Mitchell: We want to share it. If we've been able to do it, then why can't they? Why can't you? Why can't we all do it? And yes, you need the story, but if you dig deep enough, those stories are there. Paul Marden: Absolutely, Absolutely. One of the things that is a real common conversation here, M and H, is looking forward, crystal ball gazing, talking. There's challenges in the sector, isn't there? There's lots of challenges around funding and I guess as a small museum, you must feel those choppy waters quite acutely. Jeremy Mitchell: Definitely. I mean, we're an independent museum, so we're not affected by spending cuts because we don't get any funding from that area. But the biggest challenge is from the funding perspective. Yes, we have a big income gap every year that we need to bridge. And now that so much more of the sector is losing what was its original core funding, they're all fishing in the same pond as us and they've got. Invariably they've got a fundraising team probably bigger than our entire museum team, let alone the volunteer fundraiser that we've got. So, yes, it is a challenge and you are having to run faster just to stand still. The ability to put on an exhibition like Peggy Guggenheim shows that we are worth it. Paul Marden: Yes, absolutely. Jeremy Mitchell: And the Guggenheim was funded by Art Fund Western loan programme and an Arts Council project grant. And it was a large Arts Council project grant. Paul Marden: So although everyone's fishing in the same pond as you're managing to yeah. To stretch my analogy just a little bit too far, you are managing to. To get some grant funding and. Jeremy Mitchell: Yes. Paul Marden: And lift some tiddlers out the pond. Jeremy Mitchell: Yes. But it was quite clear that with Peggy it was a story that had to be told. Paul Marden: So we talked a little bit about challenging times. But one of the big opportunities at M and H is to be inspired to think about where the opportunities are going forwards. You've had a day here today. What are you thinking as inspiration as next big things for Petersfield Museum. Jeremy Mitchell: I'm finding that really difficult because we're small, we're a small site, Arkansas, I think has got to be a way forward. I miss the talk. But they're all being recorded. Paul Marden: Yes. Jeremy Mitchell: So I shall be picking that one up with interest. But AR is something. We've got police cells. Well, we've got a police cell. Paul Marden: Okay. Jeremy Mitchell: Now, wouldn't it be great to tell an augmented reality story of Victorian justice to kids? Paul Marden: Yes. Jeremy Mitchell: While they're sat in a victory in a Victorian police cell on a hard wooden bench. That is the original bench that this prisoners would have slept on. Paul Marden: I've done enough school visits to know there's enough kids that I could put in a jail just to keep them happy or to at least keep them quiet whilst the rest of us enjoy our visit. Yes. I feel like I need to come to Petersfield and talk more about Peggy because I think there might be an entire episode of Skip the Queue to talk just about putting on a big exhibition like that. Jeremy Mitchell: Yeah, no, definitely. If you drop me an email you can skip the queue and I'll take you around. Paul Marden: Oh lovely, Rachel, welcome to Skip the Queue. You join me here at M and H show. And we've taken over someone's stand, haven't we? I know, it feels a bit weird, doesn't it? Rachel Kuhn: I feel like we're squatting but I. Paul Marden: Feel a little bit like the Two Ronnies, cuz we're sat behind the desk. It's very strange. Which one are you? Anyway, just for listeners. Introduce yourself for me. Tell listeners what it is that you do at BOP Consulting. Rachel Kuhn: Yeah, so I'm Rachel Kuhn, I'm an associate director at BOP and we specialise in culture and the creative economy and kind of working across everything that is to do with culture and creative economy globally. But I lead most of our strategy and planning projects, particularly in the UK and Ireland, generally working with arts, heritage, cultural organisations, from the very earliest big picture strategy through to real nitty gritty sort of operational plans and outside of bop. I'm a trustee for Kids in Museums, where we love to hang, and also a new trustee with the Postal Museum. Paul Marden: Given what you do at bop, this must be like the highlight of the year for you to just soak up what everybody is doing. Rachel Kuhn: I love it. I mean, it's so lovely just going around, chatting to everybody, listening in on the talks and I think that spirit of generosity, you know, like, it just comes across, doesn't it? And it just reminds me why I love this sector, why I'm here. You know, everyone wants to, you know, contribute and it's that whole sort of spirit of what do they say? We know when the tide rises, so do all the boats or all the ships. And I feel like that's the spirit here and it's lovely. Paul Marden: It is such a happy place and it's such a busy, vibrant space, isn't it? What have been the standout things for you that you've seen today? Rachel Kuhn: I think probably on that spirit of generosity. Rosie Baker at the founding museum talking about the incredible work they've done with their events, hires, programmes. Obviously got to give a shout out to the Association of Cultural Enterprise. I've been doing a lot of hanging out there at their stage day. So Gurdon gave us the rundown of the benchmarking this morning. Some really good takeaways from that and Rachel Mackay, I mean, like, obviously. Paul Marden: Want to go into. Rachel Kuhn: You always want to see her. Really good fun, but lovely to hear. She's talking about her strategy, the Visitor Experience strategy. And you know what, I spend so much time going into places looking at these sub strategies, like visual experience strategies that just haven't been written in alignment with the overall strategy. So it's lovely to see that linking through, you know, and obviously I'm from a Visitor Experience background, so hugely passionate about the way that Visitor Experience teams can make visitors feel the organization's values. And that alignment was really impressive. So, yeah, really lovely and loads of great takeaways from all those talks. Paul Marden: I will just say for listeners, all of these talks have been recorded, so everyone's going to be able to download the materials. It take a couple of weeks before they were actually published. But one of the questions that I've asked everybody in these vox pops has been, let's do some crystal ball gazing. It's. It stinks at the moment, doesn't it? The, the, the economy is fluctuating, there is so much going on. What do you see 6 to 12 month view look like? And then let's really push the boat out. Can we crystal ball gaze maybe in five years? Rachel Kuhn: Yeah.  I mean, look, I think the whole problem at the moment and what's causing that sort of nervousness is there's just a complete lack of surety about loads of things. You know, in some ways, you know, many organisations have welcomed the extension for the MPO round, the current round, but for many, you know, that's just pushed back the opportunity to get in on that round that little bit further away. It's caused that sort of nervousness with organisations are having to ride on with the same funding that they asked for some years ago that just doesn't, you know, match, you know, and it's actually a real time cut for them. Paul Marden: Absolutely. Rachel Kuhn: So I think, very hard to say, I don't know that there's much I can say. I feel like as at sea as everyone else, I think about what the landscape looks like in the next six months, but I think that never has there been, you know, a better time than something like this like the M and H show. You know, this is about coming together and being generous and sharing that information and I think reaching out to each other and making sure that we're sort of cross pollinating there. There's so much good stuff going on and we've always been really good at that and I think sometimes when we're feeling a bit down, it feels like, oh, I just don't want to go to something like this and meet others and, you know, get into a bit of a misery cycle. Rachel Kuhn: But actually it's so uplifting to be at something like this. And I think, you know, what we've seen here is at the show today, I think, is organisations being really generous with their experience and their expertise. Suppliers and consultants and supporters of the sector being really generous with their time and their expertise and actually just shows just spending a bit of time with each other, asking things of each other. We've just got loads of stuff to share and we're all really up for it. And I think that generosity is so critical and I mean, obviously I'm going to plug, I've got to plug it. Rachel Kuhn: So, you know, if you are a supplier, if you are a commercial business working in this sector, it might be tough times for you, but it's certainly nowhere near as hard as it is for the arts and cultural heritage organisations in the sector. You know, reach out to them and see how you can support them and help them. I mean, you and I have both been on a bit of a drive recently to try and drum up some sponsorship and corporate support for kids in museums who, you know, an Arts council MPO who we're incredible, incredibly proud to represent and, you know, do reach out to us. If you've been thinking, oh, I just want to sponsor something and I'd love to sponsor us. Paul Marden: Exactly. I mean, there's loads of opportunities when you take kids in museums as an example, loads of opportunities for. And this is what Arts Council wants us to do. They want us to be more independent, to generate more of our own funding and we've got a great brand, we do some amazing work and there's lots of opportunities for those commercial organisations who align with our values to help to support us. Rachel Kuhn: So I think you asked me there about what's in the next year. So next year, six months, I don't know is the answer. I think it's just a difficult time. So my advice is simply get out there, connect, learn from each other, energise each other, bring each other up. Let's not get into that sort of doom cycle. That's very easy next five years. You know what, I've had some really interesting meetings and conversations over the last. Well, one particularly interesting one today, some other ones about some funds that might be opening up, which I think is really exciting. You know, we've seen this really big challenge with funding, you know, slowing funding going in much larger amounts to a smaller number of large organisations and that causes real problems. But I think there might be a small turnaround on that. Rachel Kuhn: I'm not crumbs in the earth. I think it's still tough times. But that was really exciting to hear about. I'm also seeing here at the show today. I've been speaking to a lot of suppliers whose their models seem to be shifting a lot. So a lot more opportunities here where it requires no investment from the attraction and a lot more sort of interesting and different types of profit share models, which I think is really interesting. So I think the other thing I'd say is if you're an attraction, don't discount partnering some of these organisations because actually, you know, go and talk to them. Rachel Kuhn: Don't just, don't just count them out because you think you haven't got anything to invest because many of them are visiting new models and the couple that I've spoken to who aren't, learn from your competitors and start doing some different models. And I think that's been really interesting to hear some very different models here for some of the products, which is really exciting. Paul Marden: It is really hard sitting on the other side of the fence, as a supplier, we need cash flow as well. We've got to pay bills and all of those sorts of things. But you're right, there are interesting ways in which we all want to have a conversation. As you say, don't sit back afraid to engage in the conversation because you've got nothing to invest, you've got an important brand, you've got an audience. Those are valuable assets that a supplier like us would want to partner with you to help you to bring a project to life. And that might be on a rev share model, it might be on a service model. There's lots of different ways you can slice it and dice it. Rachel Kuhn: And going back, on a closing note, I suppose, going back to that generosity thing, don't think because you haven't got any money to commission, you know, a supplier to the sector or a commercial company, that you can't reach out to them. Like, you know, we are in this because we really want to support these organisations. This is our passion. You know, many of us are from the sector. You know, I will always connect somebody or introduce somebody or find a way to get a little bit of pro bono happening, or, you know, many of my colleagues are on advisory committees, we're board members. And I think that's the same for so many of the companies that are, like, working with the sector. You know, reach out and ask for freebie, you know, don't ask, don't get. Paul Marden: Yeah, exactly. Rachel, it is delightful to talk to you as always. Thank you for joining us on Skip the Queue and I am sure, I'm sure we'll make this into a full episode one day soon. I do say that to everybody. Rachel Kuhn: Thanks so much. Lovely to speak to you. Paul Marden: Andy. Andy Povey: Paul.Paul Marden: We've just walked out of the M and H show for another year. What are your thoughts? Andy Povey: First, I'm exhausted, absolutely exhausted. I'm not sure that I can talk anymore because I've spent 48 hours having some of the most interesting conversations I've had all year. Paul Marden: No offence, Tonkin. Andy Povey: You were part of some of those conversations, obviously, Paul. Paul Marden: I was bowled over again by just the sheer number of people that were there and all those lovely conversations and everybody was just buzzing for the whole two days. Andy Povey: The energy was phenomenal. I worked out that something like the 15th show, M & H show that I've been to, and I don't know whether it's just recency because it's sitting in the far front of my mind at the moment, but it seems like this was the busiest one there's ever been. Paul Marden: Yeah, I can believe it. The one thing that didn't change, they're still working on Olympia. Andy Povey: I think that just goes on forever. It's like the fourth Bridge. Paul Marden: Talks that stood out to you. Andy Povey: I really enjoyed interpretation One led by the guy from the sign language education company whose name I can't remember right now. Paul Marden: Yeah, Nate. That was an amazing talk, listeners. We will be getting him on for a full interview. I'm going to solve the problem of how do I make a inherently audio podcast into something that's accessible for deaf people? By translating the podcast medium into some sort of BSL approach. So that was the conversation that we had yesterday after the talk. Andy Povey: I know. I really look forward to that. Then, of course, there was the George and Elise from Complete Works. Paul Marden: I know. They were amazing, weren't they? You couldn't tell at all that they were actors. Do you know, it was really strange when George. So there was a point in that talk that George gave where we all had a collective breathing exercise and it was just. It was. It was so brilliantly done and were all just captivated. There must have been. I rechon there was 100 people at theatre at that point. Absolutely. Because it was standing room only at the back. And were all just captivated by George. Just doing his click. Very, very clever. Andy Povey: But massively useful. I've seen the same thing from George before and I still use it to this day before going on to make a presentation myself. Paul Marden: Yeah, yeah. Andy Povey: Just grounding yourself, centering yourself. Well, it's fantastic. Paul Marden: Yeah. But the whole thing that they were talking about of how do we create opportunities to have meaningful conversations with guests when they arrive or throughout their entire experience at an attraction so that we don't just talk about the weather like we're typical English people. Andy Povey: That's great, isn't it? Go and tell a Brit not to talk. Talk about the weather. Paul Marden: But training your staff makes absolute sense. Training your staff to have the skills and the confidence to not talk about the weather. I thought that was really interesting. Andy Povey: It's an eye opener, isn't it? Something really simple, but could be groundbreaking. Paul Marden: Yeah. Andy Povey: Then what was your view on all of the exhibitors? What did you take away from all the stands and everybody? Paul Marden: Well, I loved having my conversation yesterday with Alan Turing. There was an AI model of Alan Turing that you could interact with and ask questions. And it was really interesting. There was a slight latency, so it didn't feel quite yet like a natural conversation because I would say something. And then there was a pause as Alan was thinking about it. But the things that he answered were absolutely spot on, the questions that I asked. So I thought that was quite interesting. Other exhibitors. Oh, there was a lovely point yesterday where I was admiring, there was a stand doing custom designed socks and I was admiring a design of a Jane Austen sock and there was just somebody stood next to me and I just said, "Oh, Jane Austen socks." Paul Marden: Very on Trend for the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen, that all of the museums in Hampshire will be buying those up. And should funnily you should say that I'm the chief executive of Chawton Park House, which is one of the museums in the last place that Jane Austen lived. So very interesting, very small world moment at that point. Andy Povey: I do, it's almost an oxymoron to talk about Jane Austen socks. I don't imagine her having worn anything with nylon or Lycra in it. Paul Marden: Very true. I hadn't tweaked that. Andy Povey: There was a lot of AI there wasn't there AI this, AI that. Paul Marden: And there were some really good examples of where that is being used in real life. Yeah, yeah. So there were some examples where there's AI being used to help with visitor counts around your attraction, to help you to optimise where you need to put people. I thought that Neil at Symantec just talking about what he called answer engine optimisation. That was interesting. There were some brilliant questions. There was one question from an audience member asking, are there any tools available for you to figure out whether how well your organisation is doing at being the source of truth for AI tools? Andy Povey: Yeah, yeah. So almost like your Google search engine ranking. Paul Marden: But exactly for ChatGPT. Andy Povey: And have you found one yet? Paul Marden: No, not yet. There's also quite a lot of people talking about ideas that have yet to find a home. Andy Povey: Yes. What a very beautiful way of putting it. Paul Marden: The people that have. That are presenting a topic that has yet to get a real life case study associated with it. So the rubber hasn't yet hit the road. I don't think on that. Andy Povey: No. I think that's true for an awful lot of AI, isn't it? Not just in our sector. Paul Marden: No. Andy Povey: It's very interesting to see where that's all going to go. And what are we going to think when we look back on this in two or three years time? Was it just another chocolate teapot or a problem looking for a solution? Or was it the revolution that we all anticipate. Paul Marden: And I think it will make fundamentals change. I think it's changing rapidly. But we need more real case studies of how you can do something interesting that is beyond just using ChatGPT to write your marketing copy for you. Andy Povey: Yeah, I mean it's all about putting the guest at the front of it, isn't it? Let's not obsess about the technology, let's look at what the technology is going to enable us to do. And back to the first part of this conversation, looking at accessibility, then are there tools within AI that are going to help with that? Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. So there was definitely. There was an interesting talk by Vox. The people that provide, they provide all of the radio boxes for everybody to wear at M and H that provides you with the voiceover of all of the speakers. But they use this technology across all manner of different attractions and they were talking about using AI to do real time translation of tours. So you could. Andy Povey: Very interesting. Paul Marden: Yeah. So you could have an English speaker wandering around doing your tour and it could real time translate up to. I think it was up to four languages. Andy Povey: BSL not being one of those languages. Paul Marden: Well, no, they were talking about real time in app being able to see subtitles. Now, I don't know whether they went on to say you could do BSL. And we know from the other presentation that not everybody that is deaf is able to read subtitles as fast as they can consume sign language. So it's important to have BSL. But there were some parts of that Vox product that did it address deaf people. It wasn't just multilingual content. Andy Povey: So AI people, if you're listening, you can take the idea of translating into BSL in real time and call it your own. Paul Marden: Yeah, we very much enjoyed hosting our theatre, didn't we? That was a lot. And Anna, if you are listening, and I hope you are, because lots of people have said very nice things in this episode about M and H. Andy and I would love to come back next year. Andy Povey: Absolutely. Paul Marden: And host a theatre for you. Any other thoughts? Andy Povey: Just really looking forward to the rest of the week off. Yeah, it's a sign of a good show when you walk away with all that positive feeling and that positive exhaustion and you probably need a week to reflect on all of the conversations that we've had. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. Next up we is AIM Conference at Mary Rose in June. I can't wait very much. Looking forward to that. Thank you ever so much for listening. We will join you again in a few weeks. See you soon. Bye Bye. Andy Povey: Draw.Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others to find us. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them to increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcripts from this episode and more over on our website, skipthequeue fm.  The 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey is now LIVE! Dive into groundbreaking benchmarks for the industryGain a better understanding of how to achieve the highest conversion ratesExplore the "why" behind visitor attraction site performanceLearn the impact of website optimisation and visitor engagement on conversion ratesUncover key steps to enhance user experience for greater conversionsDownload the 2024 Rubber Cheese Visitor Attraction Website Survey Report

