Why History?

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by me, Fraser McGrure, for Aleph. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Ben Fawkes, Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph. And this week we're discussing why we study history.

Speaker B: 00:00:26

Why do we study history? Well, if I could give you a one-liner, we probably wouldn't need the entire podcast. But I think to start with, why are we asking the question of why do we study history, right? Because on one hand, you think, well, actually, if I want to know what the world's like today, that's geography. Anything that happened more than one second ago is history. So like, if you study anything at all, that isn't happening now. That's sort of history. But I have always been slightly sceptical of like traditional arguments for why we study history. And I've always felt that people who teach history, for example, are a bit defensive about like why we study history, as though the study of history kind of needs a bit more shoring up. And so to check my instinct on this, I typed why study X, right, into Google. And I looked at the numbers of results for each X, right, for every kind of main subject. And I was absolutely right. So at the bottom of the list, the most confident subject, the subject that where people are least likely to need to say why study this is maths. 7,000 hits with maths. Oddly, literature and art are next with 17,000 and 19,000 hits each. Why study art? Why study literature? Whatever the reasons are, people don't feel as much of a need to bang on about it. Then we progress through biology, music, physics, chemistry, philosophy with 36,000. And then in the premier league of subjects, which have a bit of a kind of crisis of confidence, we have English with 60,000 results, economics with 65,000 results, geography, 70,000 results. And right at the top of the list with 96,000 hits for why study this is history. So I was right. That history has a crisis of confidence, that historians feel some sort of unique need to defend their subject. So I think what we want to do here is...

Speaker C: 00:02:30

Maybe they've got lots of reasons to do it.

Speaker B: 00:02:32

Well, we've got... The question is, can we do that job for them and come up with a better, a good justification for why we study history? Or are they right because actually it's stupid and we should stop studying history altogether? That's, I think, what we want to look at. Yeah. If only we had someone who'd studied history. Yeah, right. I didn't study history, so I can't help you.

Speaker A: 00:02:56

Did you study history? No, I didn't. What did you study? I did, what? University, philosophy and economics. Economics. Well, you're no good. Peter, what did you study? Engineering. Yeah, I studied theology. I'm not good to know one. What did you study, Ben? History. Brilliant. We found our man.

Speaker D: 00:03:10

Which is almost in the realms of ancient history now. Right. Yeah. Especially a couple of decades ago.

Speaker A: 00:03:16

Yeah. Well, look, enlighten us. Why is history important, Ben?

Speaker D: 00:03:20

So I think there's two aspects to this sort of question. The first one often tends to be when people ask why is someone studying history or why should you study history, that it becomes very vocationally focused in terms of, you know, what jobs does it lead to? So I think with a lot of subjects that aren't sort of don't have, I guess, a professional or vocational lead on, you have to sort of look at some of the other sort of skills that you learn within that. And as Nick mentioned before, the critical thinking analysis is really important. Historians generally tend to be very good at research because they've had to use a lot of different sources, primary, secondary, often quite old, interpreting them, putting them in context. So I think that applies directly to a lot of jobs and workplaces. But then I guess there's the other question is why is history important or interesting? And I think we're going to get onto it shortly. But I think history is really useful for understanding the context of today based on what's happened in the past, and also for informing decision making about things that are happening now and why people might be reacting to things or why things have come to come to be in the way that they are. But look, tell me why you studied history? Well, the short answer is, it was my best subject at school. So, you know, being one of these people going to university and not being entirely sure what I actually wanted to do with my career. But why do you think it was your best subject then? Well, I found it interesting. I like writing, I like researching, all those types of things. I was really interested in military history in particular. As a child, I spent a lot of time, we'd been living in Europe, so we traveled around the battlefields. My father was an army officer, an ex-army officer. So, you know, he sort of was interested, so he took me along to these things. So that was really interesting to me. And yeah, so that kind of sparked my interest and took it from there. So I guess that's part of the point is often people do better at things that they're interested in. Definitely. And did you enjoy it? And what did you do well? At university? Yeah. I did reasonably well. I enjoyed it for the most part. But I guess once again, it was perhaps looking at where you focus in the areas of interest and picking your course around that rather than just the subject itself. What did you actually focus on? Well, I just turned up and just picked a whole lot of random paper units, courses. We call them papers in New Zealand. And some of the subject matter didn't really interest me hugely. So it took me a couple of years to find areas I was interested in. And then, you know, the things I were interested in were military history. And we had a really good lecturer who did modern British social history. So I found that really interesting. Okay, great. So circling

