Oct 14, 2024
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.
Sep 24, 2024
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.
Aug 21, 2024
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
Sep 2, 2023
Pontifacts is not the only podcast that focuses on the popes, but it is certainly the most entertaining.
It is presented by Bry and Fry, two very funny women who obviously have a great time creating the show, and their enjoyment rubs off on the listener.
Having been best friends for now well over a decade, when Bry, a history buff and podcast fan, decided she wanted to create a history podcast of her own, she naturally turned to her old chum Fry to co-host.
The popes as a subject matter were a natural fit with Bry’s historical interests, and the pair decided to follow a similar format to that used by the already successful Rex Factor Podcast, which rates all the Kings and Queens of England.
While developing Pontifacts, Bry had the opportunity to gain valuable podcasting experience by co-hosting The Lesser Bonapartes—one of the great lost masterworks of historical podcasting lore.
Interestingly, while Bry seems to be the keeper of knowledge about the popes and surrounding theology, it is Fry who has the Catholic background—not only is her father a deacon, but most of her family works for the church in one way or another, as well. Personally, though, Fry describes herself as “lapsed.”
Bry sees the popes mostly through an historical lens. History has been her passion from an early age, and she has studied it all her life. Her particular enthusiasm is for The Renaissance, specifically Florence and The Medici–she even got married in Florence in a beautiful, Renaissance-themed wedding. Bry does like dressing up!
Fry claims to be “just here for the ride.” This is not quite true, as she acts as the voice of the audience by expressing bewilderment at the mad goings-on of those crazy, crazy popes. Bry also points out that there is quite a clear division of labor—while she does most of the research and talking, Fry is the one making it all happen behind the scenes. Beyond that, Fry is the comic foil to Bry’s onslaught of deep research and illuminating quotes. Her humor is as dry as a well-made martini, and she never fails to amuse with her wry interjections.
The office of the pontiff holds fascination for anyone interested in history regardless of religious inclinations because, as Bry points out, “It is one of the longest-standing institutions in the entire world and one of the only roles in history that has survived every era… since antiquity. Kingdoms come and go… countries have come and gone… we have had empires and republics and nation-building… but the pope remains and continues to be a massively important figure. There’s no way to look at history and not wonder, ‘Hey, what was the pope doing?’ Because they were doing something.”
The all-important ratings
One of the most popular aspects of the show is its scoring system, which provides for a great deal listener engagement. The categories they use to rate each pope in what they describe as their invented “Harry Potter Latin” are:
- Papatum Infallium: Holiness
- Fructus Prohibitum: Scandals and Misdeeds
- Seculari Impactum: Worldliness and Mass Appeal
- Each provides up to 10 points each from both Bry and Fry. Popes can pick up extra points from other categories, including:
- Faciem Sanctus: Appearance. Here, the scores are divided by four, because… well, a pope shouldn’t really be judged on his looks.
- Tempus Pontificus: Length of papacy.
Popes also earn a “Cannon Bonus Point” if they have been made into a saint, and finally, the truly exceptional can earn themselves a Papal Bull:
“Popes who achieve a Papal Bull will go to the Pearly Gates and eventually be rated against one another in the ultimate showdown, to decide which was the popiest pope who ever poped. Will someone be popey enough to take the keys away from St. Peter himself? Time will tell,” Bry explains.
Pope Damasus is currently topping the leaderboard. His is a juicy story, as he presided over a slaughter of his rivals’ supporters when he took office, and he was also reputed as a bit of a lady’s man. But more crucially, he presided over the council that decided which books are included in the Bible as we know it. So, we can see that he would have scored highly in Papatum Infallium for his work on the Bible, in Fructus Prohibitum for the scandals, and in Seculari Impactum for the slaughtering.
Pope Honorius, from the seventh century, sounds great. He repaired aqueducts, fortified the city, and nourished the city, but unfortunately, has been excommunicated.
One of the very best episodes is Episode 137: Johannes Anglicus. In it, Bry ambushes Fry with the tale of Pope Joan. Bry keeps it very straight while describing how Johannes suddenly, mysteriously, started to get very fat. Fry’s screams of outrage upon discovering that he wasn’t fat, but rather pregnant, as Johannes was in fact Joan are much like those of the people of Rome at the time!