Japan emerges as a major player among world powers as their ambassadors helped finalize the postwar treaties and create a new international body meant to stop large-scale wars before they began: The League of Nations. However, trouble continued brewing on the Korean Peninsula as a new mass movement for national liberation took to the streets.Higher Listenings: Joy for EducatorsA new podcast from Top Hat delivering ideas, relief, and joy to the future of teaching.Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the show My latest novel, "Califia's Crusade," is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Bookshop.org, and many other online platforms!

Chicago crime reporters descended upon Ruth and Carl Wanderer's Chicago home after the war hero's wife was shot dead in a holdup at their front door. Who was the Ragged Stranger who assaulted them? And why did he have Carl Wanderer's service weapon?Sources:Bigge, Lauren. “‘Shell Shock Treatments During World War I: A First Step Towards Modern Military Psychiatry.” National Museum of Health and Medicine. https://medicalmuseum.health.mil/index.cfm?p=media.news.article.2018.shell_shock_treatmentEghigian, Greg. “ The First World War and the Legacy of Shellshock.” Vol. 31, No. 4. Psychiatric Times. 28 February, 2018.Hecht, Ben. Charlie: The improbable Life & Times of Charles MacArthur (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957).Lesy, Michael. Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007)Murray, George in The Chicago Crime Book Ed. Albert Halper. (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1967).Nash, Jay Robert. Bloodletters and Badmen: A Narrative Encyclopedia of American Criminals from the Pilgrims to the Present (New York: M. Evans & Company, 1973).Schechter, Harold. Murderabilia: A History of Crime in 100 Objects (New York: Workman Publishing Co., 2023).As well as articles from the Washington Times, The Manning Times, Richmond TImes-dispatch, Chicago Tribune.And the Chicago Homicide database entry https://homicide.northwestern.edu/database/5270/Music: Credits to Holizna, Fesilyan Studios & Virginia Liston. Also featuring “It's a Long Way to Tipperary” by Jack Judge and “Old Pal” by Henry Burr.For more information, visit www.oldbloodpodcast.com

In this episode we start a look at some of the Forgotten Memoirs of the First World War, starting with Percy Croney's 'Soldiers Luck' published in the mid-1960s. Croney was a 1914 volunteer who served with the Essex Regiment and Scottish Rifles at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, being wounded several times and taken prisoner in March 1918. We ask what the value of memoirs like this are to our understanding of the Great War. Percy Croney - Soldier's Luck on Open LibraryGot a question about this episode or any others? Drop your question into the Old Front Line Discord Server or email the podcast.Send us a textSupport the show

In the decade before the First World War over ten thousand Russian Jews travelled across the Atlantic but instead of alighting in New York, where a large Jewish diaspora community was established, they came to Galveston, Texas. Galveston was not the final destination for most of the new arrivals, many travelled across the USA and settled in its rural and urban centres. In this episode of the Explaining History podcast we speak with author Rachel Cockerell, who traces the story of the Galveston Jews and the activities of her Great Grandfather David Jochelmann, who was the driving force behind the Galveston Movement. *****STOP PRESS*****I only ever talk about history on this podcast but I also have another life, yes, that of aspirant fantasy author and if that's your thing you can get a copy of my debut novel The Blood of Tharta, right here:Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you enjoy the Explaining History podcast and its many years of content and would like to help the show continue, please consider supporting it in the following ways:If you want to go ad-free, you can take out a membership hereOrYou can support the podcast via Patreon hereOr you can just say some nice things about it here Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/explaininghistory. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The new international status quo that emerged after the first World War was very different than what came before, and Japan was poised to become a major new power in this new world.Support the show My latest novel, "Califia's Crusade," is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Bookshop.org, and many other online platforms!

Friends of the Rosary,Today, May 13, the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, or Our Lady of the Holy Rosary of Fátima (Nossa Senhora de Fátima).This feast commemorates the Blessed Virgin Mary's first of six appearances to three Portuguese shepherd children in 1917.During the apparitions, Mary revealed herself as Our Lady of the Rosary and conveyed messages about the importance of prayer and penance.The message of Fatima includes a call to conversion of heart, repentance from sin, love and trust in God, and a dedication to the Blessed Virgin Mary, especially through the daily prayer of the Rosary.On May 13th, 1917, the siblings Francisco and Jacinta Marto, aged 9 and 7 respectively, with their cousin Lucia Dos Santos, aged 10, saw inside a cloud the figure of a woman dressed in white who bore in her hand a rosary.Our Lady of Fatima asked them to return to that place in the following months, always on the 13th day.At those meetings, Our Lady of Fatima revealed startling facts to the children who were to attend, such as the end of the First World War and the threat of a second war, which was even more terrible. Other revelations concerned the political order of the world and the advent of Communist Russia.Mary also exhorted the three shepherd children: “Pray, pray very much. Make sacrifices for sinners. Many souls go to hell, because no one is willing to help them with sacrifice.”“In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph,” she reassured the children.In 1930, the Catholic Church recognized the supernatural nature of Our Lady of Fatima's apparitions. In her honor, a sanctuary was erected, and faithful worldwide still visit it as a pilgrimage destination.Today is also the traditional commemoration of Our Lady of the Most Blessed Sacrament. Saint Peter Julian Eymard gave this title to our Blessed Mother in May 1868 to honor her relationship to the Holy Eucharist and to place her before us as a model in our devotion to the Blessed Sacrament.Ave Maria!Jesus, I Trust In You!Come, Holy Spirit, come!To Jesus through Mary!Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will. Please give us the grace to respond with joy!+ Mikel Amigot w/ María Blanca | RosaryNetwork.com, New York• May 13, 2025, Today's Rosary on YouTube | Daily broadcast at 7:30 pm ET

Winnie - the real-life bear who inspired A.A. Milne to create Winnie-the-Pooh - died at London Zoo on 12th May, 1934. Brought to the UK by Canadian soldier Harry Colbourn, who'd named her after Winnipeg, the approachable bear took up residence at the Zoo during the First World War, where she became a favourite with visiting children, who were permitted to ride on her back and feed her treats. One such visitor was none other than Christopher Robin. In this episode, The Retrospectors explain why Winnie's enclosure was an architectural triumph; consider A.A. Milne's attempt to distance his family from Pooh's legacy; and discover that the literary Pooh could have been a swan… Further Reading: • ‘The True Story of the Real-Life Winnie-the-Pooh' (HISTORY, 1934): https://www.history.com/news/the-true-story-of-the-real-life-winnie-the-pooh • ‘The skull of the 'real' Winnie goes on display' (BBC News, 2015): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-34844669 • ‘The bear who inspired Winnie-the-Pooh' (ZSL, 2014): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdOymRprTqM Love the show? Support us!  Join 

The eastern front of the first world war was much busier than its western counterpart and the stakes for one nation were much higher. When the war finally ended with the Entente triumphant, Japan was poised to enjoy the advantages of supporting the winning side.Support the show My latest novel, "Califia's Crusade," is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Bookshop.org, and many other online platforms!

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Rubina Raja, professor of classical archaeology and art at Aarhus University in Denmark.First, we go back to May 2015, when the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria was about to fall to Jihadist fighters and how of a group of men risked their lives to preserve the world-famous archaeology.Plus, the entrepreneur and engineer Yoshitada Minami and his wife Fumiko Minami who came up with a way to liberate women from two to three hours of housework a day through the invention of the rice cooker in 1955.Then the story of the sinking of the Lusitania, the British ocean liner sunk by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland during the First World War.Also, celebrating 80 years since the end of the Second World War in Europe we dive into the BBC archives to listen to correspondents capturing the scenes of joy across London on VE day in 1945.Finally, how in 2000, keen cricketer Paul Hawkins wanted to turn his passion into innovation when he created the technology we now known as ‘HawkEye'.Contributors: Khalil Hariri - archaeology expert who worked at Palmyra's museum Rubina Raja - professor of classical archaeology and art at Aarhus University in Denmark Aiji Minami - son of Yoshitada and Fumiko Minami Margaret Hague Thomas – passenger on the Lusitania Leslie Morton – merchant seaman on the Lusitania Paul Hawkins – founder of ‘Hawkeye'(Photo: Palmyra. Credit: PHAS / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

In this episode of podcast listeners questions we ask: what Great War items would you take to a Desert Island, how was cause of death accurately reported or not by the military authorities, how did men on the front line get news of other fronts and their own, and were truces to bury the dead common on the Western Front?Book Recommendation: Frederick Manning Her Privates We/Middle Parts of Fortune.Got a question about this episode or any others? Drop your question into the Old Front Line Discord Server or email the podcast.Send us a textSupport the show

The assassination of an Austrian Archduke sparks a chain reaction which would ignite a global conflict on a scale never seen before.If you'd like to read the complete "Literary Digest History of the World War," all ten volumes are available for free on the internet archive here.Support the show My latest novel, "Califia's Crusade," is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Bookshop.org, and many other online platforms!