Speaker A: 00:06:19

back to what you said earlier, I think you said one of the importance of studying history is it can inform us now and decisions and gives us examples of how we might act differently, or something like that, I think you said. So have you got some examples of that? Yeah, I've got a

Speaker D: 00:06:35

few. A couple are kind of older. And then I've got a couple more recent contexts we could talk about. Okay. But if we look at the older one, go back 100 years or just over 100 years, the world had one of the most catastrophic wars that it had ever had in World War One. And part of the reason for that, why it was so bloody, was that military tactics hadn't kept up with technological advances in terms of things like machine guns, which allowed rapid firing of defensive positions to protect defensive positions. And this notion of digging in and building trenches, no one felt that they'd come across this before. And no one had developed tactics in order to negate it. However, if we look back a few decades, the British Army had actually come across trench warfare before. In the Boer War, right? No? Or was it before that? Well, Crimea initially. Okay. So there was some elements of trench warfare there. And then also when they were in New Zealand fighting the indigenous people, they encountered trench warfare, which proved to be quite an effective tactic to stopping their advances and holding them up. So despite the fact that, in the New Zealand context anyway, that war was won, there was no sort of reflection on what went wrong here, how can we learn from it? And how can we evolve to do things differently? That's the problem with winning, isn't it? You don't

Speaker C: 00:08:07

work out what you did, what you could have done better. You could have won better.

Speaker A: 00:08:12

So sorry, are you citing this as an example of history gone wrong, as it were? Or rather that, hey, the history was there, but people didn't sort of study it enough? Yeah, I think they're

Speaker D: 00:08:20

driven by the experiences in: 1944

Speaker A: 00:10:04

So we're citing this, or you're citing this as an example of, hey,

Speaker D: 00:10:07

history was learned. Yeah, exactly. So perhaps an evolution of military thinking and science from my previous example as well. Gotcha. Okay. Yep. I think one really good modern example of particularly as it comes down to sort of diplomacy and policymaking is the tangle that the government's got itself in around the situation in Northern Ireland as it relates to Brexit. So it seemed to me that there seemed to be a fundamental lack of understanding from the government as to how their proposed treatment of Northern Ireland would go down in the country, both on the Republican side and the Unionist side. And to me, that sort of screams that they haven't really studied or understood what the drivers of that conflict are. You know, why it would be important for the nationalist factions to have some sort of continued integration with the Republic of Ireland. And also why the Unionists would react so strongly to having some sort of border or, you know, some sort of customs border or physical border with the rest of the UK. And to me, when all that sort of was going on, as someone who, you know, I did this in GCSE equivalent history at school, like it just seems so obvious. But maybe if someone hadn't actually, you know, taken the time or had the knowledge to understand it, it just seemed like a fairly sort of common sense, arbitrary, pragmatic decision to make, particularly given that it affects a small, relatively small population, you know, within the 1.6 million people in Northern Ireland compared to 60 odd million in the rest of the UK. So, and then sort of going back a little bit further as well, you know, really understanding why the Good Friday Agreement was such a significant sort of act of statecraft, you know, to help sort of get a conflict which had been seen as being pretty much unresolvable to that point, into a place where the communities were able to live relatively peacefully.

Speaker A: 00:12:20

Yeah. I mean, what I wanted to say to that is, oh, what a pity that, you know, the government didn't have an historian to call on to have a think about all this stuff.

Speaker D: 00:12:29

Well, the Prime Minister technically at the time called himself a historian, but it was more ancient Greek and Roman.

