Interview: Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse

Fake History Hunter and author of Fake History: 101 Things That Never Happened

Fake History Hunter will be the first keynote at Intelligent Speech who is a social media influencer. But we are sure she will be known to many of our attendees as she is very much our kind of social media influencer. And she is hugely influential. With some 280,000 followers on Twitter alone (yes, we are going to call it Twitter, more on that below), the voice of the Fake History Hunter carries gravitas on the platform. Many people will at @fakehistoryhunt when they are debunking some nonsense that Fake History Hunter will have skewered previously.

Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse is the Fake History Hunter and we were lucky to be able to interview her and find out more about the person behind the social media accounts. Fake History Hunter is available widely, “I’m everywhere. I mean, I’m on Twitter. I’m on Instagram. I’m on Facebook. I’m on all the new social media platforms that popped up after Twitter became ruined by Musky Boy.” Though she does concede that Twitter is still the best place to be.

Jo can’t quite remember how long ago it was since she set up Fake History Hunter (it was June 2017) but she says that it feels like a decade. Interestingly she does have something of a penchant for Tik-Tok even though it doesn’t provide the kind of interaction and debate that Fake History Hunter thrives on. “Once you get the idea that it’s really just to share a short video and then move on that. It’s not really the place to debate. It becomes less evil. Because suddenly now, when I open Tik-Tok, I’m just getting video after video from archaeologists and historians. You know guys literally sitting in a trench going, ‘Look what I found!’ and that makes me really happy.”

Jo has brought her Fake History Hunter off the socials and onto the page with the recent publication of Fake History: 101 Things That Never Happened. As an illustration of the importance of her online presence, she was approached by more than one publisher and asked to write a book and given that she had dreamt of being a writer as a little girl, she jumped at the chance.

She sounds like she really enjoyed the process of writing the book and interacting with a positive editor, all the way to it becoming a big hit. Having enjoyed this one so much, she is planning more, starting with a version of this one but directed at kids. She is looking forward to arming the next generation with facts that they can pull their parents and teachers up on.

Fake History: 101 Things That Never Happened is a lot of fun. With 101 things to choose from, a suggested approach is to go through the contents list and find the things that you believe to be true and get yourself schooled.

It is also very funny! Even for a Dutch person, Jo, has an incredible dominion of the English language, which she learnt largely from watching British TV. This means that she has a great turn of phrase, e.g. “Like any normal person, I’ve been obsessed with medieval torture devices ever since I was a little girl.”
Jo’s approach to learning a language is similar to her hunting of fake history. She noticed that the subtitles on Dutch TV were much milder than the original, so naturally she wanted to find out what that word she just heard on The Young Ones really meant. And then, of course, she was able to bandy about this newly acquired filth on the school playground the following day.

Getting to the truth of things is, Jo says, part of her DNA. And as a history lover she just can’t abide being people getting things wrong and talking nonsense. And challenging people is, she says, “A good excuse to talk about something you’re interested in. You know, because when you say mediaeval people never bathe, and I say they did. That’s not the end of the conversation, you know, because then we have a debate, and then I get an excuse to brag about my knowledge, but also teach someone. And sometimes when you correct someone, their response is really cool. They’re really happy. They’re interested. Oh, wow! I learned something new. That’s fantastic, brilliant. Thank you. And that makes me feel good.” Though of course, other people get angry and aggressive. Jo certainly doesn’t shy away from an online fight. She says that she can find these entertaining.

But she doesn’t just challenge fake history online for her own gratification, she sees that a lot of the fake history that is shared, is shared with an agenda.
“They’re trying to support an idealism or an idea that they have. Which quite often is an offensive one or a wrong one, or just a stupid one. So sometimes you want to stop something from being spread for more reasons than just enjoying history.”

Jo does admit that there is sometimes something a little sad about finding out that a much cherished historical myth turns out to be fake, she says, “I would have loved Napoleon to have blown the nose off the sphinx. I would be the happiest person in the world if tomorrow an archaeologist found a Viking helmet with horns. Cause they are much cooler.”

But on the other hand, getting to the truth of things holds its own fascination. The famous oubliettes that guides at French chateaux will tell tourists is where prisoners would be flung to literally be forgotten were, in actual fact, probably just water cisterns. But these water cisterns in turn help debunk another myth about the middle ages – that people didn’t really bathe that often. Jo is very interested in mediaeval bathing!

…and torture instruments. If that is your thing too, make your way to the Fake History Hunter Twitter to learn how things like the Iron Maiden were Victorian inventions that chimed with their worldview.

Jo has a rather dim opinion of the Victorians and finds that she is often debunking fake history that comes down to us from that period and is coloured by a Victorian mindset.