In the first weeks of the outbreak of the First World War, the outdated Schlieffen Plan required the German Army to rapidly cross Belgium to attack northern France. Instead of the anticipated 6-8,000 troops, the Belgians fielded 32,000 men and defended the fortress town of Liege vigorously. German atrocities in Liege afterwards were the product of an imagined belief in guerrilla fighters amongst the civilian population.*****STOP PRESS*****I only ever talk about history on this podcast but I also have another life, yes, that of aspirant fantasy author and if that's your thing you can get a copy of my debut novel The Blood of Tharta, right here:Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you enjoy the Explaining History podcast and its many years of content and would like to help the show continue, please consider supporting it in the following ways:If you want to go ad-free, you can take out a membership hereOrYou can support the podcast via Patreon hereOr you can just say some nice things about it here Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/explaininghistory. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are few more respected economic analysts in the world than the Financial Times Chief Economic Commentator Martin Wolf. Yesterday, we ran a conversation with Wolf about the survival of American democracy. Today, we talk Trumpian economics, particularly tariff policy. Wolf characterizes Trump's trade policies as historically unprecedented in their scale, comprehensive nature, and unpredictability. But are they “dumb”, I asked? He acknowledges genuine issues driving tariff policy like global imbalances and deindustrialization but believes the current approach won't solve these problems. Wolf explains that the US-China trade war is causing significant economic disruption, with prohibitive tariffs likely stopping trade between the world's two dominant economies. He warns that investor confidence is damaged by unpredictability, which will take years to restore, and questions the wisdom of dismantling America's alliance system. Dumb, dumb and dumber. Five Key Takeaways* Trump's tariff policies are unprecedented in economic history for their scale, comprehensive nature affecting most of the world, and extraordinary unpredictability.* There are legitimate economic problems regarding global imbalances and deindustrialization, but Wolf believes the current approach won't solve these issues and may worsen them.* The economic consequences include potential slowdowns in US retail sales, reduced profits for retailers, job losses, and decreased manufacturing investment due to uncertainty.* Investor confidence is severely damaged by unpredictability, with concerns about US government stability reflected in Treasury markets, and this uncertainty could take "a decade or two" to fully dissipate.* Wolf compares the current US withdrawal from global leadership to America's post-WWI rejection of the League of Nations, calling it "strikingly willful" and potentially destabilizing for the global order. Full TranscriptAndrew Keen: Hello everybody, we are at the London office of the Financial Times with the chief economics commentator of the newspaper, one of the world's leading economists, Martin Wolf. Martin's been on the show many times. Martin, before we went live you suggested to me that this was your moment, that suddenly economics has become interesting again. Is it because of this Tariff thing that a certain Donald Trump has introduced well, there's no doubtMartin Wolf: what you describe as this tariff thing has created a novelty, to put it mildly. He's done things that as far as I can see have never been done before in the history of economics. So and you don't normally live through an experience with a set of policies, trade policy, which has been pretty unexciting since the Second World War, and you're suddenly in a different world. And that was not quite what we expected. In addition to that, it's not even as though it's sort of predictably in a different world. It was sort of every day or so. It seems to be something different. So in that sense, yes, it is very, very exciting. Now, there are other things going on, obviously in the administration and other areas which might turn out to be even more important. The attack on science and the funding of science, for example, the attack on universities. These are all very, important, the dismantling of important parts of the government, the relationship with allies, but I think this tariff war is remarkable for its scale. We've never seen changes in tariffs on this level before. It's comprehensive nature that base effects most of the world and it's extraordinary unpredictability. So this This is a new world for economists and we will be studying this, I'm absolutely sure, for half a century.Andrew Keen: My sense, Martin, is that one of the reasons you're enjoying it is because you're a natural polemicist and you haven't pulled your punches in your columns. I think you recently wrote in one of your last FTPs that America is inevitably going to lose in this war against China. Is it as dumb? As it seems. I mean, you're the chief economist at the chief economics commentator at the FT, one of the world's, as I said, most respected economists. You're an expert on this area. Is it just dumb? Are there any coherent economic arguments in favor of tariffs, of what they're doing? Well, I think...Martin Wolf: There is a genuine problem, and part of that is to do with trade. And more broadly the balance of payments, which is affecting the U.S., is genuine. There's a real set of issues, and economists, including me actually, have been discussing these problems, which you might call actually two problems, the global imbalances problem and the deindustrialization problem. These are two real problems, economic and social. The problem is that it's very hard for me to see how these policies that are now being introduced will solve those problems worldwide, and they are global problems. And the way the war is being pursued, if you like, by the Trump administration is such as, I think, inevitably to lose the many of the allies they ought to have in this contest and therefore they are playing this match, if we like, without the help of lots of people who should be on their side. And I don't think the way they're going about it now will solve that problem. I think making it worse but yes there are a couple of genuine real problems which is perfectly reasonable for them want to for them to want to address address if they can do so in a coherent well-plannedAndrew Keen: relatively inclusive way is it a problem with China essentially in terms of China producing too much and not buying enough of American goods is that the heart of the problem I think the problem China'sMartin Wolf: not the only such country. They are right to observe that Germany has also behaved somewhat in the same way, but Germany's capacity for disruption, though very real in Europe and I wrote about that in my book on the crisis published about a decade ago, is not global. The rise of China was bound to be a massively disruptive event. How could it not be? Suddenly there's a new peer competitor out there in the world. I don't think we had the right or the capacity to prevent its rise I would have strongly opposed any such effort but some people I'm sure would disagree but China is a vast country with a tremendously capable population and an even more capable government than we thought 20 or 30 years ago and its rise was going to be very disruptive its disruption is for the world I mean it's also disrupted Europe a lot it's disrupted any country that is competing with Chinese manufacturers. Actually, that includes Japan. Japan has been displaced as a manufacturing exporter to significant degree by China. So it's not just about America. One of the mistakes is thinking it's just about America. The rise of China is a fundamental transformational moment. And there is a specific problem with China, which is it's been following the general line of East Asian manufacturing-led development but because it's much bigger and because there are features of its economy particularly excess savings which are even larger than in other countries the disruption is even bigger so there's a genuine disruptive force here which we should have started dealing with consistently.Andrew Keen: About two decades ago. My sense is that Trump is trying in his own peculiar way to walk back some of these policies. But has the damage already been done? Well, that's a very interesting question.Martin Wolf: There are two dimensions that some damage has been done because it's working through the system now. Right now, there's essentially prohibitive tariffs between the US and China. And that means that trade between these two countries is largely going to stop and inevitably that's going to do a lot of damage because they, on both sides, but notably with China's supplies of manufacturers to the U.S. There are an enormous number of businesses across the United States that depend on these products. So that's going to be a disruption and it's going show itself up in economic activity and retail sales in the U.S. That's going have a significant effect. But I think the more important point is the degree of unpredictability and the degree of zaniness of what's happened, introducing these so-called reciprocal tariffs, which were reciprocal on one day and essentially getting rid of them the next for 90 days without anyone knowing what will follow them, for example, or introducing these obviously not expected, massively prohibitive tariffs on China, 145% tariffs and 125% on the other side, people suddenly realize that sort of anything can happen, things that they couldn't possibly imagine. It was completely outside their worst nightmares that this is what would happen when Donald Trump became president. After the first term, they didn't experience that. So I think the realization... That the range of possible developments of events is so far outside what you thought was possible changes the way you view the future and inevitably I think it's going to make investors who are going to be affected by trade which is basically anyone in manufacturing quite a lot of other businesses very very nervous about making commitments which they can't walk back so I think that everybody's going to become very risk averse. That includes allies, potential allies, because they don't know what's going happen to them. Should they align themselves with the US? Well, maybe that won't work. Look at what has happened to Canada. So, I think the In this respect, they have broadened the range of possible futures in relationship to the US, still the most important country in the world, beyond anything they could imagine, and that cannot disappear quickly. It will take, I would have thought, a decade or two at best before people will say, Now we know exactly what's going on.Andrew Keen: Exactly how the U.S. Is going to behave again. In terms of the economic consequences, Martin, is the real damage, at least at this point, 100 days into the Trump administration, is there real damage to the U S economy and the U,S. Consumer? I think that...Martin Wolf: That's certainly going to be important. There's no doubt about it. There's a basic proposition in economics, which is still basically true. The biggest victim of protection, particularly at this sort of level. Is your own country. You are imposing massive adjustment shocks on your country by suddenly putting out of reach, a huge range of goods that they were used to buying. So that's a huge shock and they have to adjust their spending habits, the firms have to adjust how they structure themselves. That's ineluctable and as it all goes away, And if it all goes away, will they assume that it's all back to normal? I don't know. But of course, because the US is the US, it has imposed tariffs now, significant tariffs by historical standards. It used to be an average of 2% or so. Now it's 10%, leaving aside China and leaving aside of course the automobile sector which has got higher tariffs and all the other special cases that are being considered. So these all affect other countries. And, of course, the effect on China is certainly going to be very, very substantial because it's losing the ability, really, to export to its biggest single market, if you don't regard Europe as a single market. So there will be damage to China. And then there's a really big question. What does it mean for all the countries that might replace China? Vietnam for example, other East Asian countries, is there now going to be a huge opportunity or is the US going to jack up its, reintroduce its reciprocal tariffs, 50%, close to 50%, which case they're going to lose the market. So I think at the moment you'd have to say that everybody is going to feel... Actually or very close to actuallyAndrew Keen: damaged. And what's that gonna look like? Higher prices, fewer jobs? Well I would be, there will be countries that will, in the US in particular. What should we be so to speak looking forward to in the next couple of years? Well when I assume thatMartin Wolf: There will be a slowdown in retail sales of consumer goods which will be really quite significant. It will affect the profits of major U.S. Retailing and retail firms significantly and jobs in those activities. That's sort of the shock effect. There will be a risk factor in investment above all investment in manufacturing which will also be significant so I would expect manufacturing investment to decline too. Will that lead to an actual formal recession? I don't know. I don t have enough expertise on the day-by-day numbers. I think there s an additional factor which we mustn t underestimate, how that will play out, we don t know, which is the loss of confidence in the U.S. Government, and you can see that in the Treasury s market, which is most important market in the world, and the pricing there suggests some real nervousness about the future of stability of US economic policy. And here, I think the most important thing will be will there be a war on the Fed? Who's going to be the next Fed chair? What will Trump try to do to get the Fed to do what he wants? So there's going to be a shorter term medium short term impact on the economy. Through exports and, above all, also import availability. And there's going to be bigger concern which will affect investment. And, I think, people's confidence in US financial assets, which is ultimately about confidence in the US government and the consistency and probity of its policies. So short, medium, and long-term effects. How bad it will be, that depends very much on what is decided in the next few months. If in the end, the trade war disappears, Trump stops threatening the Fed, everybody thinks well they tried that it was a huge disaster and they've learnt and he's very flexible he could go away still but the next I think the next two three months are going to be very very important do they walk all this back pretty decisively or do they stick with it or even play double or quits we don't knowAndrew Keen: I don't know whether Mr. Trump knows. Finally, and that's one of Donald Runfield's unknown unknowns, especially when we get into the head of Donald Trump. Finally, Martin, you're very good at the big picture. What people are talking about this moment at the end of a US-centric economic world order, the demise of the dollar, perhaps the rise of cryptocurrency, obviously the 90s. Dimension. Was this? Two final questions. Firstly, is that true? Are we seeing a reoriented global financial system in America and the dollar no longer being central? And secondly, for all Trump's stupidity, was this in the long run inevitable? I mean, of course, Kane says in the long run, everything is inevitable, including our own deaths. Uh is this something that we should have expected it's just all come in a rush in a mad rush at the beginning of 2025 well these these are really difficult questions i think that's why i asked you you're the chief economics commentator in the ft if you can't answer them no one let's just say how i think about itMartin Wolf: There are two reasons why you could think the world wouldn't continue as it was. The first is the rise of China has genuinely changed the world. And the unipolar moment was clearly over and China is clearly a more credible peer competitor of the US across the board than the Soviet Union ever was. So in that sense, the world that the US comfortably dominated had gone, and it was bound to require a, and something I've written about many times, a forceful alliance strategy by the US using its web of alliances which are still so potent as the basis of its power and influence to maintain anything like that order. So that was the situation. What I don't think was inevitable is that the president who sort of declared the end of the US-led order would also be someone who basically stands not just for America first but America alone. I always attacked his allies so forcibly. So he has, as it were, taken apart the Alliance system and the values that were linked to that, on which I think U.S. Leadership was going to depend increasingly in future. So that's a, it doesn't seem to be a necessary shock and a rather strange one if you consciously detonate as such an important part of your power, but I suppose it is possible to argue that after 80 years since the war, second world war, the Americans have just sort of got tired of that world and tired of the responsibility of that well and they've sort of gotten tired with themselves, with the system that they've been living under. That's so obvious. Left and right agree they don't like modern America. Well once we look at that, then it may be that this was inevitable, but it was inevitable then for reasons that I don't fully understand. And that's probably a failure of my imagination. And the core remains that while America couldn't go on being precisely what it was in the 90s or early 2000s, where they made a bigger mess of it, but they didn't have to jump out of the world and the world they created with this stupendous speed. And it's very similar, and even more dramatic in its effects, when after the First World War the Americans repudiated the League of Nations, said Europe's got nothing to do with us, we're just going to leave it, gone. You sort it out and you know what happened as a result. Germans elected the Nazis and the Nazis started conquering the whole of Europe. So it's the American withdrawal. So suddenly, and so completely, well, complete, that's unfair, but so suddenly, with no obvious strategy to replace it, that seems to me striking, strikingly willful and a little bit mad and in any case, for me it's a surprise.Andrew Keen: And it changes the world. Well, on that chilling note, Martin Wolff, the chief economics commentator of BFT, given us much to think about. Martin, thank you so much. This story is only just beginning. We're gonna get you back on the show in the not too distant future to explain what comes after America. This is a public episode. 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On this episode of World Book Club Harriett Gilbert talks with nobel Laureate Abdulrzak Gurnah about his hauntingly beautiful novel ‘Paradise' It tells the story of Yusuf, a 12 year-old boy living in East Africa at the beginning of the 20th century. Sold off to settle his father's debts, Yusaf embarks on a journey across the African continent. Through his naive and innocent eyes, the journey starts out as an adventure, but every wonderous thing Yusuf sees, every glimpse of paradise, is polluted by violence, the growing influence of colonialism, and the looming spectre of the First World War. This is a stunning novel - a multi-faceted, vivid exploration of the shifting culture of Africa at the turn of the century. It's layered with mythology, Biblical and Koranic symbolism, and an unflinching insight into the effects of colonialism. Abdulrazak will be answering our listeners' questions here on World Book Club.