Fry might profess to be a non-expert, but when asked how many popes there have been, she quickly responded with 266. Each is included in the Apostolic Succession and in the main Pontifacts feed.
What will follow on for Pontifacts? Saints? Patriarchs? Bry and Fry don’t know yet for sure, but as they still have over 1,000 years of popes to cover, there will be plenty of Pontifacts to come, which surely keeps their devoted listeners happy.
Coming up
Pontifacts came storming back after a hiatus in March this year and have got straight into some of the juiciest bits, well not so juicy in the case of Cadaver Synod (Episode 115). And as of Episode 121, they have just got into the “Pornocracy”–a period when the papacy became dominated by women, which does promise to be juicy. This should run to at least ten episodes, which will see us through to the end of the year pretty much.
Intelligent Speech
Pontifacts has paid back the lead that they took from existing RexyPod podcasts in spades and have been a benevolent presence in the history podcasting community generally and specifically within the RexyPod set, where Bry has been a great support to many of the next wave of RexyPods. Last year at Intelligent Speech, we had a great RexyPod Panel featuring, Pontifacts, Totalus Rankium, and Rex Factor. This year there will a new set of RexyPodders on the Child of Rexypanel Panel, covering French Monarchs, Tsars, Tudors, and The American West.
Pontifacts will be speaking at IS and The History of the Popemobile––Responses and Innovations for Changing and Challenging Papacies, we will see where that takes us if you will excuse the pun. What we can be sure about is that it will be a lot of fun, like everything Pontifacts do and well worth coming along for the ride.
Jul 18, 2023
From the outset I should say that interviewing Sebastian Major was the absolute pleasure that I expected it to be. He is certainly one of the most affable history podcasters on the scene.
For those of you unlucky enough not to have yet listened to Our Fake History, and I urge you to remedy that situation promptly, this is the podcast that looks at historical myths and tries to “determine what’s fact, what’s fiction and what is such a good story that it simply must be told”. As a long-term listener and fan of the show, your correspondent did very much enjoy hearing Sebastian speak the tagline live and up close.
Including extras, Our Fake History boasts over 200 episodes and is now into its eighth season. The fake history approach allows Sebastian to delve into the great stories of history, right from the outset in Season 1, we had The Trojan War, Joan of Arc and Napoleon. As it became obvious that this podcast was going to run for a while, Sebastian has rationed his menu of biggies, so he managed to avoid The Knights Templar until Season 7, Galileo until Season 8 and he is only just got to Christopher Columbus and he very much enjoyed it even though he has had to research some fairly grim events.
The inception of Our Fake History has a legend of its own. At the time, Sebastian was a high-school history teacher in Toronto. As any good history teacher does he wanted to hook his students into the period that they were studying and thought that he would tell them the tale of Rasputin in all its salacious detail. He told them the well-known tale of how the mad monk survived poisoning, shooting and being thrown into a frozen Russian river wrapped in a blanket only to die from exposure. But on finishing, hoping to have inculcated these young minds with a life-long love of learning, he saw that one student had a hand up and said, “That’s not true. That’s a total myth. That didn’t really happen. Why are you lying to us in our history class?”
And sure enough, Sebastian went back to do his research and found that this tale though fantastical was widely believed but when he looked into it further he found that it was essentially based on one man’s account. And this man, Felix Yusupov, had skin in the game, he was the classic unreliable narrator, and unreliable narrators who would go on to become a stock character of the podcast.
So, Sebastian went back to the class with an entirely different Rasputin-based lesson, where the focus was reading multiple sources and questioning all of them. “What should we believe? How do we use these different sources? How do we weight them? How would we come to trust one over another?” And thus was born Our Fake History.
What became of that student who stood up and questioned his teacher, like so much of the historical record, is lost to the mists of time. But you can find the answer to his protests in the Who Killed Rasputin series as Season 2, Episodes 28-29.