“If you look at how Victorians were writing about the Middle Ages or the Neanderthals, when they were first discovered. You clearly see that they’re sharing their perspective of that world through Victorian rose-tinted glasses, or grime-tinted glasses!”

Their cities were grimy so they naturally believed that people from long ago must have been even grimier. “So because, you know, we all like to think that history and progress is a straight line. But it isn’t.”

She also thinks that in one hundred years time, historians will look back at us and think, “that they would say that with their wacky twenty-first century ideas.” Historians, as she says, are just human and can make mistakes, and sometimes they simply copy and paste, often innocently believing that a quote they have seen in a reputable historian’s book is valid without researching it for themselves. She gives an example of this the famous quote by Elizabeth I saying that she hardly ever bathed (bathing again!) turns out to be a Victorian joke.

Jo has had the history nerd’s dream career. She left behind a job in film and television to become a historical researcher and consultant for authors, museum, documentaries and television shows. She designed museum exhibits and portrayed people from the past as a live historical interpreter in museums. This meant she got to dress up in authentic period clothing, something she loves, especially if it means that she can portray a clean mediaeval person. She once, in full dress, took down a teacher, in front of his class, who had been pontificating about the Middle Ages.

Intelligent Speech

We are very much looking forward to welcoming Jo, the Fake History Hunter, to Intelligent Speech 2025 and look forward to seeing that person who deflated a pompous teacher in action.

She is still working on the details of her Keynote address but it will likely cover favourite topics hygiene, torture and maybe even some Viking horns. The Q&A promises to be great, so audience members should come prepared.

Interview: Otto English

Utter Bollocks podcast and Fake Heroes and Fake History books

Otto English is the kind of interviewee one cannot resist from describing as affable. The interview ran over the time allotted by a well-known video conferencing service and we had to hurriedly regenarate a link to continue the conversation.

Otto English, the pseudonymous author and journalist, has made a name for himself as a sharp critic of British politics and culture. We were not far into the interview before we came to this pen name, partly just in order to establish how to address him. Andrew Scott, for that is his real name, decided that he needed an alter ego in order to be able to post freely on what was then, and still is to many, Twitter. He was making his way writing dramas and screenplays and didn’t want that career to be muddied by his newfound persona who was lampooning politicians on social media.
But then another Andrew Scott appeared on our screens, most notably as the hot priest in the series, Fleabag, so Otto English stuck, and that is how we will be referring to him, seeing how fitting it is for our purposes.

The titles of his two books and of his podcast, will tell you why we, at Intelligent Speech Towers, were so keen to sign him up as Keynote speaker for the 2025 event with the topic of “Deception”.

His first book was Fake History, subtitled Ten Great Lies and How They Shaped the World, covering an array of topics from Winston Churchill to Genghis Khan via flat earthers and curry. He followed this with Fake Heroes: Ten False Icons and How They Altered the Course of History, and with Mother Teresa, Che Guevara, and JFK on the cover, we can see that again, English ranges his aim far and wide.

Otto’s podcast, Utter Bollocks, is very much in keeping with truth bombing of his books. He co-hosts with John Mitchinson, one of the creators of the hit BBC quiz show QI – so a proper big brain. Otto and John choose a myth each episode and delve into any veracity that it might have and judgement is passed down by AI Joe on whether it is utter bollocks or not. AI Joe is voiced by Joanna Scanlan, the renowned, BAFTA-winning, actress who has appeared in any number of films and TV series.

And when Otto is not posting copiously on Twitter, writing books, and presenting podcasts, he gets on with his day job of being a journalist. He writes mostly for Byline Times, and you can find his articles here: https://bylinetimes.com/author/ottoenglish/ Sensitivity alert: if you are a big fan of Brexit or Boris Johnson, you might want to avert your eyes.

Otto enjoys writing honest profiles of people and it came naturally to him as he had carved out something of a niche, when writing for Politico, for obituaries of people who were not dead yet, including Boris Johnson, The Queen, and Prince Philip. Otto is not the sort of person to do a complete hatchet job on his subjects but neither would he pen the kind of hagiography that obituaries often are. For instance, his piece on The Queen was about a woman called Elizabeth Windsor rather than Her Majesty the Queen.

These profiles led directly to his second book, Fake Heroes, being commissioned, which is essentially a collection of “ten honest obituaries that look at the myth of that person.” There is another book in the pipeline, which is almost the opposite of Fake Heroes, where Otto will be examining notorious people from history, such as Roger Casement or Al Capone and assessing whether they really were as bad as they have been painted. He had to promise his long-suffering agent that he wasn’t going to “do Hitler!”