In a special Trench Chat we speak to Philipp Cross who has written a superb book about his great-great grandfather's war as an officer in the German Army. Alexander Pfeifer served from the very beginning until the very end of the conflict on three fronts, and we discover how Philipp researched and wrote the book, and what it tells us about the Great War.Buy The Book on Amazon: The Other Trench.The Other Trench website: The Other Trench.The Other Trench on Facebook: The Other Trench.Got a question about this episode or any others? Drop your question into the Old Front Line Discord Server or email the podcast.Send us a textSupport the show

 This week we continue our study of the French Army in the First World War as we examined one of France's most controversial commanders, Robert Nivelle, and the April 1917 offensive that bears his name. What happened during the Noelle Offensive, and why did it lead to a mutiny in the French Army? Join Our Community: https://not-so-quiet.com/ Use our code: Dugout and get one month free as a Captain. Support via Paypal: https://battleguide.co.uk/nsq-paypal Do you like our podcast? Then please leave us a review, it helps us a lot! E-Mail: ⁠nsq@battleguide.co.uk⁠ Battle Guide YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@BattleGuideVT Our WW2 Podcast: https://battleguide.co.uk/bsow If you want to keep your finger on the pulse of what the team at Battle Guide have been getting up to, why not sign up to our monthly newsletter: ⁠https://battleguide.co.uk/newsletter Twitter: @historian1914 @DanHillHistory @BattleguideVT Credits: - Host: Dr. Spencer Jones & Dan Hill - Production: Linus Klaßen - Editing: Hunter Christensen & Linus Klaßen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week's Mentioned in Dispatches podcast, Stephen Sandford explores the early history of the 18th Battalion London Regiment (London Irish) during the First World War. He examines the battalion's formation, recruitment, training and unique cultural identity, as well as its connections to Ireland and its first action at Loos. This talk was recorded at the London Pride Conference, held in June 2024.

Send us a textROBERT SCHREINER is the author of The Wolves and the Greyhounds, a military thriller/historical fiction novel set in the early months of the First World War.The novel is based on extraordinary actual events. In August 1914, as war was declared, an entire fleet of German warships stealthily eluded an Allied blockade, slipped out into the Pacific Ocean, and disappeared. The possibility that the elusive German fleet might suddenly appear on any horizon paralyzed the British Empire and set in motion a frantic search for the enemy warships.The book follows two naval captains - one British, one German - as their fates are inexorably drawn together. In this epic wartime adventure, bold gambles and tragic miscalculations pull these two captains, their ships, and their rival empires into a desperate clash, culminating in the most decisive naval battles of the war.Robert is a former CIA Intelligence Officer who works as a consultant and executive in the global private security industry. He is an avid amateur military historian who has traveled the world, routinely sneaking in side-trips to visit ancient fortifications and battlefields. He lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Tennessee with his wife, two spoiled cocker spaniels, and an amusingly musical cockatiel.Find out more information about him and his books  at: https://www.robertschreiner.com/******If you would like to contact the show about being a guest, please email us at Dauna@bettertopodcast.comFollow us on Social MediaInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/author_d.m.needom/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bettertopodcastwithdmneedomAudio production by Rich Zei of Third Ear AudioIntro and Outro music compliments of Fast Suzi©2025 Better To...Podcast with D. M. NeedomSupport the show