Sebastian loves fake history because it tells us so much about real history. All myths are constructs of their time. Sebastian cites the example of the Titanic myth (Season 7, Episodes 151-153) as being a window on the British Edwardian cultural perspective and the expectation that the captain had been heroic, had shown the stiff upper-lip and had gone down with his ship as he should have done. Whether this is true or not is less interesting to Sebastian than what the belief in this myth tells us about those British Edwardians. Sebastian’s recent series on Christopher Columbus is worth checking out if you want to delve further into how myths evolve over time and what they tell us about the tellers of those myths.
As for those who actually invent the myths, those unreliable narrators, over the years Sebastian has built up a bit of Rogue’s Gallery who keep popping up that would include Geoffrey of Monmouth, Heinrich Schliemann and Graham Hancock. Schliemann even has his own guitar sting when he crops up yet again committing one more crime against archaeology. But for all his wanton destruction of the ruins of Troy, undoubtedly his greatest discovery, Sebastian confesses to a certain fondness for Schliemann… Hancock not so much. I sense that Sebastian has slogged through the collected works of Graham Hancock as an act of true altruism. He has done it so that we don’t have to – taken one for the team if you will.
Sebastian might be a lover the fakers and fakery, but he does believe that there is such a thing as real history. He says, “And so real history is when you look at all of the sources that you that you have in front of you and you go, okay, all of these sources agree on a certain number of things and where there is consensus and where there is agreement and where the things that are written match up with what’s in the archaeological record. Those are the things we can say are true. Those are the things we can say really happened or those are the places we can say there is no disagreement on this.”
So Our Fake History focuses on the historical events where these criteria are not met, where things are contested, where there are multiple perspectives that we cannot, from our distance in time say for certain which is correct. Over the years Sebastian has learnt to smell out fishiness, “I’m always suspicious of something that comes up in a historical source that that sounds a little too much like a fairy tale. Or sounds to a little too much like a story trope that we’ve heard before.”
That said, this does not mean that there is no truth in fairy tales. In fact, when asked to recommend a single episode for new listeners, he proposes the Was There A Real Pied Piper?(Season 4, Episode 77). He feels that it is a nice, concise introduction to what he does.
When it comes to recommending a whole series, he goes for something more personal to him as a Canadian, namely The War of 1812 (Series 6, Episodes 133-135). And he can’t help himself steering people towards the various episodes he has done on music, including Who Invented Rock ‘n Roll? (Series 3, Episodes 53-54).
Music is very important to Sebastian, and Our Fake History always opens with a fine, and supremely rock and roll, “1, 2, 3, 4” intro from a band called Dirty Church. But it was only after a few years that we found out that Dirty Church is one of a number of bands that Sebastian has been part of over time. He plays all the melodic interludes between sections of the podcast too.
And with his band background, Sebastian really enjoys suggesting concepts from history as potential band names, undoubtedly the best of these being the Boudiccan Destruction Horizon (a line in the substrata of London that marks the time that Boudicca burnt the city to the ground). He got into a bit of hot water with this recently when he thought there should be a Scandinavian band called The Ultimate Thule, after the mythic northern island, but it turns there is already a Swedish band of this name, unfortunately they turn out to be neo-Nazis.
Behind the scenes
As ever at Intelligent Speech, we do like to find out a little about the whole business of podcasting, this is particularly true of independent podcasters like Sebastian, who have taken the plunge and gone full time. Sebastian has given up his regular teaching work, though he is keeping his hand in with some supply teaching and envisages himself going back into it at some point.
It might not be the most profitable, but the Our Fake History merch really is exceptional and this is thanks to the input from Frank Fiorentino, an artist friend of Sebastian’s. Frank designs unique artwork for each episode of OFH. Originally Frank volunteered his services but Sebastian is now able to reward for his work, which he does diligently by insisting that Sebastian shares the topics and focuses beforehand, so that he can create a piece of art that really does reflect the episode in question. Your correspondent is the proud owner of a Plague Doctor covid mask, which felt all too apposite at the time.
Our Fake History also has a Patreon page with various rewards for different tiers, including bonus episodes, and the opportunity to vote on future episodes.
Sebastian is also now exploring the wilder shores of social media, well YouTube and something called TikTok, in order to bring the gospel of Fake History to the younger generations.