Speaker A: 00:12:33

Exactly. The prime mover behind, arguably the prime mover behind all this was a classicist. So, yeah, I'll make of that what we will. But, okay, nice. Nick, you look like you're going to say

Speaker B: 00:12:44

something? Yeah. Well, I just, I think Ben's talked about specific examples, which I think it's very easy to, or relatively easy to make a case for saying, you know, if you're looking at this particular area, you know, the history of it is going to be important, whatever it is, you know, you should try and understand its dynamics. And that's history, right? But I think there are wider, like more universal lessons you could pull out from history that I think people are still inclined to forget unless they've studied it, which, you know, human nature doesn't change. You know, I think that's an important lesson, which people forget. Here, I've got this new system. It's going to work this time. Communism is going to work this time. That, you know, power really is, you know, the major driver of societal change. Well, you could say power and maybe technology. I think the cyclical nature of civilization is the fact that, you know, whoever's powerful now will not be powerful in the future. The kind of Ozymandias effect. We could all do with remembering that. You might be up now, but, you know, in 100 years time, 200 years time, the world's going to look very different. So, you know, just be prepared for that. You know, that actually, when we look at conflicts, for example, you know, they often come down to the same things and they often play out in the same ways. And I think Ben touched on this, but this kind of cure for optimism, I think, looking at history to say, you know, all of these thousands of military commanders, they all thought they were going to win. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been doing it. And looking at the history and saying, oh, you know, these things can play out in many different ways. I think it's just really useful kind of set of things to have

Speaker C: 00:14:21

in the back of your mind, really. But yeah, Peter. Yeah, if you just rattle off a few more objective reasons for history. Yeah. In history's defense. So we've done a lot of learning from the past, which I think, in my mind, you boil that down to, it gives you a model for how people behave in certain circumstances, which probably maps on to future people in future similar circumstances.

Speaker B: 00:14:47

Yeah, because they're the same people. I think like if it wasn't true, looking at the history of Martians might not tell us anything useful, but it is because it's humans. Yeah. You know,

Speaker C: 00:14:57

that's why it's useful. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because economics doesn't change. Yeah. Physics doesn't change. People don't change. So yeah, but other sort of more slightly more nebulous things that it gives you. So an understanding of context. So why do we have a Bank of England? Why do we have the UN? Why do we have institutions like that? Why do we educate our children in this way? These are all these things in which you're kind of given ways of doing things. There's a history to that. And that's quite important to why they exist. And so if you said, well, let's do away with the Bank of England. Let's just have the government set interest rates. Well, there's probably a good reason for not doing that. And we don't want to eliminate that at chest and fence. So history allows us to examine why. Yeah. Like we tried that up until

Speaker B: 00:15:47

1997. Right. And the result was bad. If you don't know that, you're much more inclined to go,

Speaker C: 00:15:53

this sounds like a good idea. Yeah. Cultural identity. So it gives you purpose. It gives you a reason for why you are who you are and why the people you know how they are very important. Moral lessons. We derive our sort of ethical framework from how things have been done in the past and how people perceive those things. So how we conduct ourselves is a lesson of history. And if we didn't, if we didn't study that, then we wouldn't be liberal progressives or we wouldn't be conservatives. We wouldn't have any kind of like identity in that sense. And channeling the Chris Wragg, economic and political uses. If you were if you were a despot, you can use history to bend the will of your people. Yeah. In your favour. Yeah. But more benignly, you can you can call upon positive patriotic feelings derived from history to support your cause. Finally, it's fun. People like stories. So it's inherently good. It's inherently. Oh, I don't know about that. Appealing subject, because you're dealing with stories. But these are real stories that actually happened. And your job is to write that narrative that's and as truly as possible reflect what actually happened.