Few analysts are more familiar with the politics of both contemporary Turkey and the United States than my old friend , the distinguished Turkish political scientist Soli Ozel. Drawing on his decades of experience in both countries, Ozel, currently a senior fellow at the Institut Montaigne, explains how democratic institutions are similarly being challenged in Trump's America and Erdogan's Turkey. He discusses the imprisonment of Istanbul's popular mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, restrictive speech in American universities, and how economic decline eventually undermines authoritarian regimes. Ozel emphasizes that effective opposition requires both public discontent and compelling leadership alternatives, which Turkey has developed but America currently sorely lacks. Most intriguingly, he suggests that Harvard's legal battle against Trump could be as significant as the 1925 Scopes trial which marked the end of another bout of anti-scientific hysteria in America. 5 Key Takeaways* Populist authoritarianism follows a similar pattern regardless of left/right ideology - controlling judiciary, media, and institutions while claiming to represent "the people" against elites.* Academic freedom in America has declined significantly, with Ozel noting he experienced more classroom freedom in Turkey than at Yale in 2019.* Economic pain combined with a crisis of legitimacy is crucial for challenging authoritarian regimes, but requires credible opposition leadership to succeed.* Istanbul mayor Imamoglu has emerged as a powerful opposition figure in Turkey by appealing across political divides and demonstrating practical governance skills.* Turkey's strategic importance has increased due to its position between war zones (Syria and Ukraine) and Europe's growing need for security partners as American support becomes less certain. Full TranscriptAndrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's not great news these days that the U.S. Brand has been, so to speak, tarnished as a headline today on CNN. I'm quoting them. CNN, of course, is not Donald Trump's biggest fan. Trump tarnishes the U S brand as a rock of stability in the global economy. I'm not sure if the US was ever really a rock of stability for anything except itself. But we on the show as. As loyal viewers and listeners know, we've been going around the world, taking stock of the US brand, how it's viewed around the word. We did a show last week with Simon Cooper, the Dutch-based Paris writer of the Financial Times, who believes it's time for all Americans to come and live in Europe. And then with Jemima Kelly, another London-based correspondent. And I thought we would broaden. I asked european perspective by visiting my old friend very old friend Soli Ozel. iVve known him for almost forty years he's a. Senior fellow of international relations and turkey at the montane institute he's talking to us from vienna but he is a man who is born and spends a lot of his time thinking about. Turkey, he has an interesting new piece out in the Institute Montaigne. Turkey, a crisis of legitimacy and massive social mobilization in a regional power. I want to talk to Soli later in this conversation about his take on what's happening in Turkey. But first of all, Soli, before we went live, you noted that you first came to America in September 1977. You were educated here, undergraduate, graduate, both at uh, sized in Washington DC and then at UC Berkeley, where you and I studied together at the graduate program. Um, how do you feel almost 50 years, sorry, we're dating ourselves, but how did you feel taking off your political science cap, your analyst cap, how did you feel about what's happening in America as, as a man who invested your life in some ways in the promise of America, and particularly American education universities.Soli Ozel: Yeah, I mean, I, yes, I came to the States or I went to the States in September of 1977. It was a very different America, post Vietnam. And I went through an avant garde college liberal arts college.Andrew Keen: Bennington wasn'tSoli Ozel: Bennington College, and I've spent about 11 years there. And you and I met in 1983 in Berkeley. And then I also taught at American universities. I taught at UC Santa Cruz, Northwestern, SAIS itself, University of Washington, Yale, and had fellowships in different parts. Now, of course, in those years, a lot has changed in the US. The US has changed. In fact, I'm writing a piece now on Christopher Lash. And reading Christopher Lasch work from the 60s and the 1970s, in a way, you wonder why Trumpism has not really emerged a bit earlier than when it did. So, a lot of the... Dynamics that have brought Donald Trump to power, not once, but twice, and in spite of the fact that, you know, he was tried and found guilty and all that. Many of those elements have been there definitely since the 1980s, but Lascch identified especially this divergence between educated people and less educated people between brainies and or the managerial class and the working class in the United States. So, in a way, it looks like the Trumpism's triumph came even a bit late, although there were a couple of attempts perhaps in the early 1990s. One was Pat Buchanan and the other one, Ross Perot, which we forget that Ross Perot got 19% of the vote against in the contest when Bill Clinton. Won the election against George H.W. Bush. So underground, if you will, a lot was happening in the United States.Andrew Keen: All right. And it's interesting you bring up Lash, there's that sort of whole school Lasch Daniel Bell, of course, we had Daniel Bell's son, David Bell, on the show recently. And there's a lot of discussion, as I'm sure you know, about the nativism of Trump, whether it's uniquely American, whether it was somehow inevitable. We've done last week, we did a show about comparing what's happening now in America to what happened after the First World War. Being less analytical, Solé, my question was more an emotional one to you as someone who has built their life around freedom of expression in American universities. You were at Bennington, you were at SICE, you're at UC Berkeley, as you know, you taught at UC Santa Cruz and Yale and many other places. You come in and out of this country giving lectures. How do you personally feel about what's happening?Soli Ozel: Yeah, okay. I mean, in that sense, again, the United States, by the way, I mean the United States has been changing independently of Mr. Trump's presidency. It was much more difficult to be, I mean when I went to college in Bennington College, you really did not bite your tongue when you were going to speak either as a student or a professor. And increasingly, and especially in my last bout at Yale in 2019, I felt that, you know, there were a lot of constraints on what you could say or how you could say it, whether you would call it walkism, political correctness, whatever it was. It was a much, the atmosphere at the university was much more constrained in terms of what transpired in the classroom and that I mean, in Turkey, I had more freedom in terms of how we debated things in class that I felt that...Andrew Keen: That is astonishing. So you had more freedom in...Soli Ozel: As well, you did in Yale in 1990. I'm talking about not the political aspect of things, but how you debate something, okay, whether or not, I mean, there would be lots of views and you could you could present them without insulting anyone, however you presented them was fine, and this is how what the dynamics of the classroom had been when I was a student. So, in that sense, I guess it wasn't just the right that constrained speech, but also the left that constrained the speech, because new values were added or new norms were invented to define what can and cannot be said. And of course, that goes against the grain of what a university education ought to be. I mean, I had colleagues. In major universities who told me that they really were biting their tongue when they were giving their lectures. And that is not my understanding of education or college education and that certainly has not been my experience when I came to the States and for my long education here for 11 years.Andrew Keen: Solit, you and I have a long history of thinking about the Middle East, where back in the early 80s, we TA'd a class on the Arab-Israeli conflict with Yaya Sadowski, who at that time was a very independent thinker. I know he was a close friend of yours. I was always very influenced by his thinking. You're from Izmir, from a Jewish family in Turkey. So you're all too familiar with the complexity of anti-Semitism, Israel, the Middle East, Turkey. What do you personally make of this hysteria now on campus about anti-semitism and throwing out anyone, it seems, at least from the Trump point of view, who are pro-Palestinian? Is this again, I mean, you went back to Christopher Lasch and his thinking on populism and the dangers of populism in America. Or is this something that... Comes out of the peculiarities of American history. We have predicted this 40 years ago when you and I were TAing Sadowski's class on Arab-Israeli conflict at Berkeley.Soli Ozel: The Arab-Israeli conflict always raises passions, if you will. And it's no different. To put it mildly, Salvador, I think. Yeah, it is a bit different now. I mean, of course, my hunch is that anti-Semitism is always present. There is no doubt. And although I followed the developments very closely after October 7. I was not in there physically present. I had some friends, daughters and sons who were students who have reported to me because I'm supposed to know something about those matters. So yeah, antisemitism is there. On the other hand, there is also some exaggeration. We know that a lot of the protesters, for instance, were Jews themselves. But my hunch is that the Trump administration, especially in their attack against elite universities, are using this for political purposes. I'm sure there were other ways of handling this. I don't find it very sincere. And a real problem is being dealt with in a very manipulative political way, I think. Other and moreover So long as there was no violence and I know there were instances of violence that should be punished that I don't have any complaints about, but partially if this is only related to what you say, I'm not sure that this is how a university or relations between students at the university ought to be conducted. If you're not going to be able to say what you think at the university, then what else are you going to say? Are you going be able say it? So this is a much more complicated matter than it is being presented. And as I said, my view or based on what I follow that is happening at colleges, this is being used as an excuse. As somebody I think Peter Beinhart wrote today in the New York Times. He says, No, no, no. It is not really about protecting Jewish students, but it is protecting a certain... Type of Jewish students, and that means it's a political decision, the complaints, legitimate complaints, perhaps, of some students to use those against university administrations or universities themselves that the Trump administration seems to be targeting.Andrew Keen: Yeah, it's interesting you bring up Beinart. He was on the show a year or two ago. I think he notes that, I mean, I don't want to put words into his mouth, but he seems to be suggesting that Jews now have a responsibility almost to speak out, not just obviously about what's happening in the U.S., but certainly about what is happening in Gaza. I'm not sure what you think on.Soli Ozel: He just published a book, he just published the book being Jewish in the US after Gaza or something along those lines. He represents a certain way of thinking about what had happened in Gaza, I mean what had happened to Israel with the attack of Hamas and what had happened afterwards, whether or not he represents the majority. Do you agree with him? I happen to be. I happen to be sympathetic to his views. And especially when you read the book at the beginning, it says, look, he's a believer. Believer meaning he is a practicing Jew. So this is not really a question about his own Jewishness, but how he understands what being a Jew actually means. And from that perspective, putting a lot of accent to the moral aspects of Jewish history and Jewish theological and secular thinking, He is rebelling, if you will, against this way of manipulative use. On the part of some Jewish organizations as well of what had gone on and this is this he sees as a along with others actually he also sees this as a threat to Jewish presence in the United States. You know there is a simultaneous increase in in anti-semitism. And some people argue that this has begun even before October 7. Let us not forget Charlottesville when the crowds that were deemed to be nice people were chanting, Jews will not replace us, and those people are still around. Yeah, a lot of them went to jail.Andrew Keen: Yeah, I mean Trump seemed to have pardoned some of them. And Solly, what do you make of quote-unquote the resistance to Trump in the U.S.? You're a longtime observer of authoritarianism, both personally and in political science terms. One of the headlines the last few days is about the elite universities forming a private collective to resist the Trump administration. Is this for real and is it new? Should we admire the universities or have they been forced into this position?Soli Ozel: Well, I mean, look, you started your talk with the CNN title. Yeah, about the brand, the tarnishing of the U.S. Whatever the CNN stands for. The thing is, there is no question that what is happening today and what has been happening in my judgment over the last two years, particularly on the issue of Gaza, I would not... Exonerate the Biden administration and the way it actually managed its policy vis-a-vis that conflict. There is, of course, a reflection on American policy vis a vis that particular problem and with the Trump administration and 100 days of storm, if you will, around the world, there is a shift in the way people look at the United States. I think it is not a very favorable shift in terms of how people view and understand the United States. Now, that particular thing, the colleges coming together, institutions in the United States where the Americans are very proud of their Madisonian institutions, they believe that that was there. Uh, if you will, insurance policy against an authoritarian drift in their system. Those institutions, both public institutions and private institutions actually proved to be paper tigers. I mean, look at corporations that caved in, look at law firms that arcade that have caved in, Look at Columbia university being, if you will the most egregious example of caving in and plus still not getting the money or not actually stopping the demands that are made on it. So Harvard after equivocating on this finally came up with a response and decided to take the risk of losing massive sums of grants from the federal government. And in fact, it's even suing. The Trump administration for withholding the money that was supposed to go to them. And I guess there is an awakening and the other colleges in order to protect freedom of expression, in order, to protect the independence of higher education in this country, which has been sacrosanct, which is why a lot of people from all around the world, students... Including you and I, right? I mean, that's why we... Yeah, exactly. By the way, it's anywhere between $44 and $50 billion worth of business as well. Then it is there finally coming together, because if you don't hang together, you'll hang separately, is a good American expression that I like. And then trying to defend themselves. And I think this Harvard slope suit, the case of Harvard, is going to be like the Stokes trial of the 1920s on evolution. It's going to be a very similar case, I believe, and it may determine how American democracy goes from now.Andrew Keen: Interesting. You introduced me to Ece Temelkuren, another of your friends from someone who no longer lives in Turkey. She's a very influential Turkish columnist, polemicist. She wrote a famous book, How to Lose a Country. She and you have often compared Turkey. With the rest of the world suggesting that what you're going through in Turkey is the kind of canary in the coal mine for the rest the world. You just came out with a piece, Turkey, a crisis of legitimacy, a massive social mobilization and regional power. I want to get to the details of what's happening in Turkey first. But like Ece, do you see Turkey as the kind of canary and the coalmine that you got into this first? You're kind of leading the narrative of how to address authoritarianism in the 25th century.Soli Ozel: I don't think Turkey was the first one. I think the first one was Hugo Chavez. And then others followed. Turkey certainly is a prominent one. But you know, you and I did other programs and in an earlier era, about 15 years ago. Turkey was actually doing fine. I mean, it was a candidate for membership, still presumably, formally, a candidate for membership in the European Union, but at the time when that thing was alive. Turkey did, I mean, the AKP government or Erdogan as prime minister did a lot of things that were going in the right direction. They certainly demilitarized Turkish politics, but increasingly as they consolidated themselves in power, they moved in a more authoritarian path. And of course, after the coup attempt in 2016 on the 15th of July, that trend towards authoritarianism had been exacerbated and but with the help of a very sui generis if you will unaccountable presidential system we are we find ourselves where we are but The thing is what has been missed out by many abroad was that there was also a very strong resistance that had remained actually unbowing for a long time. And Istanbul, which is, of course, almost a fifth of Turkey's population, 32 percent of its economy, and that's where the pulse of the country actually beats, since 2017 did not vote for Mr Erdogan. I mean, referendum, general election, municipal election. It hasn't, it hasn't. And that is that really, it really represents the future. And today, the disenchantment or discontent has now become much broader, much more broadly based because conservative Anatolia is also now feeling the biting of the economy. And this sense of justice in the country has been severely damaged. And That's what I think explains. The kinds of reaction we had throughout the country to the first arrest and then incarceration of the very popular mayor of Istanbul who is a national figure and who was seen as the main contender for the presidency in the elections that are scheduled to take place in.Andrew Keen: Yeah, and I want to talk more about Turkey's opposition and an interesting New York Times editorial. But before we get there, Soli, you mentioned that the original model was Chavez in Venezuela, of course, who's always considered a leftist populist, whereas Erdogan, Trump, etc., and maybe Netanyahu are considered populists of the right. Is that a useful? Bifurcation in ideological terms or a populist populism that the idea of Chavez being different from Trump because one's on the left and right is really a 20th century mistake or a way of thinking about the 21st century using 20th-century terms.Soli Ozel: Okay, I mean the ideological proclivities do make a difference perhaps, but at the end of the day, what all these populist movements represent is the coming of age or is the coming to power of country elites. Suggests claiming to represent the popular classes whom they say and who are deprived of. Uh, benefits of holding power economically or politically, but once they get established in power and with the authoritarian tilt doesn't really make a distinction in terms of right or wrong. I mean, is Maduro the successor to Chavez a rightist or a leftist? I mean does it really make a difference whether he calls himself a leftists or a rightists? I is unaccountable, is authoritarian. He loses elections and then he claims that he wins these elections and so the ideology that purportedly brought them to power becomes a fig leaf, if you will, justification and maybe the language that they use in order to justify the existing authoritarianism. In that sense, I don't think it makes a difference. Maybe initially it could have made a difference, We have seen populist leaders. Different type of populism perhaps in Latin America. For instance, the Peruvian military was supposed to be very leftist, whereas the Chilean or the Brazilian or the Argentinian or the Uruguayan militaries were very right-wing supported by the church itself. Nicaragua was supposed to be very Leftist, right? They had a revolution, the Sandinista revolution. And look at Daniel Ortega today, does it really matter that he claims himself to be a man of the left? I mean, He runs a family business in Nicaragua. And so all those people who were so very excited about the Nicaraguan Revolution some 45 years ago must be extraordinarily disappointed. I mean, of course, I was also there as a student and wondering what was going to happen in Nicaragua, feeling good about it and all that. And that turned out to be an awful dictatorship itself.Andrew Keen: Yeah, and on this sense, I think you're on the same page as our mutual friend, Moises Naim, who wrote a very influential book a couple of years ago. He's been on the show many times about learning all this from the Latin American playbook because of his experience in Venezuela. He has a front row on this. Solly, is there one? On this, I mean, as I said, you just come out with a piece on the current situation in Turkey and talk a little bit more detail, but is America a few stops behind Turkey? I mean you mentioned that in Turkey now everyone, not just the urban elites in Istanbul, but everyone in the country is beginning to experience the economic decline and consequences of failed policies. A lot of people are predicting the same of Trump's America in the next year or two. Is there just one route in this journey? Is there's just one rail line?Soli Ozel: Like by what the root of established wow a root in the sense of youAndrew Keen: Erdogan or Trump, they come in, they tell lots of lies, they promise a lot of stuff, and then ultimately they can't deliver. Whatever they're promising, the reverse often happens. The people they're supposed to be representing are actually victims of their policies. We're seeing it in America with the consequences of the tariff stuff, of inflation and rise of unemployment and the consequences higher prices. It has something similar. I think of it as the Liz Truss effect, in the sense that the markets ultimately are the truth. And Erdogan, I know, fought the markets and lost a few years ago in Turkey too.Soli Ozel: There was an article last week in Financial Times Weekend Edition, Mr. Trump versus Mr. Market. Trump versus, Mr. Market. Look, first of all, I mean, in establishing a system, the Orban's or Modi's, they all follow, and it's all in Ece's book, of course. You have to control the judiciary, you have to control the media, and then all the institutions. Gradually become under your thumb. And then the way out of it is for first of all, of course, economic problems, economic pain, obviously makes people uncomfortable, but it will have to be combined with the lack of legitimacy, if you will. And that is, I don't think it's right, it's there for in the United States as of yet, but the shock has been so. Robust, if you will, that the reaction to Trump is also rising in a very short period, in a lot shorter period of time than it did in other parts of the world. But economic conditions, the fact that they worsen, is an important matter. But there are other conditions that need to be fulfilled. One of those I would think is absolutely the presence of a political leader that defies the ones in power. And I think when I look at the American scene today, one of the problems that may, one of problems that the political system seems to have, which of course, no matter how economically damaging the Trump administration may be, may not lead to an objection to it. To a loss of power in the midterms to begin with, is lack of leadership in the Democratic Party and lack of a clear perspective that they can share or program that they present to the public at large. Without that, the ones that are in power hold a lot of cards. I mean, it took Turkey about... 18 years after the AKP came to power to finally have potential leaders, and only in 2024 did it become very apparent that now Turkey had more than one leader that could actually challenge Erdogan, and that they also had, if not to support the belief in the public, that they could also run the country. Because if the public does not believe that you are competent enough to manage the affairs of the state or to run the country, they will not vote for you. And leadership truly is an extraordinarily important factor in having democratic change in such systems, what we call electoral authoritarian.Andrew Keen: So what's happened in Turkey in terms of the opposition? The mayor of Istanbul has emerged as a leader. There's an attempt to put him in jail. You talk about the need for an opposition. Is he an ideological figure or just simply younger, more charismatic? More attractive on the media. What do you need and what is missing in the US and what do you have in Turkey? Why are you a couple of chapters ahead on this?Soli Ozel: Well, it was a couple of chapters ahead because we have had the same government or the same ruler for 22 years now.Andrew Keen: And Imamo, I wanted you to pronounce it, Sali, because my Turkish is dreadful. It's worse than most of the other.Soli Ozel: He is the mayor of Istanbul who is now in jail and whose diploma was annulled by the university which actually gave him the diploma and the reason why that is important is if you want to run for president in Turkey, you've got to have a college degree. So that's how it all started. And then he was charged with corruption and terrorism. And he's put in zero. Oh, it's terrorism. There was.Andrew Keen: It's terrorism, they always throw the terrorist bit in, don't they, Simon?Soli Ozel: Yeah, but that dossier is, for the moment, pending. It has not been closed, but it is pending. Anyway, he is young, but his major power is that he can touch all segments of society, conservative, nationalist, leftist. And that's what makes people compare him also with Erdogan who also had a touch of appealing to different segments of the population. But of course, he's secular. He's not ideological, he's a practical man. And Istanbul's population is about anywhere between 16 and 18 million people. It's larger than many countries in Europe. And to manage a city like Istanbul requires really good managerial skills. And Imamoglu managed this in spite of the fact that central government cut its resources, made sure that there was obstruction in every step that he wanted to take, and did not help him a bit. And that still was continuing. Still, he won once. Then there was a repeat election. He won again. And this time around, he one with a landslide, 54% against 44% of his opponent, which had all theAndrew Keen: So the way you're presenting him, is he running as a technocrat or is he running as a celebrity?Soli Ozel: No, he's running as a politician. He's running a politician, he is a popular politician. Maybe you can see tinges of populism in him as well, but... He is what, again, what I think his incarceration having prompted such a wide ranging segments of population really kind of rebelling against this incarceration has to do with the fact that he has resonance in Anatolia. Because he does not scare conservative people. He aspires the youth because he speaks to them directly and he actually made promises to them in Istanbul that he kept, he made their lives easier. And he's been very creative in helping the poorer segments of Istanbul with a variety of programs. And he has done this without really being terribly pushing. So, I mean, I think I sense that the country sees him as its next ruler. And so to attack him was basically tampering with the verdict of the ballot box. That's, I, think how the Turkish public interpreted it. And for good historical reasons, the ballot box is really pretty sacred in Turkey. We usually have upwards of 80% of participation in the election.Andrew Keen: And they're relatively, I mean, not just free, but the results are relatively honest. Yeah, there was an interesting New York Times editorial a couple of days ago. I sent it over. I'm sure you'd read it anyway. Turkey's people are resisting autocracy. They deserve more than silence. I mean from Trump, who has very peculiar relations, he has peculiar relations with everyone, but particularly it seems with Turkey does, in your view, does Turkey needs or the resistance or the mayor of Istanbul this issue, need more support from the US? Would it make any difference?Soli Ozel: Well, first of all, the current American administration didn't seem to particularly care that the arrest and incarceration of the mayor of Istanbul was a bit, to say the least, was awkward and certainly not very legal. I mean, Mario Rubio said, Marco Rubio said that he had concerns. But Mr. Witkoff, in the middle of demonstrations that were shaking the country, Mr. Witkof said it to Tucker Carlson's show that there were very wonderful news coming out of Turkey. And of course, President Trump praised Erdogan several times. They've been on the phone, I think, five times. And he praised Erdogan in front of Bibi Netanyahu, which obviously Bibi Netanyah did not particularly appreciate either. So obviously the American administration likes Mr. Erdogans and will support him. And whatever the Turkish public may or may not want, I don't think is of great interest toAndrew Keen: What about the international dimension, sorry, Putin, the Ukrainian war? How does that play out in terms of the narrative unfolding in Turkey?Soli Ozel: Well, first of all, of course, when the Assad regime fell,Andrew Keen: Right, and as that of course. And Syria of course as well posts that.Soli Ozel: Yeah, I mean, look, Turkey is in the middle of two. War zones, no? Syria was one and the Ukraine is the other. And so when the regime fell and it was brought down by groups that were protected by Turkey in Idlib province of Syria. Everybody argued, and I think not wrongly, that Turkey would have a lot of say over the future of Syria. And I think it will. First of all, Turkey has about 600 miles or 911 kilometer border with Syria and the historical relations.Andrew Keen: And lots of Syrian refugees, of course.Soli Ozel: At the peak, there were about 4 million, I think it's now going down. President Erdogan said that about 200,000 already went back since the overthrow of the regime. And then of course, to the north, there is Ukraine, Russia. And of course this elevates Turkey's strategic importance or geopolitical importance. Another issue that raises Turkish geopolitical importance is, of course, the gradual withdrawal of the United States from providing security to Europe under the umbrella of NATO, North Atlantic Alliance. And as the Europeans are being forced to fetch for themselves for their security, non-EU members of NATO such as Britain, Norway, Turkey, their importance becomes more accentuated as well. And so Turkey and the European Union were in the process of at least somewhat normalizing their relations and their dialog. So what happened domestically, therefore, did not get much of a reaction from the EU, which is supposed to be this paragon of rights and liberties and all that. But But it also left Turkey in a game in an awkward situation, I would think, because things could have gone much, much better. The rapprochement with the European Union could have moved a lot more rapidly, I will think. But geopolitical advantages are there. Obviously, the Americans care a lot for it. And whatever it is that they're negotiating with the Turkish government, we will soon find out. It is a... It is a country that would help stabilize Syria. And that's what President Trump also said, that he would adjudicate between Israel and Turkey over Syria, because these two countries which have been politically at odds, but strategically usually in very good terms. Whether or not the, so to avoid a clash between the two in Syria was important for him. So Turkey's international situation will continue to be important, but I think without the developments domestically, Turkey's position and profile would have been much more solid.Andrew Keen: Comparing US and Turkey, the US military has never participated, at least overtly, in politics, whereas the Turkish military, of course, has historically. Where's the Turkish Military on this? What are they thinking about these imprisonments and the increasing unpopularity of the current regime?Soli Ozel: I think the demilitarization of the Turkish political system was accomplished by the end of the 2000s, so I don't think anybody knows what the military thinks and I'm not sure that anybody really wonders what the army thinks. I think Erdogan has certainly on the top echelons of the military, it has full control. Whether or not the cadets in the Turkish military are lower echelons. Do have political views at odds with that of the government that is not visible. And I don't think the Turkish military should be designing or defining our political system. We have an electorate. We do have a fairly, how shall I say, a public that is fairly attuned to its own rights. And believes certainly in the sanctity of the ballot box, it's been resisting for quite some time and it is defying the authorities and we should let that take its course. I don't think we need the military to do it.Andrew Keen: Finally, Soli, you've been very generous with your time from Vienna. It's late afternoon there. Let's end where we began with this supposed tarnishing of the U.S. Brand. As we noted earlier, you and I have invested our lives, if for better or worse, in the U S brand. We've always been critical, but we've also been believers in this. It's also important in this brand.Soli Ozel: It is an important grant.Andrew Keen: So how do we, and I don't like this term, maybe there is a better term, brands suggest marketing, something not real, but there is something real about the US. How do we re-establish, or I don't know what the word is, a polish rather than tarnish the US brand? What needs to happen in the U.S.Soli Ozel: Well, I think we will first have to see the reinvigoration of institutions in the United States that have been assaulted. That's why I think the Harvard case... Yeah, and I love you.Andrew Keen: Yeah, and I love your idea of comparing it to the Scopes trial of 1926. We probably should do a whole show on that, it's fascinating idea.Soli Ozel: Okay, and then the Democratic Party will have to get its act together. I don't know how long it will take for them to get their act together, they have not been very...Andrew Keen: Clever. But some Democrats will say, well, there's more than one party. The Sanders AOC wing has done its job. People like Gavin Newsom are trying to do their job. I mean, you can't have an official party. There's gonna be a debate. There already is a debate within the party between the left and the right.Soli Ozel: The thing is, debates can be endless, and I don't think there is time for that. First of all, I think the decentralized nature of American governance is also an advantage. And I think that the assault has been so forceful that everybody has woken up to it. It could have been the frog method, you know, that is... Yeah, the boiling in the hot water. So, already people have begun to jump and that is good, that's a sign of vitality. And therefore, I think in due time, things will be evolving in a different direction. But, for populist or authoritarian inclined populist regimes, control of the institutions is very important, so you've got to be alert. And what I discovered, studying these things and looking at the practice. Executive power is a lot of power. So separation of powers is fine and good, but the thing is executive power is really very... Prominent and the legislature, especially in this particular case with the Republican party that has become the instrument of President Trump, and the judiciary which resists but its power is limited. I mean, what do you do when a court decision is not abided by the administration? You cannot send the police to the White House.Andrew Keen: Well, you might have to, that's why I asked the military question.Soli Ozel: Well, it's not up to the military to do this, somehow it will have to be resolved within the civilian democratic system, no matter where. Yes, the decks are stacked against the opposition in most of these cases, but then you'll have to fight. And I think a lot hinges on how corporations are going to react from now on. They have bet on Trump, and I suppose that many of them are regretting because of the tariffs. I just was at a conference, and there was a German business person who said that he has a factory in Germany and a factory in Ohio. And he told me that within three months there would not be any of the goods that he produces on the shelves because of tariffs. Once this begins to hit, then you may see a different dynamic in the country as well, unless the administration takes a U-turn. But if it does take a U turn, it will also have weakened itself, both domestically and internationally.Andrew Keen: Yeah, certainly, to put it mildly. Well, as we noted, Soli, what's real is economics. The rest is perhaps froth or lies or propaganda. Soli Ozel: It's a necessary condition. Without that deteriorating, you really cannot get things on values done.Andrew Keen: In other words, Marx was right, but perhaps in a slightly different context. We're not going to get into Marx today, Soli, we're going to get you back on the show. Cause I love that comparison with the current, the Harvard Trump legal thing, comparing it to Scopes. I think I hadn't thought of that. It's a very interesting idea. Keep well, keep safe, keep telling the truth from Central Europe and Turkey. As always, Solia, it's an honor to have you on the show. Thank you so much.Soli Ozel: Thank you, Andrew, for having me.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Dear friends,For Australians, Anzac Day is the great national day. But what is it we're remembering? And should we celebrate Anzac Day? In particular, should Christians be remembering or celebrating a military battle of the First World War? Does Anzac Day glorify war? Is it an alternative religion for Australians? I hope you will enjoy our discussion as Peter and I try and grapple with the history and purpose of Anzac Day observances.Yours,Phillip This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.twoways.news/subscribe

