Dan Carlin Is the Ultimate Time Traveler

Dan Carlin (Hist’89) is 4 minutes and 41 seconds into an episode of his Hardcore History podcast when he pauses to catch his breath. Alexander the Great has just watched his father, King Phillip II, get assassinated. It’s a milestone moment that Carlin likens to the 9/11 attacks, where anyone watching knew in those terrifying moments that everything would change.

Beyond the walls of his podcasting studio, Carlin’s millions of listeners wait expectantly at the edge of their proverbial seats. Was Alexander a victim, innocently watching the assassination of his royal father in the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon? Or was Alexander a traitor who orchestrated his father’s death to seize the throne? Carlin’s audience ponders this question as they drive through their neighborhoods, prepare dinner in their kitchens, and jog through parks, all while listening to Carlin.

“Dan Carlin is one of the world’s greatest storytellers, and anyone who has spent any time listening to his audio, even for a few minutes, understands that this is the case,” said Clint Kisker, an entrepreneur and former president of MWM Interactive, an entertainment company that has collaborated with Carlin.

A trailblazer in the podcasting space, Carlin was part of the early crowd of people in 2005 to tell stories about history via the Internet in an audio format. In the 20 years since, more than 100 million people have tuned into his tremendously popular shows. In Common Sense, Carlin, a self-described politically independent pragmatist, looks at events shaping the world. Hardcore History delves into riveting historic moments, and Hardcore History: Addendum features interviews and material that don’t make it into the main program.

For Carlin, who’s disarmingly gregarious and humble, a knowledge of history and its cast of characters is essential for understanding the present moment. Moreover, he said it enables us to see how groups of human beings tend to behave, especially under pressure. 

“Life, as someone once said to me, is like living inside a television soap opera,” Carlin recalled. “If you don’t go back and watch the previous episodes, you’ll never understand what’s going on — or why — in the story currently.”

Path to Podcasting

In his 20s, Carlin worked in broadcast television in Los Angeles before moving to Oregon and becoming a television reporter, then a radio show host. But when the tech version of the Gold Rush began in the late 1990s, he and five friends formed a startup. The goal was to launch a novel product — amateur content made by the public and hosted on a platform. It would have been something like what YouTube turned out to be. After he left the startup, what Carlin eventually produced was a podcast, but it wasn’t recognized as such yet.

In 2004, the term “podcast” first appeared in print when Guardian reporter Ben Hammerstein used it to describe a new type of audio blogging that could be played on an Apple iPod. The origins of the word? A mash-up of “iPod” and “broadcast.”

Plunging into new territory, Carlin launched his Common Sense podcast in 2005, followed by Hardcore History a year later. The Hardcore History format is unique, even by today’s standards.

“Podcasters doing true crime or sports entertainment are all folks who took an existing medium and adapted it to meet their needs,” Kisker said. “Dan created a medium. There was no prior ‘Dan Carlin.’ It wasn’t a thing.”

Each of Carlin’s Hardcore History episodes is an extraordinarily deep dive into a slice of history — and because he spends an inordinate amount of time researching, he only releases one to two episodes a year. Each one runs between three and five hours.

Carlin’s show takes on a conversational dimension as he doesn’t prepare a written script — his storytelling style is all improv. Episodes include the famous World War II battles that shaped modern naval warfare, the Atlantic slave trade, the Asia-Pacific War of 1937–45 and the Viking sea kings of the 10th and 11th centuries.

“Every show is on a subject I’ve been really interested in, so I have a foundation,” Carlin said. “Then I start reading, so I’m trying to update my knowledge — what’s true, how history has evolved and become clarified over time.”

But Carlin doesn’t just regurgitate important dates on his podcasts. He uses empathy to slingshot his listeners back in time, making people like Alexander the Great fallibly human and their decisions topically relevant. In doing so, his audience stands on the sidelines of pivotal historic moments, cheering and jeering on characters they once knew only by name but now feel a personal connection to.

“Empathy for historical personalities is vital if we want to try to see them more as three-dimensional figures rather than two-dimensional ones,” Carlin said. “Put yourself into the shoes of President Harry Truman having to make the decision about dropping atomic bombs in the Second World War. How could you even begin to assess such an event without trying to imagine yourself in his position?”

Having an empathetic understanding of the human experience is essential to help us navigate our complex world, said William Wei, one of Carlin’s CU Boulder history professors and a former Colorado state historian.

“As historians have demonstrated since time immemorial, history functions as humanity’s collective memory and the means for understanding the consequences of human choices,” Wei said.

At Home in Hollywood

Carlin grew up on the edges of Hollywood’s golden spotlight. His mother earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in the 1968 film Faces. His father, Ed Carlin, was a movie producer. Carlin spent his childhood in two towns at opposite ends of the San Fernando Valley — first Toluca Lake, then Calabasas. Back then, Toluca Lake was home to celebrities like Bob Hope, Bette Davis and Frank Sinatra. Yet Carlin describes both towns as Brady Bunch-type communities filled with camera operators, production folks and just regular people.

“Neither area was what it is now,” Carlin said. “Next door lived a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. Bob Hope lived in town, but we never saw him. It didn’t feel glitzy.”

Even so, it wasn’t a big leap for Carlin to get highly involved in his high school’s improv program and plunge deeply into theater classes for a brief stint at California State University, Northridge. And when he decided to finish his studies out of state, CU Boulder felt like the right fit.

“My dad really liked CU. He said it reminded him of UCLA in the 1950s when he was a student,” Carlin recalled. “It’s like [Coach] Bill McCartney said, ‘If you get the recruits to town, they’ll come.’”

Boulder Backstory

When Carlin arrived on campus, Coach McCartney was in his fifth season coaching the Colorado Buffaloes, finishing second in the Big 8. It was CU’s best conference record in 25 years. But you were more likely to find Carlin protesting CIA recruitment on campus and CU’s investments in South Africa’s apartheid than standing in line for football tickets. Clad in his Ecuadorian sweater purchased near the Alfred Packer Grill, Carlin pursued his passion for history, with an emphasis on military history. One of his courses was “Sociology of Peacemaking,” which he joked was “a CU way of talking about the military.”

“When I decided to transfer to CU, none of my theater classes transferred,” said Carlin, who initially thought that it was all a wasted effort. “But the great thing is, I’ve used the theater and history stuff every single day in my work.”

Carlin remembered the history department had a pamphlet printed on green paper titled something along the lines of, “What to Tell Your Parents About Choosing History as a Major.” None of the professions he pursued after graduation — journalism, broadcasting and podcasting — appeared on the pamphlet. Carlin addressed this discrepancy in 2020 when he served as CU’s first virtual graduation speaker.

“CU gave me the skills to put myself in a position to be offered these gigs,” he told the graduates. “And [it gave me] the knowledge, not the specific knowledge about how to do those jobs — after all, I didn’t study journalism, broadcasting or podcasting in school — but CU gave me the lifelong ability to know how to keep learning.”

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Illustrations by María Jesús Contreras