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.