From 1901 until the First World War, in the age just before movies became popular, Mayor George Baker's theater was the great shaper and driver of Portland's unique culture. (Portland, Multnomah County; 1900s, 1910s) (For text and pictures, see https://offbeatoregon.com/1803d.baker-stock-theater-in-portland-488.html)

Fractured Lives' explores how the First World War literally fractured lives. The war's many casualties were not just amongst the dead. There were the men maimed and disabled with scars that would blight the rest of their lives. The play also has resonance for the present day, as wars and international conflicts continue to fracture lives, leaving scars and injuries that can last a lifetime. Today men still return from war's ‘theatre' to play out new roles that they have not chosen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For this week's Sunday Debate, we're dipping back into the archive to 2014, when we gathered a panel of expert historians to debate whether Britain was right to fight in the First World War, a tragedy that laid the foundations for decades of destructive upheaval and violence across Europe. To debate the issue, we invited leading historians Margaret MacMillan, Max Hastings, John Charmley and Dominic Sandbrook to an event hosted by journalist, columnist and national security expert, Edward Lucas.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode we ask were there any 'Thankful Villages' in France where everyone came home, what was 'Camp Elisabeth' at Verdun as visited by Professor Richard Holmes in the 1990s, did Great War soldiers experience any spiritual or paranormal activity on the battlefields and how did the presence of British and Commonwealth soldiers impinge on life behind the lines in France.BBC Report: France's Thankful Village With No War Memorial.The Richard Holmes Episode mentioned in the podcast: Western Front Verdun 1916.Got a question about this episode or any others? Drop your question into the Old Front Line Discord Server or email the podcast.Send us a textSupport the show

Every April 25, Australia commemorates Anzac Day as a national day in memory of soldiers who died in war, particularly at the battle of Gallipoli during the First World War. Anzac Day is often associated with values such as “mateship”. However, can these values also be found in Indonesian culture? - Setiap tanggal 25 April, Australia memperingati Anzac Day sebagai hari nasional untuk mengenang para prajurit yang gugur dalam perang, khususnya dalam pertempuran Gallipoli saat Perang Dunia Pertama. Anzac Day sering dikaitkan dengan nilai-nilai seperti "mateship". Namun, apakah nilai-nilai itu juga bisa kita temukan dalam budaya Indonesia?