Speaker B: 00:17:18

Okay, nice. Where do we go from here, Nick? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, this, I think we need to delve a bit more deeply into something which we take, I think, a bit for granted. But the idea of using a historical analogy. I mean, that's, I think one of the great purported uses of having this kind of library of historical examples. If I'm about to embark on a new world war, it would be quite useful to know how the other ones panned out, for example. You know, so so but then there is this vexed question of which situation I'm in. And therefore, which historical analogies I should be drawing on? You know, so you could say, for example, that the Maginot line, you know, was learning the correct lessons from World War One. You know, it was that it was learning, well, it's we're going to have, you know, it's going to be a lot of fighting at the border. We'll get bogged down for years. We need an advantage here. We're going to have trenches that have really good ones. Really good trenches. You know, the Great Leap Forward in China, unmitigated disaster. But, you know, pretty much trying to follow the Soviet industrialization, you know, approach. And, and so, you know, we and so you and you see this kind of discussion a lot, for example, you know, I know during or just before the Iraq War, you know, for or against basically came down to is this Germany, World War Two, and we will rid the world of Saddam Hussein and everyone will pat us on the back and the Iraqis will be really pleased to get rid of this dictator. Or is it going to be Vietnam? And, you know, chaos and years of bloodshed, and eventually we withdraw. And the, there was, you know, so it's not like, should we pay attention to history or not? It's like, which historical situation are we most in? What's the selection set? Yeah. How do we know we're learning the right lessons? Right. I think, and I think that's that, that's, I suspect most educated people, most decision makers think they are paying attention to history. I think it's tricky, it's trickier to work out how you do that. And to what extent you are supposed to put, you know, more or less emphasis on different bits of history. And whether the answer is, in fact, just to take a bit of a ragbag of examples and take the average, I don't know. Methodology. Is there a methodology to all this, Peter?

Speaker C: 00:19:32

Um, well, I, yeah, so the, I haven't got an answer for you. Oh. But I've got a slight, another slight, a peeve of mine. Oh. Historians. Oh, no. You've been all nice to them. Oh, yeah, we have.

Speaker B: 00:19:45

We should have a jingle called, which goes, Peter's peeves. And he pops in with another peeve.

Speaker C: 00:19:52

Yeah. So, um, a lot of historians, uh, particularly the ones that, uh, push out books every year about this, this battle in Normandy or that battle in Waterloo. You're talking about Anthony Beaver. Yes, that guy and others like him. They're also narrative based, right? It's all just words. It's all kind of like, I read some books, I read these papers, I talked to these people, and I made up a story and I wrote the story out. Now, I, narrative work, I get the idea, right? It's appealing, it's easy, it's accessible. And if you can distill kind of complicated thing down to a story, then it, people sort of more like to pick it up and run with it. Um, so if it's factual, fair enough. But I think it's very easy to become a bit too obsessed with an idea when you're doing a narrative, a particular sort of explanation for something, in contrast to more quantitative approaches. So there are, there's a branch of history, um, quantitative history, sometimes called clear metrics, which is, we're not going to do really anything with primary sources. They're, they're there to decorate and provide color to, uh, to, to, to data analysis, to actual data sets that we can either, we either directly have, or we can generate through archaeological finds, providing us with evidence that a certain number of people were here or that kind of thing. So they either direct analysis of historical data sets or creation of data sets, which represent the body of understanding and then analysis of those data sets.

Speaker A: 00:21:31

Clearly you're a brilliant historian, Peter, because arguably in any academic field, the best and the really good, true original thinkers in those will always, a bit like the um, always be very conscious of, you know, of our thing, right, of Cosa Nostra, which is, and, and will always be thinking about the subject itself and what it means and how you use it as a tool and so on. And so I agree. Um, but yeah, you've just sort of, yeah, called out some of the populist historians or whatever the, you know, the, yeah. Uh, where do we go with that?

Speaker D: 00:22:08

I was just going to say, this is sort of a presentation issue. So like with, with some of the more, um, I guess if you go to the library and get like a very serious academic history book, unless you're really interested in the subject, it can be quite dry and a bit boring at times. Um, I think some of the people Peter were talking about it, these two drivers, first of all, that they want to make a living. So they want to sell their books as many as possible. Um, but yeah, I think a lot of areas of society are very narrative driven as a way of, you know, you look at different aspects of society or, um, things are in the public domain and it's very much like, what is the narrative here? And that's, that's used as a way of, um, telling a story. So I think that's partly at the, that's seen as having a good racy narrative helps. Um, but maybe what Peter's talking about more is just being about creative about how things are presented. So I do think for various reasons, we're moving away from a lot from just having like a 400 page book or report or something like that. So are there different ways that these stories can be told or explained? Um, I mean, I think some of the, some people are really in the sort of popular history area, the ones who do the documentaries and is that a better medium? Is there other ways to, um, to, um, present what happened in the past and what we can learn from it? That's not sort of a massive tone that maybe that's part of the question. Yeah.