Part of Otto’s fascination with fake history is how it gets weaved into our various national mythologies. This is something that he will be examining in his Keynote talk at Intelligent Speech 2025.

He cites the example of the small boats at Dunkirk, that Christopher Nolan revisited in his recent film. There were small boats at Dunkirk, but they had mostly been requisitioned into service, sometimes without the knowledge of their owners, and were mostly used to ferry soldiers from the shore to the waiting troop ships. But the heroic story of thousands of common people coming to the rescue of “our boys” is what allowed the British to turn what was really a story of ignominious defeat into a myth of steadfast defiance.

Otto likes to watch his audiences when he does book readings and goes into the Dunkirk myth and enjoys seeing how he can see the audience literally be knocked back when they hear the truth. Inconveniently, the real saviour of the troops at Dunkirk was probably actually Adolf Hitler himself, who issued a seemingly bizarre “Halt Order”, that stopped the German advance 12 miles from Dunkirk, which, along with a brave defence by French troops bought the British Navy crucial time to evacuate but thanking Hitler or worse still, the French, does not sit well in this tale of the plucky Brit fighting against apparently insurmountable odds.

Intelligent Speech

Otto’s Keynote speech at Intelligent Speech, provisionally titled, How Bad History Poisons Politics, will explore these kinds of national myths and how they are often exploited by politicians for nefarious purposes.

“Trump, Brexit, the rise of Putin, Xi, the global migration crisis and many political crises across the world are all rooted in dangerous ahistorical narratives of lost paradise, stolen greatness and the notion that if we could turn the clock back and reset it all our present would be safe once more. Much of it is informed by Fake History which poisons the well of understanding of who we are and what really happened in the past and we need to seek to urgently address that more than ever. In this presentation I will explain why we need to question those narratives and understand the ‘truth’ of who we are.”

He describes the mythos of Churchill as an example, and how he is summoned by various characters on the British right, “It’s something we don’t think that we British people do. It’s the kind of thing we think people do in Russia or in some tinpot dictatorship in South America. We think, those idiots, they lionise Che Guevara or Mussolini, how could they be that stupid?” Otto pauses during this invective to couch his description about Churchill to make the point that he is not comparing him to Guevara or Mussolini, and says, “he did a lot of good things… But the idea that he got every call right or that he was sort of a man of the people who was standing on the underground, chatting to people was a load of absolute bollocks.” He then goes on to talk about how in Boris Johnson’s biography The Churchill Factor, “which seemed to have been written over a very large lunch, he trots out all these stories which are easily, provably false.”

Favourite Deception

Otto’s favourite fake history story is the story of Henry Tandy, the man who supposedly confronted an unarmed young German corporal in the trenches of World War I and allowed him to go free. This young German was none other than Adolf Hitler. “It’s all nonsense,” says Otto “but what’s fascinating is that it is not entirely nonsense, as some elements are true. Hitler did have a portrait of Henry Tandy and did often repeat this story but he had chosen Henry Tandy because he was the most decorated serviceman of World War I and “Hitler wanted to create an origin myth about himself,” where his life had been saved, so that he could go on, Christ-like, to save Germany. What Otto likes about this story is how all the players in it started to play along with it, including Henry Tandy himself, who began to tell of how he wished he had shot Hitler, even though previously, when asked by journalists, he denied any knowledge of it.

“So that shows the sort of power of fake history, and how it can draw people in like some sort of mega magnet to serve all sorts of different strands. And now everybody confects these lies in order to have their own agendas, which is very interesting.”

Conversely his favourite story that turns out to probably not be utter bollocks is when he was in the aptly named The Bull pub in Hertfordshire, chatting to the barman who told him “We’ve got an elephant buried in the garden.” Otto’s bullsh*t antenna tuned straight into this and naturally he decided to investigate. And it turns out that there are probably many elephants buried in all sorts of unlikely places throughout the British Isles. In the late 1900s, there would have been hundreds of circuses travelling up and down the country and with elephants not being native to these climes, they are hard to keep alive and inevitably some would have fallen by the wayside and these deaths would have woven themselves into the folk memories of people. “Some of the stories of elephant burials in villages are clearly true, and they are fragments of memories of a moment in the past when something rather magical happened when an elephant walked into a village, and then something terrible happened, and it died.”
So, roll up, roll up to hear Otto’s Keynote presentation that will undoubtedly be a great event and, which you would be well-advised not to miss.

Interview: Wesley Livesay

History of the Second World War and History of the Great War podcasts

Wesley is a true stalwart of Intelligent Speech – he is just prepping what will be his third Intelligent Speech presentation and this time he is joining us as a Keynote Speaker.

Wesley has been podcasting since 2014, first bringing us the History of the Great War Podcast and, not illogically, following up with the History of the Second World War Podcast. Unlike some podcasters, he can readily pinpoint the very day he launched his first episode. It was the 28th of June 2014 – precisely 100 years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand – the event that sparked the Great War.

He set up this first podcast to closely follow the chronology of World War One. He decided to cover events strictly according to the year in which they happened, so in 2016 he would only talk about what went on in 1916.

He eventually found this framework quite constraining, as he says, “I really had to keep things moving so that I could hit those totally arbitrary deadlines.” So for his next podcast – The History of the Second World War Podcast, he decided to do away with this restriction, and also presumably because he didn’t want to wait until 2039 to get going!

He has found this liberating as it allows him to go into a lot more depth, though this has not been universally popular, he shares some feedback with us:

“I actually was getting a little criticism along the way from some listeners that it was taking me a little too long to get to the war, because I spent a 170 episodes or something and I hadn’t even got to Poland yet. That’s three years of podcasting!”

(Here at Intelligent Speech we are big fans of the meandering podcast that takes the time it needs to give the listener the necessary background to really get the thing – viz. Wittenburg to Westphalia from our own Dear Leader.)

As a podcaster of long standing, Wesley has some fascinating insights into the world of history podcasting. It was interesting to hear that his interview series on the Spanish Civil War was not particularly popular with some of his listeners. He thinks this might be because his podcast is the single-voice-to-microphone style of podcast, à la Mike Duncan, and this is what his listeners enjoy. If they were fans of a different, interview, style of podcast, they would listen to an interview-based podcast. Wesley also finds that interviews take him outside his usual podcast routine where it is just him, his research and his microphone. Interviews require all sorts of admin and arrangements. (FWIW, this correspondent particularly enjoyed the Spanish Civil War series and would highly recommend it: https://historyofthesecondworldwar.com/interviews/)

From the viewpoint of 2024, it might seem that podcasting about the seminal conflicts of the 20th Century would be a crowded market, but ten years ago it really wasn’t. And even today, there are not many strictly chronological podcasts about these wars. Wesley describes his approach, “It’s chronological from the beginning. It hits all the high and low points. This is critical to helping people understand the war or events in history in general, because if you just are bouncing around it’s really hard to understand the context, and it ends up elevating events over others based on what you cover. And that’s how you end up with, you know 49 million books, about The Normandy Invasion.” His podcast isn’t one of those that he calls “platoon hunting”, that go right down to the unit level, when you sometimes can’t see the wood for the trees. As he says, “What I’m mostly interested in answering, when I’m looking at my podcast, is, you have to answer the who, the what, the where, the when. That’s really important. But I wanna get to the why, I’m really curious about the why. And that’s what I wanna think about. That’s what I wanna talk about.”

Favourite Deception

Wesley tells us that his favourite historical deception from World War Two were the often rubbish disguises the German Navy applied to merchant ships. He says they looked like something a five-year old would have dreamed up but points out that they didn’t need to look good close up – they only needed to deceive until they got within gunshot range.

Intelligent Speech

As we mentioned, Wesley has appeared at Intelligent Speech before, as a main presenter, and as a panel member but also crucially as tech support to a fairly technically inept bunch at Intelligent Speech Towers (your correspondent raises their hand). In fact it is largely thanks to Wesley that we managed to rescue some of the past video recordings from digital doom. You can find Wesley’s past appearances here:

2022: The Correct Wrong Choice about the Maginot Line

2021: The Czech Legion The Longest Journey Home

For 2025, Wesley is bringing us “Sacrificed in the Name of Deception”, which frankly sounds great! We won’t spoilerise his Keynote too much here but he mentions, “What I’m kind of looking at is in the Second World War. There’s a lot of instances where one side, often the Allies, based on how things kind of worked out, they have information about what the enemy is going to do. But they had to conceal the fact that they had that information. The highest levels of Allied leadership essentially ordered mistakes to be made. People died.”

Wesley tells us that he loves appearing at Intelligent Speech precisely because of the aforementioned style of his podcast. It can be a little lonely just being a one-man band with a microphone. Intelligent Speech allows him to interact with fans of history and history podcasts. “I love being in the presence of people who are really passionate and excited about something. It’s very motivating to be in that kind of environment.”

We are certainly delighted that Wesley will be joining us for Intelligent Speech 2025 and are very much looking forward to hearing all about his sacrificial deceptions.

If you want to check Wesley’s output, follow the links below or search for History of the Great War Podcast and/or History of the Second World War Podcast wherever you get your podcasts, as they say.

YouTube Channel

Patreon