A year ago, the great American historian Adam Hochschild came on KEEN ON AMERICA to discuss American Midnight, his best selling account of the crisis of American democracy after World War One. A year later, is history really repeating itself in today's crisis of American democracy? For Hochschild, there are certainly parallels between the current political situation in the US and post WW1 America. Describing how wartime hysteria and fear of communism led to unprecedented government repression, including mass imprisonment for political speech, vigilante violence, and press censorship. Hochschild notes eery similarities to today's Trump's administration. He expresses concern about today's threats to democratic institutions while suggesting the importance of understanding Trump supporters' grievances and finding ways to bridge political divides. Five Key Takeaways* The period of 1917-1921 in America saw extreme government repression, including imprisoning people for speech, vigilante violence, and widespread censorship—what Hochschild calls America's "Trumpiest" era before Trump.* American history shows recurring patterns of nativism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and scapegoating that politicians exploit during times of economic or social stress.* The current political climate shows concerning parallels to this earlier period, including intimidation of opposition, attacks on institutions, and the widespread acceptance of authoritarian tendencies.* Hochschild emphasizes the importance of understanding the grievances and suffering that lead people to support authoritarian figures rather than dismissing their concerns.* Despite current divisions, Hochschild believes reconciliation is possible and necessary, pointing to historical examples like President Harding pardoning Eugene Debs after Wilson imprisoned him. Full Transcript Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. We recently celebrated our 2500th edition of Keen On. Some people suggest I'm mad. I think I probably am to do so many shows. Just over a little more than a year ago, we celebrated our 2000th show featuring one of America's most distinguished historians, Adam Hochschild. I'm thrilled that Adam is joining us again a year later. He's the author of "American Midnight, The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis." This was his last book. He's the author of many other books. He is now working on a book on the Great Depression. He's joining us from his home in Berkeley, California. Adam, to borrow a famous phrase or remix a famous phrase, a year is a long time in American history.Adam Hochschild: That's true, Andrew. I think this past year, or actually this past 100 days or so has been a very long and very difficult time in American history that we all saw coming to some degree, but I don't think we realized it would be as extreme and as rapid as it has been.Andrew Keen: Your book, Adam, "American Midnight, A Great War of Violent Peace and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis," is perhaps the most prescient warning. When you researched that you were saying before we went live that your books usually take you between four and five years, so you couldn't really have planned for this, although I guess you began writing and researching American Midnight during the Trump 1.0 regime. Did you write it as a warning to something like is happening today in America?Adam Hochschild: Well, I did start writing it and did most of the work on it during Trump's first term in office. So I was very struck by the parallels. And they're in plain sight for everybody to see. There are various dark currents that run through this country of ours. Nativism, threats to deport troublemakers. Politicians stirring up violent feelings against immigrants, vigilante violence, all those things have been with us for a long time. I've always been fascinated by that period, 1917 to 21, when they surged to the surface in a very nasty way. That was the subject of the book. Naturally, I hoped we wouldn't have to go through anything like that again, but here we are definitely going through it again.Andrew Keen: You wrote a lovely piece earlier this month for the Washington Post. "America was at its Trumpiest a hundred years ago. Here's how to prevent the worst." What did you mean by Trumpiest, Adam? I'm not sure if you came up with that title, but I know you like the term. You begin the essay. What was the Trumpiest period in American life before Donald Trump?Adam Hochschild: Well, I didn't invent the word, but I certainly did use it in the piece. What I meant by that is that when you look at this period just over 100 years ago, 1917 to 1921, Woodrow Wilson's second term in office, two things happened in 1917 that kicked off a kind of hysteria in this country. One was that Wilson asked the American Congress to declare war on Germany, which it promptly did, and when a country enters a major war, especially a world war, it sets off a kind of hysteria. And then that was redoubled some months later when the country received news of the Russian Revolution, and many people in the establishment in America were afraid the Russian Revolution might come to the United States.So, a number of things happened. One was that there was a total hysteria against all things German. There were bonfires of German books all around the country. People would take German books out of libraries, schools, college and university libraries and burn them in the street. 19 such bonfires in Ohio alone. You can see pictures of it on the internet. There was hysteria about the German language. I heard about this from my father as I was growing up because his father was a Jewish immigrant from Germany. They lived in New York City. They spoke German around the family dinner table, but they were terrified of doing so on the street because you could get beaten up for that. Several states passed laws against speaking German in public or speaking German on the telephone. Eminent professors declared that German was a barbaric language. So there was that kind of hysteria.Then as soon as the United States declared war, Wilson pushed the Espionage Act through Congress, this draconian law, which essentially gave the government the right to lock up anybody who said something that was taken to be against the war. And they used this law in a devastating way. During those four years, roughly a thousand Americans spent a year or more in jail and a much larger number, shorter periods in jail solely for things that they wrote or said. These were people who were political prisoners sent to jail simply for something they wrote or said, the most famous of them was Eugene Debs, many times the socialist candidate for president. He'd gotten 6% of the popular vote in 1912 and in 1918. For giving an anti-war speech from a park bandstand in Ohio, he was sent to prison for 10 years. And he was still in prison two years after the war ended in November, 1920, when he pulled more than 900,000 votes for president from his jail cell in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.So that was one phase of the repression, political prisoners. Another was vigilante violence. The government itself, the Department of Justice, chartered a vigilante group, something called the American Protective League, which went around roughing up people that it thought were evading the draft, beating up people at anti-war rallies, arresting people with citizens arrest whom they didn't have their proper draft papers on them, holding them for hours or sometimes for days until they could produce the right paperwork.Andrew Keen: I remember, Adam, you have a very graphic description of some of this violence in American Midnight. There was a story, was it a union leader?Adam Hochschild: Well, there is so much violence that happened during that time. I begin the book with a graphic description of vigilantes raiding an office of the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, taking a bunch of wobblies out into the prairie at night, stripping them, whipping them, flogging them fiercely, and then tarring and feathering them, and firing shotguns over their heads so they would run off into the Prairie at Night. And they did. Those guys were lucky because they survive. Other people were killed by this vigilante violence.And the final thing about that period which I would mention is the press censorship. The Espionage Act gave the Postmaster General the power to declare any publication in the United States unmailable. And for a newspaper or a magazine that was trying to reach a national audience, the only way you could do so was through the US mail because there was no internet then. No radio, no TV, no other way of getting your publication to somebody. And this put some 75 newspapers and magazines that the government didn't like out of business. It in addition censored three or four hundred specific issues of other publications as well.So that's why I feel this is all a very dark period of American life. Ironically, that press censorship operation, because it was run by the postmaster general, who by the way loved being chief censor, it was ran out of the building that was then the post office headquarters in Washington, which a hundred years later became the Trump International Hotel. And for $4,000 a night, you could stay in the Postmaster General's suite.Andrew Keen: You, Adam, the First World War is a subject you're very familiar with. In addition to American Midnight, you wrote "To End All Wars, a story of loyalty and rebellion, 1914 to 18," which was another very successful of your historical recreations. Many countries around the world experience this turbulence, the violence. Of course, we had fascism in the 20s in Europe. And later in the 30s as well. America has a long history of violence. You talk about the violence after the First World War or after the declaration. But I was just in Montgomery, Alabama, went to the lynching museum there, which is considerably troubling. I'm sure you've been there. You're not necessarily a comparative political scientist, Adam. How does America, in its paranoia during the war and its clampdown on press freedom, on its violence, on its attempt to create an authoritarian political system, how does it compare to other democracies? Is some of this stuff uniquely American or is it a similar development around the world?Adam Hochschild: You see similar pressures almost any time that a major country is involved in a major war. Wars are never good for civil liberties. The First World War, to stick with that period of comparison, was a time that saw strong anti-war movements in all of the warring countries, in Germany and Britain and Russia. There were people who understood at the time that this war was going to remake the world for the worse in every way, which indeed it did, and who refused to fight. There were 800 conscientious objectors jailed in Russia, and Russia did not have much freedom of expression to begin with. In Germany, many distinguished people on the left, like Rosa Luxemburg, were sent to jail for most of the war.Britain was an interesting case because I think they had a much longer established tradition of free speech than did the countries on the continent. It goes way back and it's a distinguished and wonderful tradition. They were also worried for the first two and a half, three years of the war before the United States entered, that if they crack down too hard on their anti-war movement, it would upset people in the United States, which they were desperate to draw into the war on their side. Nonetheless, there were 6,000 conscientious objectors who were sent to jail in England. There was intermittent censorship of anti-war publications, although some were able to publish some of the time. There were many distinguished Britons, such as Bertrand Russell, the philosopher who later won a Nobel Prize, sent to jails for six months for his opposition to the war. So some of this happened all over.But I think in the United States, especially with these vigilante groups, it took a more violent form because remember the country at that time was only a few decades away from these frontier wars with the Indians. And the westward expansion of the United States during the 19th century, the western expansion of white settlement was an enormously bloody business that was almost genocidal for the Native Americans. Many people had participated in that. Many people saw that violence as integral to what the country was. So there was a pretty well-established tradition of settling differences violently.Andrew Keen: I'm sure you're familiar with Stephen Hahn's book, "A Liberal America." He teaches at NYU, a book which in some ways is very similar to yours, but covers all of American history. Hahn was recently on the Ezra Klein show, talking like you, like we're talking today, Adam, about the very American roots of Trumpism. Hahn, it's an interesting book, traces much of this back to Jackson and the wars of the frontier against Indians. Do you share his thesis on that front? Are there strong similarities between Jackson, Wilson, and perhaps even Trump?Adam Hochschild: Well, I regret to say I'm not familiar with Hahn's book, but I certainly do feel that that legacy of constant war for most of the 19th century against the Native Americans ran very deep in this country. And we must never forget how appealing it is to young men to take part in war. Unfortunately, all through history, there have been people very tempted by this. And I think when you have wars of conquest, such as happen in the American West, against people who are more poorly armed, or colonial wars such as Europe fought in Africa and Asia against much more poorly-armed opponents, these are especially appealing to young people. And in both the United States and in the European colonization of Africa, which I know something about. For young men joining in these colonizing or conquering adventures, there was a chance not just to get martial glory, but to also get rich in the process.Andrew Keen: You're all too familiar with colonial history, Adam. Another of your books was about King Leopold's Congo and the brutality there. Where was the most coherent opposition morally and politically to what was happening? My sense in Trump's America is perhaps the most persuasive and moral critique comes from the old Republican Center from people like David Brooks, Peter Wayno has been on the show many times, Jonathan Rausch. Where were people like Teddy Roosevelt in this narrative? Were there critics from the right as well as from the left?Adam Hochschild: Good question. I first of all would give a shout out to those Republican centrists who've spoken out against Trump, the McCain Republicans. There are some good people there - Romney, of course as well. They've been very forceful. There wasn't really an equivalent to that, a direct equivalent to that in the Wilson era. Teddy Roosevelt whom you mentioned was a far more ferocious drum beater than Wilson himself and was pushing Wilson to declare war long before Wilson did. Roosevelt really believed that war was good for the soul. He desperately tried to get Wilson to appoint him to lead a volunteer force, came up with an elaborate plan for this would be a volunteer army staffed by descendants of both Union and Confederate generals and by French officers as well and homage to the Marquis de Lafayette. Wilson refused to allow Roosevelt to do this, and plus Roosevelt was, I think, 58 years old at the time. But all four of Roosevelt's sons enlisted and joined in the war, and one of them was killed. And his father was absolutely devastated by this.So there was not really that equivalent to the McCain Republicans who are resisting Trump, so to speak. In fact, what resistance there was in the U.S. came mostly from the left, and it was mostly ruthlessly silenced, all these people who went to jail. It was silenced also because this is another important part of what happened, which is different from today. When the federal government passed the Espionage Act that gave it these draconian powers, state governments, many of them passed copycat laws. In fact, a federal justice department agent actually helped draft the law in New Hampshire. Montana locked up people serving more than 60 years cumulatively of hard labor for opposing the war. California had 70 people in prison. Even my hometown of Berkeley, California passed a copycat law. So, this martial spirit really spread throughout the country at that time.Andrew Keen: So you've mentioned that Debs was the great critic and was imprisoned and got a considerable number of votes in the election. You're writing a book now about the Great Depression and FDR's involvement in it. FDR, of course, was a distant cousin of Teddy Roosevelt. At this point, he was an aspiring Democratic politician. Where was the critique within the mainstream Democratic party? Were people like FDR, who had a position in the Wilson administration, wasn't he naval secretary?Adam Hochschild: He was assistant secretary of the Navy. And he went to Europe during the war. For an aspiring politician, it's always very important to say I've been at the front. And so he went to Europe and certainly made no sign of resistance. And then in 1920, he was the democratic candidate for vice president. That ticket lost of course.Andrew Keen: And just to remind ourselves, this was before he became disabled through polio, is that correct?Adam Hochschild: That's right. That happened in the early 20s and it completely changed his life and I think quite deepened him as a person. He was a very ambitious social climbing young politician before then but I think he became something deeper. Also the political parties at the time were divided each party between right and left wings or war mongering and pacifist wings. And when the Congress voted on the war, there were six senators who voted against going to war and 50 members of the House of Representatives. And those senators and representatives came from both parties. We think of the Republican Party as being more conservative, but it had some staunch liberals in it. The most outspoken voice against the war in the Senate was Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin, who was a Republican.Andrew Keen: I know you write about La Follette in American Midnight, but couldn't one, Adam, couldn't won before the war and against domestic repression. You wrote an interesting piece recently for the New York Review of Books about the Scopes trial. William Jennings Bryan, of course, was involved in that. He was the defeated Democratic candidate, what in about three or four presidential elections in the past. In the early 20th century. What was Bryan's position on this? He had been against the war, is that correct? But I'm guessing he would have been quite critical of some of the domestic repression.Adam Hochschild: You know, I should know the answer to that, Andrew, but I don't. He certainly was against going to war. He had started out in Wilson's first term as Wilson's secretary of state and then resigned in protest against the military buildup and what he saw as a drift to war, and I give him great credit for that. I don't recall his speaking out against the repression after it began, once the US entered the war, but I could be wrong on that. It was not something that I researched. There were just so few voices speaking out. I think I would remember if he had been one of them.Andrew Keen: Adam, again, I'm thinking out loud here, so please correct me if this is a dumb question. What would it be fair to say that one of the things that distinguished the United States from the European powers during the First World War in this period it remained an incredibly insular provincial place barely involved in international politics with a population many of them were migrants themselves would come from Europe but nonetheless cut off from the world. And much of that accounted for the anti-immigrant, anti-foreign hysteria. That exists in many countries, but perhaps it was a little bit more pronounced in the America of the early 20th century, and perhaps in some ways in the early 21st century.Adam Hochschild: Well, we remain a pretty insular place in many ways. A few years ago, I remember seeing the statistic in the New York Times, I have not checked to see whether it's still the case, but I suspect it is that half the members of the United States Congress do not have passports. And we are more cut off from the world than people living in most of the countries of Europe, for example. And I think that does account for some of the tremendous feeling against immigrants and refugees. Although, of course, this is something that is common, not just in Europe, but in many countries all over the world. And I fear it's going to get all the stronger as climate change generates more and more refugees from the center of the earth going to places farther north or farther south where they can get away from parts of the world that have become almost unlivable because of climate change.Andrew Keen: I wonder Democratic Congress people perhaps aren't leaving the country because they fear they won't be let back in. What were the concrete consequences of all this? You write in your book about a young lawyer, J. Edgar Hoover, of course, who made his name in this period. He was very much involved in the Palmer Raids. He worked, I think his first job was for Palmer. How do you see this structurally? Of course, many historians, biographers of Hoover have seen this as the beginning of some sort of American security state. Is that over-reading it, exaggerating what happened in this period?Adam Hochschild: Well, security state may be too dignified a word for the hysteria that reigned in the country at that time. One of the things we've long had in the United States is a hysteria, paranoia directed at immigrants who are coming from what seems to be a new and threatening part of the world. In the mid-19th century, for example, we had the Know-Nothing Party, as it was called, who were violently opposed to Catholic immigrants coming from Ireland. Now, they were people of Anglo-Saxon descent, pretty much, who felt that these Irish Catholics were a tremendous threat to the America that they knew. There was much violence. There were people killed in riots against Catholic immigrants. There were Catholic merchants who had their stores burned and so on.Then it began to shift. The Irish sort of became acceptable, but by the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century the immigrants coming from Europe were now coming primarily from southern and eastern Europe. In other words, Italians, Sicilians, Poles, and Jews. And they became the target of the anti-immigrant crusaders with much hysteria directed against them. It was further inflamed at that time by the Eugenics movement, which was something very strong, where people believed that there was a Nordic race that was somehow superior to everybody else, that the Mediterraneans were inferior people, and that the Africans were so far down the scale, barely worth talking about. And this culminated in 1924 with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act that year, which basically slammed the door completely on immigrants coming from Asia and slowed to an absolute trickle those coming from Europe for the next 40 years or so.Andrew Keen: It wasn't until the mid-60s that immigration changed, which is often overlooked. Some people, even on the left, suggest that it was a mistake to radically reform the Immigration Act because we would have inevitably found ourselves back in this situation. What do you think about that, Adam?Adam Hochschild: Well, I think a country has the right to regulate to some degree its immigration, but there always will be immigration in this world. I mean, my ancestors all came from other countries. The Jewish side of my family, I'm half Jewish, were lucky to get out of Europe in plenty of time. Some relatives who stayed there were not lucky and perished in the Holocaust. So who am I to say that somebody fleeing a repressive regime in El Salvador or somewhere else doesn't have the right to come here? I think we should be pretty tolerant, especially if people fleeing countries where they really risk death for one reason or another. But there is always gonna be this strong anti-immigrant feeling because unscrupulous politicians like Donald Trump, and he has many predecessors in this country, can point to immigrants and blame them for the economic misfortunes that many Americans are experiencing for reasons that don't have anything to do with immigration.Andrew Keen: Fast forward Adam to today. You were involved in an interesting conversation on the Nation about the role of universities in the resistance. What do you make of this first hundred days, I was going to say hundred years that would be a Freudian error, a hundred days of the Trump regime, the role, of big law, big universities, newspapers, media outlets? In this emerging opposition, are you chilled or encouraged?Adam Hochschild: Well, I hope it's a hundred days and not a hundred years. I am moderately encouraged. I was certainly deeply disappointed at the outset to see all of those tech titans go to Washington, kiss the ring, contribute to Trump's inauguration festivities, be there in the front row. Very depressing spectacle, which kind of reminds one of how all the big German industrialists fell into line so quickly behind Hitler. And I'm particularly depressed to see the changes in the media, both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post becoming much more tame when it came to endorsing.Andrew Keen: One of the reasons for that, Adam, of course, is that you're a long-time professor at the journalism school at UC Berkeley, so you've been on the front lines.Adam Hochschild: So I really care about a lively press that has free expression. And we also have a huge part of the media like Fox News and One American Network and other outlets that are just pouring forth a constant fire hose of lies and falsehood.Andrew Keen: And you're being kind of calling it a fire hose. I think we could come up with other terms for it. Anyway, a sewage pipe, but that's another issue.Adam Hochschild: But I'm encouraged when I see media organizations that take a stand. There are places like the New York Times, like CNN, like MSNBC, like the major TV networks, which you can read or watch and really find an honest picture of what's going on. And I think that's a tremendously important thing for a country to have. And that you look at the countries that Donald Trump admires, like Putin's Russia, for example, they don't have this. So I value that. I want to keep it. I think that's tremendously important.I was sorry, of course, that so many of those big law firms immediately cave to these ridiculous and unprecedented demands that he made, contributing pro bono work to his causes in return for not getting banned from government buildings. Nothing like that has happened in American history before, and the people in those firms that made those decisions should really be ashamed of themselves. I was glad to see Harvard University, which happens to be my alma mater, be defiant after caving in a little bit on a couple of issues. They finally put their foot down and said no. And I must say, feeling Harvard patriotism is a very rare emotion for me. But this is the first time in 50 years that I've felt some of it.Andrew Keen: You may even give a donation, Adam.Adam Hochschild: And I hope other universities are going to follow its lead, and it looks like they will. But this is pretty unprecedented, a president coming after universities with this determined of ferocity. And he's going after nonprofit organizations as well. There will be many fights there as well, I'm sure we're just waiting to hear about the next wave of attacks which will be on places like the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation and other big nonprofits. So hold on and wait for that and I hope they are as defiant as possible too.Andrew Keen: It's a little bit jarring to hear a wise historian like yourself use the word unprecedented. Is there much else of this given that we're talking historically and the similarities with the period after the first world war, is there anything else unprecedented about Trumpism?Adam Hochschild: I think in a way, we have often had, or not often, but certainly sometimes had presidents in this country who wanted to assume almost dictatorial powers. Richard Nixon certainly is the most recent case before Trump. And he was eventually stopped and forced to leave office. Had that not happened, I think he would have very happily turned himself into a dictator. So we know that there are temptations that come with the desire for absolute power everywhere. But Trump has gotten farther along on this process and has shown less willingness to do things like abide by court orders. The way that he puts pressure on Republican members of Congress.To me, one of the most startling, disappointing, remarkable, and shocking things about these first hundred days is how very few Republican members to the House or Senate have dared to defy Trump on anything. At most, these ridiculous set of appointees that he muscled through the Senate. At most, they got three Republican votes against them. They couldn't muster the fourth necessary vote. And in the House, only one or two Republicans have voted against Trump on anything. And of course, he has threatened to have Elon Musk fund primaries against any member of Congress who does defy him. And I can't help but think that these folks must also be afraid of physical violence because Trump has let all the January 6th people out of jail and the way vigilantes like that operate is they first go after the traitors on their own side then they come for the rest of us just as in the first real burst of violence in Hitler's Germany was the night of the long knives against another faction of the Nazi Party. Then they started coming for the Jews.Andrew Keen: Finally, Adam, your wife, Arlie, is another very distinguished writer.Adam Hochschild: I've got a better picture of her than that one though.Andrew Keen: Well, I got some very nice photos. This one is perhaps a little, well she's thinking Adam. Everyone knows Arlie from her hugely successful work, "Strangers in their Own Land." She has a new book out, "Stolen Pride, Lost Shame and the Rise of the Right." I don't want to put words into Arlie's mouth and she certainly wouldn't let me do that, Adam, but would it be fair to say that her reading, certainly of recent American history, is trying to bring people back together. She talks about the lessons she learned from her therapist brother. And in some ways, I see her as a kind of marriage counselor in America. Given what's happening today in America with Trump, is this still an opportunity? This thing is going to end and it will end in some ways rather badly and perhaps bloodily one way or the other. But is this still a way to bring people, to bring Americans back together? Can America be reunited? What can we learn from American Midnight? I mean, one of the more encouraging stories I remember, and please correct me if I'm wrong. Wasn't it Coolidge or Harding who invited Debs when he left prison to the White House? So American history might be in some ways violent, but it's also made up of chapters of forgiveness.Adam Hochschild: That's true. I mean, that Debs-Harding example is a wonderful one. Here is Debs sent to prison by Woodrow Wilson for a 10-year term. And Debs, by the way, had been in jail before for his leadership of a railway strike when he was a railway workers union organizer. Labor organizing was a very dangerous profession in those days. But Debs was a fairly gentle man, deeply committed to nonviolence. About a year into, a little less than a year into his term, Warren Harding, Woodrow Wilson's successor, pardoned Debs, let him out of prison, invited him to visit the White House on his way home. And they had a half hour's chat. And when he left the building, Debs told reporters, "I've run for the White house five times, but this is the first time I've actually gotten here." Harding privately told a friend. This was revealed only after his death, that he said, "Debs was right about that war. We never should have gotten involved in it."So yeah, there can be reconciliation. There can be talk across these great differences that we have, and I think there are a number of organizations that are working on that specific project, getting people—Andrew Keen: We've done many of those shows. I'm sure you're familiar with the organization Braver Angels, which seems to be a very good group.Adam Hochschild: So I think it can be done. I really think it could be done and it has to be done and it's important for those of us who are deeply worried about Trump, as you and I are, to understand the grievances and the losses and the suffering that has made Trump's backers feel that here is somebody who can get them out of the pickle that they're in. We have to understand that, and the Democratic Party has to come up with promising alternatives for them, which it really has not done. It didn't really offer one in this last election. And the party itself is in complete disarray right now, I fear.Andrew Keen: I think perhaps Arlie should run for president. She would certainly do a better job than Kamala Harris in explaining it. And of course they're both from Berkeley. Finally, Adam, you're very familiar with the history of Africa, Southern Africa, your family I think was originally from there. Might we need after all this, when hopefully the smoke clears, might we need a Mandela style truth and reconciliation committee to make sense of what's happening?Adam Hochschild: My family's actually not from there, but they were in business there.Andrew Keen: Right, they were in the mining business, weren't they?Adam Hochschild: That's right. Truth and Reconciliation Committee. Well, I don't think it would be on quite the same model as South Africa's. But I certainly think we need to find some way of talking across the differences that we have. Coming from the left side of that divide I just feel all too often when I'm talking to people who feel as I do about the world that there is a kind of contempt or disinterest in Trump's backers. These are people that I want to understand, that we need to understand. We need to understand them in order to hear what their real grievances are and to develop alternative policies that are going to give them a real alternative to vote for. Unless we can do that, we're going to have Trump and his like for a long time, I fear.Andrew Keen: Wise words, Adam. I hope in the next 500 episodes of this show, things will improve. We'll get you back on the show, keep doing your important work, and I'm very excited to learn more about your new project, which we'll come to in the next few months or certainly years. Thank you so much.Adam Hochschild: OK, thank you, Andrew. Good being with you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Today is ANZAC Day. Even before dawn, hundreds of thousands of people gather to commemorate the victims of the First World War and in particular the tragic landing at Gallipoli, where 16 thousand Australians and New Zealanders lost their lives. As a German, you always feel marginalised on this day - certainly not without reason. That doesn't have to be the case, says Consul General Felix Schwarz: Anzac Day certainly offers Germans positive experiences. - Heute ist ANZAC Day. Schon vor Sonnenaufgang versammeln sich Hunderttausende von Mitmenschen zu Gedenkveranstaltungen für die Gefallenen des Ersten Weltkrieges und besonders der tragischen Landung von Gallipoli, wo 16-Tausend Australier und Neuseeländer ihr Leben verloren. Als Deutscher fühle man sich - sicher nicht ohne Grund - an diesem Tag immer etwas ausgegrenzt. Das muss nicht sein, sagt Generalkonsul Felix Schwarz, Deutschen bietet Anzac Day durchaus positive Erfahrungen.