Then there is the advertising, Sebastian does sound a little sheepish about this, like so many podcasters but he recognises that this income helps him feed his family and to be a full-time podcaster, so he is actually quite comfortable with it. And if listeners are rabidly anti-advertising, they can join the ranks of the “beautiful people” on a tier of Patreon and get the ad-free versions. Seems very much fair enough!
Coming up…
- Hellfire Clubs
- Professional wrestling
- Buffalo Bill and the Wild West Shows (For the non-fake history of Sitting Bull’s involvement with Buffalo Bill, see History on Fire, episodes 55-56 from fellow Intelligent Speech Keynote, Daniele Bolelli)
- Lope de Aguirre (of Klaus Kinski’s Wrath of God fame)
Intelligent Speech
We are very glad to be able to include Sebastian as one of our Keynotes at Intelligent Speech 2023.
He’s working on a contingencies-based topic around the idea of No Contingencies, i.e. when there was no back-up plan. He’ll be exploring questions along the lines of:
- Did Cortes really burn his boats?
- What to do when you are Columbus and you’ve told everyone, including two very bellicose monarchs, that you were going to be coming back from Asia laden with gold and you are clearly not in Asia?
- Did Tesla really deliver what he said he had?
Sebastian and Daniele Bolelli of History of Fire will be appearing together on one of Intelligent Speech’s Roundtables. Details are still to be firmed up but they are looking into discussing storytelling and history, which promises to be a great session.
So roll up to Intelligent Speech in November to hear a truly beautiful person speak and in the meantime feast yourselves on the riches that are available at Our Fake History.
Jul 18, 2023
If you are reading this, you are probably into history podcasts and if you are into history podcasts, then you will already know Daniele Bolelli. Daniele has been a much-loved, leading light in history podcasting for a good few years now and has, of course, one of the most distinctive voices of our genre.
Daniele has been in the game since 2015 and is one of the few history podcasters to be able to carry an Apple-approved “Best of…” on his podcast logo since the year he launched. Eight years and 90+ episodes later, Daniele and his History on Fire podcast, certainly continue to be one of the best of…
As is abundantly clear from his accent and his name, Daniele is Italian but he has been in the US since he was 18 years old and is proud to call it his home.
When we met, he was bailing his home out after an unseasonal deluge had hit California. It was surprising for your British correspondent to be dryer than a Californian but these are strange times when it comes to the climate. It was a great privilege that we could have a quick chat and get some insight into the man behind the microphone.
His introduction to podcasting was from appearing on shows by Adam Carolla and Joe Rogan while he was promoting a book that he had written. Daniele has written a number of books, including Not Afraid: On Fear, Heartbreak, Raising a Baby Girl, and Cage Fighting; 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know: Religion; and Create Your Own Religion.
He would eventually appear eight more times on the Joe Rogan show, which definitely helped him a lot to initially grow his audience when he made his own move into podcasting.
These promotional appearances were back in 2011 when podcasting was in its infancy but his interest was piqued in this new media and people encouraged him to start his own podcast. This he duly did and launched The Drunken Taoist, a chatty podcast that covers all sorts of topics and is still going strong with 233 episodes available, the most recent one about the hot topic of our day: AI and the end of Humanity!
From his books and that podcast, we can see that Eastern religions and martial arts are a massively important part of Daniele’s world but by profession he is a history professor so branching into history podcasting was, of course, a natural move.
First he had to come up with a name (all good podcasts need an impactful name) and he freely admits that he stole the idea of History on Fire from a friend who had an HBO programme called Sports on Fire and the “On Fire” bit seemed to chime with what Daniele loves about history, meaning that it would fit well with the podcast he was planning to launch. It conveys the intensity he has always striven for and has the epic quality that matched the epic topics he covers. As he says, History on Fire as a show is “not happy, mellow and peaceful”. It’s a show that involves conflict, “not necessarily war but definitely conflict.”
Like a good father who is unable to say which of his children is his favourite, Daniele is reluctant to answer the question about which is his favourite episode. He tells people to visit his website to search the archive and find a topic that they find interesting. That’s the advantage of this kind of podcast that does not chronologically follow one historical thread but jumps around, so listeners can just go for whatever takes their fancy.
One recurring topic of History on Fire is Native American history. His theme tune is an Ennio Morricone track from a Spaghetti Western, which works oh so well. He can’t remember what first got him into this topic but he has been fascinated with the history of the American West since he was a tiny child.
So when the opportunity to cross the Atlantic arose, his mum getting a job writing for an Italian magazine about life in the US, Daniele grabbed it. Thus in 1992, at the age of 18 he found himself going through college in the States. After initially loving it, after a while he felt that he had not established any true relationships and was considering returning to Italy.
But then he had an experience that convinced him to stay. He went to a Lakota Sundance Ceremony, and all of a sudden he was in a better frame of mind, something clicked, and began to see the US as home.
That said, he has an outsider’s objectivity at being able to look at the country he now calls home. “The US is an extremely lonely society. That was back then, today I think it is ten times worse than it was.” It’s not that he looks at his home country of Italy through nostalgic, pink-tinted sunglasses and longs for some imagined communal spirt of Italy but feels that friendships in the US can often only skin-deep and fleeting. The way he puts it is that your phone book might be filled with people’s numbers but you don’t really interact with a great many people on the list.
He hasn’t in fact covered Italy a lot in History on Fire, maybe surprisingly given that Italy is quite famous for being somewhat heavy on the history and Daniele admits that when he was in Italy he “could not care less for Italian history because it is shoved down your throat at every turn,” and only began to appreciate it from a distance and enjoy Italian and European history much more from a distance than he ever did when he lived there.
As well as the episodes that cover the American West, another recurring topic is Martial Arts. He started training when he was 17 and has been practising ever since. He has read a lot about it and it makes sense for him to explore topics in History on Fire, around this world. He will be leading a tour to Japan in 2024 if plans stay on track, so if that tickles your fancy, keep following Daniele to get the details on that – it should be fascinating.
Behind the scenes
Daniele is very appreciative of the help and inspiration he got from some of the pioneers in podcasting like Joe Rogan or Dan Carlin. And he pays this all back in spades through his support of the podcasting community. Over the years, he has done some excellent collaborations and recently he has been working with fellow Intelligent Speech Keynote, Sebastian Major of Our Fake History.
Life as an independent history podcaster is not generally a viable career choice and Daniele has experimented with various ways to make it sustainable, advertising, a subscription-only model, and now Patreon.
We discussed his time behind the Luminary paywall. He says he would do it again while recognising that it might be financially rewarding but not so good for the podcast itself if the goal is to reach as many people as possible.
It’s great to have Daniele back from behind the paywall. He is releasing the episodes that had been exclusively behind the paywall.
Like many podcasters and other creatives, Daniele has a Patreon account and unlike all podcasters, he uses it really well to play with different formats and also to share something of the person behind the microphone. Patrons can find releases covering everything from deliciously simple Italian recipes, to mini-episodes that cover topics that didn’t match the strict Bolelli research criteria but that are nonetheless fascinating, and to songs by his very talented daughter.
The scope of History on Fire allows Daniele to be able to pick topics from pretty much anywhere. He sees a story that piques his interest and then goes off to see what sources are available – is there enough for him to weave a tale around? His criteria are: It needs to be an epic story, ideally with powerful characters, and with enough written about it to create a two-hour podcast out of. He will structure the episode or series around one principal source and then flesh it out with a variety of other sources to bring the story alive.
And that is what Daniele does best, he brings history alive and throws the listener into the muddy field of some ghastly battle.
Listen to…
Daniele was reluctant to choose his own favourite episodes, here are some that come highly recommended by Intelligent Speech.
- Sitting Bull
- Caravaggio
- Joan of Arc
- Taiping Rebellion
- The Conquest of Mexico
The list above neatly demonstrates why Daniele’s podcast is called History on Fire.
Coming Up…
And there certainly seems to be a lot more History on Fire in the upcoming episodes that Daniele shared when we spoke:
- US in El Salvador
- We vs Them
- Cangaço (Brazilian bandits)
We are very much looking forward to hearing Daniele speak at Intelligent Speech in November. It will be very interesting to hear what take Daniele has on our conference topic of Contingencies.