Speaker B: 00:23:45

Yeah. I mean, for a subject, which is, which appears to sort of lack enough confidence to go, look, we don't even have to defend ourself here. Um, history is incredibly popular. I mean, the amount of history podcasts, I get, I'm, I would guess it's probably in the top cup, two or three subjects for podcast, um, documentaries, fictional work set in the past. Uh, I just think there's history everywhere. People are always going on about history. Um, and I, and I, uh, yeah, so I, I don't, I, which is interesting, you know, it's interesting that we all do it, but perhaps don't necessarily reflect on, um, on, you know, why I suspect the answer is that we are actually, we get an intrinsic, uh, or we have evolved to get some kind of intrinsic, um, uh, value from listening or consuming an understanding of, you know, what's happened in the past because doing so is obviously valuable. And, you know, the fact that one imagines the earliest kinds of entertainment were probably people telling, you know, fanciful oral histories of where their tribe had come from and, and, you know, uh, what the origins of the universe were and those kinds of things. I dunno, my feeling is, well, yeah, we do, we have an urge to consume history in fact. Um, and I think, but I think the, I was just thinking about what Peter said about, you know, you get a lot of, a lot of detail, this happened and that happened. I actually think the detail is where a lot of the value is because otherwise it's too easy to impose your, your modern kind of mindset about how this would work on historical situation. I often, it's like the, knowing how someone approached a particular problem in detail. I read, I was really, I read a history book about the Agincourt campaign a few years ago. I can't remember who wrote it, but, um, and she, she went into a lot of detail about the, um, about the kind of the finances, you know, where did they get the money from and how expensive was it to keep an army in the field? And, and, you know, and then you've got a very different model. You're inclined to think feudal armies, they just trail around after their Lord and you have a battle. But when you start thinking, actually, no, there's a lot of project management here. Uh, I've got to pay them this much every month. We've got to have this much food. Actually, it's a whole ship's worth every so often. And where does that land? How do we transport it? That's the useful bit. Like then I go, Oh, right. Actually, this kind of explains a lot about things that happen, but also makes you think, look, if I've got my own personal Agincourt campaign to fight, whatever it is, um, I'm probably going to discover that there's a lot more things to think about.

Speaker C: 00:26:20

I'm not, I'm not doing down the detail, but what I'm doing down is like the seasonal hypothesis based on just reading a bunch of stuff first. Well, so what I, that book would be a perfect book if it started with, okay, so we analysed a thousand years of historical campaigns. We categorise different forces based on maybe some, uh, doctrinal approach. And we said, these ones, this doctrinal approach was more successful than this. Why is that? Then we go into the detail and say, well, this one works in these situations and this one works in those situations.

Speaker B: 00:26:51

I'm not even sure there are, it's not quite true to say that there are hypotheses being put forward. Like I think just the documentation, trying to work out who did what, when is valuable in itself. Like that's where data comes from. Yeah. You know, that's the process whereby data gets created.

Speaker C: 00:27:09

So I think there's a lot of value. You're talking about two different flavours of history then. You've got two different audiences. Yeah. Yours is the data gathering curation-y history. And I'm talking about the trying to, trying to, um, prove something that, uh, why something is or is not.

Speaker B: 00:27:25

Yeah. I mean, I, I, my instinct is that the best way, the most robust way we could use history as, as a kind of hole to make predictions about what will happen if we do X or Y, I suspect the approach, really the best approach is to actually just to get your spreadsheets out. Like, and I think the, you know, the super forecasting, exactly. Well, I think there's sort of, you know, the people who, I mean, I mean, you could look at how good forecasters were, for example, and characterise what they do is basically a type of history because they will go, what kind of situation am I in? How many times has this happened before? How probable is this outcome, you know, based on observed frequencies. So, so I think this is very closely related, that kind of methodology of, of, of his, of using history to, uh, you know, to light the way is, is something which is very similar to data analysis.

Speaker C: 00:28:20

Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. Nice, nicely rounded out there. Sometimes we call it small data analysis.

Speaker B: 00:28:26

Yeah. I mean, I think you can learn a lot from N equals one sometimes, you know, if you have

Speaker A: 00:28:30

enough detail about it, but, but yeah. No, I agree. You're right. Um, look, that's getting us close to the end, but before we do anything else, anyone?

Speaker B: 00:28:38

Uh, yeah. Well, I, I suppose just a thought really, but, um, I, I can't help feeling that part of the problem history has is that in a way it's, it's too powerful. It's like too general. And in a sense it's everything, right? I mean, it could be that, that things had worked out differently and we'd actually have several subjects like history of science, military history, some other kind of history, but as it is, we, we, we study just history, which is a bit like doing science instead of chemistry and biology and physics. Like it's just an accident that we have bundled lots of things together and branded them as history. And, and so the reason it's hard to defend maybe it's just that it feels a bit too general. What history is, is essentially is things that have happened and, um, research methods. And actually you could easily separate them out and have them apportioned differently. And then I don't think anyone would be, would be saying, why, why do we have to learn research methods? But the fact that they're kind of bolted together with some case studies about the Tudor, the Tudors is, is a bit odd, you know? Um, so yeah, yeah. Anyway, that's, that's it really.

Speaker A: 00:29:41

Yeah. I think there's a fair point in that. Um, look to finish this off. I've got a question I want to ask. It might be slightly biased by, uh, is just, well, it always is biased by whatever's on my mind. Um, what do you think to this? Um, I recently learned, uh, in, in learning a little bit of a particular history lately, there was something I went, Oh, that's, that's interesting. And it made me think about things in a slightly different way. Um, and so my question is this, do you have, presuming that all the time we're thinking about history a little bit, uh, actively or not, do you have a little bit of recent history stuff you picked up that you kind of like and would like to share? I mean, for me, I'll start off is, as I say, I, I listened to the rest is history podcast. I really enjoy it. Um, and they recently did, um, a series on, um, the Reformation, uh, or more, more particularly on Martin Luther. Um, which you'd have thought might be right up my street because having, you know, having studied theology or not, and I did study Reformation University. I didn't particularly enjoy it. I found it a bit dry, found it a bit, um, bit overly historical actually. Um, nonetheless, I listened to it on this occasion. Um, and actually one, I sort of enjoyed it, but the big thing I got that was really interesting was, it was first, it was talking about the printing press and how important that was as a, as, as a part of a development of, um, well, Luther's thinking really, because hitherto, if monks, um, who, all they did was, uh, write stuff, just copy stuff. That's what they did. They were just preserving existing stuff and just writing it down. And because it's so laborious, they didn't really have a chance to think about it. It was just copying it. Um, but because of the printing press, you print it and have a look at it and think about it. They say, Oh, what does all this mean? Cause you know, and just how that related to, um, the reformation and how it sort of, how it tied into being Luther being what he went on to be. Um, and just, just that simple thing just made me think, Hmm, that's quite interesting. You know, that sort of, yeah. Don't know, you

Speaker C: 00:31:39

look very underwhelmed. No, that's a good one. I like that. Yeah. He gave them more free time to think. Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting one because there are other technologies which have done similar things like the invention of household, uh, um, uh, good white goods, washing machines and things have freed up people to have more spare time. Yeah. There you go. And that's in turn allowed them to educate themselves differently or watch lots of Netflix. Netflix wouldn't exist without the washing machine. There wouldn't be time to, to, to watch it.

Speaker B: 00:32:11

Yeah. Yeah. So that was one, that was a little example of me that sort of went, Oh, that's interesting. Um, Nick? Yeah, well I played a, uh, a board game on Sunday about the Wars of the Roses and it, uh, really good fun. Um, and, uh, it, it makes you think a little bit about the sort of practicalities, which is great. And I just learned a lesson. I, I try, I started a campaign in Wales, uh, Jasper Tudor recruited a load of Longbowmen and decided to march through South Wales, uh, to try and clean out the, uh, the Yorkists. And of course, uh, you know, I hadn't done the sums I got, uh, I got as far as Pembroke and discovered that there was no way I could get this army moving any further without, um, without a means to get food, which I didn't have. I had no means. I was going to, I was going to march East and sort of enter England that way. No, catastrophic. You didn't get terribly far. No, exactly. I got from Harlock to Pembroke and then I realized my army was way too big for my logistics train. I couldn't get the food in. So, I mean, again, like, uh, you know, really, and I mean, is that a tale as old as time or what, you know, like, don't, um, don't start a military campaign. You haven't got the logistics, you know, to follow up, follow through with. So, uh, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Okay. Nice. Peter Orban.

Speaker D: 00:33:29

Um, so I, uh, well, about two months ago I was in Rome, um, went to, uh, uh, watch a rugby game at the Stadio Olimpico, which has, uh, been designed to look like the Coliseum. And there's a lot of symbolism around this, around the thing as a sort of, as like the, the, the home of, of modern spectator sport. Um, so it went to the rugby game. Next day I went to the Coliseum, which was interesting. Um, but also learned that half a million people were effectively executed there. And over a million animals were killed, um, as, you know, to amuse people. So, I don't know, I kind of felt that that's an interesting way that sort of narrow historical narratives can be like twisted, um, and into something that's perhaps different from what it actually is. So, you know, we think about organised sport as being something quite positive that people are interested in and is healthy and a thing which, um, not quite sort of the same as, um, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the

Speaker B: 00:34:31

Yeah. I definitely watched mass executions though, whereas I wouldn't, I probably wouldn't bother watching football. Yeah, I know you are. Sign me up. Especially if they were enemies of Rome. There's a lot of glamour around gladiatorial matches and things, and actually it's pretty brutal. It's pretty horrid. By modern sensibilities, it's pretty horrible. Um, Peter? I like the example.

Speaker C: 00:34:54

This is both, this is both historical in the sense that it's something that happened a long time ago, a while ago, not a long time ago, uh, but also history related. So I can't, it might've been one of you guys, um, referred me to the Dead Eyes podcast. Oh yeah, it was me. Yeah. So the, so in some, uh, it's, it's produced by a guy called Connor Ratcliffe, who was an actor and he auditioned and was given the role, a minor role in the HBO series Band of Brothers. Right. But prior to filming, he got fired by Tom Hanks. That's the, that's the premise of the, the Dead Eyes. And it's about him trying to work out why, what happened and why this happened. Uh, it goes, it goes on at length, but what it does give, gave, gave me is a whole new insight into the world of Hollywood and how actors do their trade and how, you know, how they, how they sell themselves. Just like everything to do with acting, which is something that I've never, ever had any exposure to.

Speaker B: 00:35:55

But I think another really important lesson you get from that exact podcast is how hard it is to find out what happened, you know, and we're talking about something 20 years ago, not 200 years ago, but, um, actually who told, said what to who, when, uh, how did this message get passed through, which agent was it, who was on it. All of those things are really lost in the mists of time. But anyway, yeah. So there's a lesson for all of us. And sometimes you just don't know.

Speaker C: 00:36:22

Connor himself, he's the primary source of a lot of, he, he, he was trying to find the other half of what went on for what he perceived. And he fully admits that, you know, he can't remember a lot of important details and some of it might have been fabricated over the years as he's told and retold the story.

Speaker A: 00:36:38

Yeah, it feels like, you know, trying to work out what happened, who did what, when, why, and all this, we need, there should be some sort of academic discipline that looks in to try and figure this stuff out. Anyway, I'm just putting it out there. Yeah, that's true. So let's stop there. Thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. I've been here with Ben Fawkes, Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph. Until next time, goodbye.