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This early part of the twentieth century was filled with revolutions and wars (including the First World War). Formosa, however, was a relatively stable Japanese colony. But not entirely stable. We'll tell you about Chinese revolutionary Luó Fúxīng (羅福星), who was executed in Taiwan for trying to rid this island of the Japanese. And we've got some good info on the often-overlooked Tapani Incident – the largest Han Chinese (with Indigenous allies) revolt against Japan… and it happened two decades into Japanese rule! Find links, pics and more at formosafiles.com

In this episode we travel to the last major battlefield of the Great War on the Western Front - the Sambre Canal. Here we follow the story of the infantry and the engineers who attacked the Canal on 4th November 1918, including the 2nd Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment. We also see what remains of the battlefield today.The interview with Josh Grover MM is on the IWM website here: Josh Grover MM interview.Recommended Book: Decisive Victory by Derek Clayton.Thread on the Great War Forum: Royal Sussex Regiment at Lock No 1.Got a question about this episode or any others? Drop your question into the Old Front Line Discord Server or email the podcast.Send us a textSupport the show

In the week that the world changed, we're talking about the last time things got this crazy.   Katherine Arden is the author of The Warm Hands of Ghosts — a novel set in the trenches of the First World War and on the borderline between horror and fantasy. It's a Faustian pact made in No-Man's Land, where our memories are the price we pay for keeping ourselves alive.   In this episode we talk a lot about history, about inflection points and moments of no-return. We talk about how systems of power can seem so complex that they lead only to ruin – but we also talk devils and fairies and angels and brave, brave nurses with scarred hands.   It's a joy of a conversation, about the most hideous time to be alive.   Enjoy!   Other books mentioned:   The Bear and the Nightingale (2017), by Katherine Arden The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025), by Stephen Graham Jones Wasteland: The Great War and the Origin of Modern Horror (2018), by W. Scott Pool Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), by Susanna Clarke The Master and the Margarita (1940), by Mikhail Bulgakov Lud in the Mist (1926), by Hope Mirrlees Ghosts Have Warm Hands: A Memoir of the Great War (1968), by Will R. Bird Between Two Fires (2012), by Christopher Buehlman Ghost Eaters (2022), by Clay McLeod Chapman Wake Up and Open Your Eyes (2025), by Clay McLeod Chapman Support Talking Scared on Patreon   Check out the Talking Scared Merch line – at VoidMerch   Come talk books on Bluesky @talkscaredpod.bsky.social  on Instagram/Threads, or email direct to talkingscaredpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our questions and answers in this episode look at what happened to trench systems when they met a road, was the Battle of the Somme a victory, how France remembers the Great War, and the role of the Army Service Corps in the conflict.Somme Book Recommendations: Gary Sheffield Forgotten Victory and also Paddy Griffith Battle Tactics on the Western Front.Book Recommendations: Michael Young Postcards of the Army Service Corps and Michael Young Army Service Corps 1902-1918.Got a question about this episode or any others? Drop your question into the Old Front Line Discord Server or email the podcast.Send us a textSupport the show

Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new title in OUP's Graphic History Series that chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany. Based on meticulous research and using powerful visual storytelling, the book provides a multilayered narrative that explores the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish villagers from the First World War to the present. Its focus on how "ordinary" people experienced this time offers a new and illuminating insight into everyday life and the processes of violence, rupture, and reconciliation that characterized the history of the twentieth century in Germany and beyond. The graphic narrative is accompanied by source documents published in English translation for the first time, an essay on the wider historical context, and an incisive reflection on the writing of this book—and of history more broadly. Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews and teaches at the University of Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research centers on German Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, and legal history. She held fellowships at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. She was DAAD Lecturer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex and Research Associate at the Department of History at LMU Munich. Her Publications include Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. She is also the co-editor of Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses (Oxford University Press, 2023) and together with Stefanie Fischer co-author of the Graphic History Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past, illustrated by Liz Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2024) . Stefanie Fischer a Senior Lecturer at the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Her fields of scholarly research are German Jewish history and Holocaust Studies. Fischer is the author of Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919-1939. Economic Trust and Antisemitic Violence (Indiana University Press, 2024) and with Kim Wünschmann of Oberbrechen. A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past (Oxford University Press, 2025). She is also co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (Oxford University Press, since 2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new title in OUP's Graphic History Series that chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany. Based on meticulous research and using powerful visual storytelling, the book provides a multilayered narrative that explores the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish villagers from the First World War to the present. Its focus on how "ordinary" people experienced this time offers a new and illuminating insight into everyday life and the processes of violence, rupture, and reconciliation that characterized the history of the twentieth century in Germany and beyond. The graphic narrative is accompanied by source documents published in English translation for the first time, an essay on the wider historical context, and an incisive reflection on the writing of this book—and of history more broadly. Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews and teaches at the University of Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research centers on German Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, and legal history. She held fellowships at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. She was DAAD Lecturer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex and Research Associate at the Department of History at LMU Munich. Her Publications include Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. She is also the co-editor of Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses (Oxford University Press, 2023) and together with Stefanie Fischer co-author of the Graphic History Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past, illustrated by Liz Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2024) . Stefanie Fischer a Senior Lecturer at the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Her fields of scholarly research are German Jewish history and Holocaust Studies. Fischer is the author of Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919-1939. Economic Trust and Antisemitic Violence (Indiana University Press, 2024) and with Kim Wünschmann of Oberbrechen. A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past (Oxford University Press, 2025). She is also co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (Oxford University Press, since 2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new title in OUP's Graphic History Series that chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany. Based on meticulous research and using powerful visual storytelling, the book provides a multilayered narrative that explores the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish villagers from the First World War to the present. Its focus on how "ordinary" people experienced this time offers a new and illuminating insight into everyday life and the processes of violence, rupture, and reconciliation that characterized the history of the twentieth century in Germany and beyond. The graphic narrative is accompanied by source documents published in English translation for the first time, an essay on the wider historical context, and an incisive reflection on the writing of this book—and of history more broadly. Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews and teaches at the University of Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research centers on German Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, and legal history. She held fellowships at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. She was DAAD Lecturer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex and Research Associate at the Department of History at LMU Munich. Her Publications include Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. She is also the co-editor of Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses (Oxford University Press, 2023) and together with Stefanie Fischer co-author of the Graphic History Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past, illustrated by Liz Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2024) . Stefanie Fischer a Senior Lecturer at the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Her fields of scholarly research are German Jewish history and Holocaust Studies. Fischer is the author of Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919-1939. Economic Trust and Antisemitic Violence (Indiana University Press, 2024) and with Kim Wünschmann of Oberbrechen. A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past (Oxford University Press, 2025). She is also co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (Oxford University Press, since 2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Between the 1870s and the First World War, European colonialists set their sights on the Africa, making territorial land grabs that consumed nearly the entire continent. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne, Professor Richard Reid explains how the so-called 'Scramble for Africa' played out, and explores its immense impact on Africa and its peoples. (Ad) Richard Reid is the author of The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2025). Buy it now from Waterstones: https://www.amazon.co.uk/African-Revolution-History-Nineteenth-Century/dp/0691187096/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty. The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Continuing our journeys along the roads which crisscross the landscape of the Western Front, we travel to Flanders in Belgium, and take the old Roman road between the city of Ypres and the town of Menin which follows the story of four years of conflict here in the First World War and discuss once more the 'culture' of The Old Front Line.Got a question about this episode or any others? Drop your question into the Old Front Line Discord Server or email the podcast.Send us a textSupport the show

(Part 2/2) On Easter Monday in 1916, Irish rebels read a proclamation of independence that sparked a week-long battle with the British army.Over the next six days, this new bloody frontier of the First World War unfolded and became known as the Easter Rising.How did the Irish rebels plan to take on the might of the British army? How did this pave the way for eventual Irish independence? And did the 1916 Rising spark the beginning of the end for the British Empire?In this second of two-parts, Anthony and Maddy talk to Dr. Conor Mulvagh, lecturer in Irish History at University College Dublin, about the dramatic events of 1916 Easter Rising and its aftermath.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

With a history stretching back to the late 18th century, the Essex Yeomanry had seen action in the First World War, but in WWII, they found themselves in the thick of the fighting once again. From the Western Desert and the Italian Campaign to the beaches of Normandy and the advance into Germany, the Essex Yeomanry played a part in some of the war's most crucial battles. My guest is Stephen Keoghane, author of 'Shield and Protect: An Illustrated History of the Essex Yeomanry'. Drawing on extensive archival research and first-hand accounts, his book explores the regiment's wartime experiences and challenges as they transitioned from their cavalry roots to modern mechanised warfare.   patreon.com/ww2podcast  

While the Suffragettes were fighting to win the vote, over in Germany, Rosa Luxemburg was focused on overthrowing the entire system. A committed Marxist revolutionary and a fervent advocate of internationalism, Luxemburg believed that true freedom lay beyond ‘bourgeois democracy'. Her sharp intellect and uncompromising stance made her a formidable force in the politics of early-20th century Europe. Mark Jones speaks to Danny Bird about Luxemburg's extraordinary biography – from her rebellious youth and opposition to the First World War to her brutal execution in 1919. The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices