Dan Carlin has never been shy about his love for narrative history, and in this episode he sits down with Dan Jones to discuss a book that attempts something audacious: covering a thousand years of European, Middle Eastern, and North African history in 656 pages. The conversation isn't really about the book itself — it's about how we should think about the middle ages, and why the questions we ask about the past say more about our present than we often realize.
The New Old Story
Carlin opens with genuine enthusiasm when he describes Jones's work: "Powers and Thrones" covers the entire period from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance — a span of roughly a thousand years across a geographically broad zone. He frames it as foundational knowledge that fills a large chunk of time and an important region, calling it "a page turner." This is classic Carlin: he's not hiding his enthusiasm, he's celebrating it.
But what makes this episode click isn't the book's scope — it's the way Jones thinks about writing history for the twenty-first century. He deliberately set out to write something that would work for an intelligent thirteen-year-old getting buzzed on medieval history, but also for someone of his own generation who might be reading history for the fifteenth time.
Carlin picks up on this immediately: "that's the kind that's the big philosophy of what i've been doing anyway." And then Jones delivers something that feels genuinely fresh — a list of what he actually prioritized when writing about the middle ages:
"i was looking for things that i actually had a list of things i thought were going to be important were already important we're going to become more important as the first half of the 21st century went on and that list was climate change, mass migration, pandemic disease, technological change and global networks."
This is the episode's most important insight. Jones isn't just narrating events — he's using the past as a lens for understanding what's already happening now. Climate change isn't some academic afterthought in his telling; it's one of the primary lenses he uses to reinterpret major historical events like the arrival of the Huns into the Roman world.
History as a Mirror
Carlin then presses Jones on something that feels almost philosophical: how does history stay relevant when we already know what happened? The answer is in what Jones says about research constantly updating:
"there are always new research going on in lots of different areas there's always and even more than that every generation has its own preoccupations it seeks to somehow see reflected or see the foundations of them in the past."
This is where the conversation gets interesting. Jones cites a line from Ohio State University historian Robert C. Davis: "history is often not our present politics projected on to the past and that makes it sound artificial." But then he reframes it differently — as though history's job is specifically to create context for the now:
"we take with us our preconections, our prejudices, our concerns, our angst, our worries when we go looking at the past man otherwise why are we bothering what are we going to learn from it if you know if it's not there to give us context somewhere now."
Carlin responds with something that feels personal: "like you had talked about like globalized networks well you know you understood that in 1982 also but boy you understand it's so much better now when we live in it and it's so in your face so i think that's just reflective of our of a better understanding."
This is the heart of what makes this conversation different from a typical book review. Carlin isn't asking Jones to summarize the middle ages — he's asking what it means to write about the past when you have lived through present versions of the same dynamics.
The Touchstone Problem
Then comes what feels like the episode's most provocative intellectual move: the framing of the middle ages itself. Carlin asks Jones to explain how a civilization that lasted roughly a thousand years in some form compares to our modern world, and Jones responds with something that sounds like it could be a direct challenge:
"you're completely and utterly and 100 correct you know the framing of the middle ages has to be wrong you know that's that's uh that's how the when the middle ages first was conceived in the 16th century."
This is Jones being deliberately contrarian. He's arguing that our very concept of the middle ages — the name, the boundaries, what we consider significant — was invented by sixteenth-century Protestants who needed a way to separate themselves from something. It's not an objective period waiting to be discovered; it's a construction that reflects the concerns of its inventors.
The Slow Collapse
The conversation's most interesting moment comes when Carlin draws an analogy between Rome's collapse and what might happen to American power:
"if we were to hypothesize that we're seeing the end of the american, the end of the united states as a superpower right and we're some future historians writing from the 22nd century we might look back on say 9/11 as a spectacular assault on the heart of america that wrought chaos and tragic death... but what we wouldn't say was that at that moment America ceased to be a superpower."
This is Carlin's thought experiment. He's asking: if future historians looked back at America's current instability, would they see collapse? The answer is no — because Rome's fall didn't happen in one day either:
"it's not like the western roman empire just falls to bits in one day i suppose."
The gap between 410 AD and 476 AD — sixty-six years of recognized Western Roman existence — feels like a revelation. The collapse was slow, gradual, and spread across multiple generations. This reframes how we think about current anxieties about American decline or global instability.
What Critics Might Say
This approach isn't without tension. Some historians would push back hard against what Jones is doing — specifically, his willingness to explicitly project present-day concerns onto the past. The traditional view holds that good history should minimize contemporary bias and stick to evidence. But Jones argues that's impossible — we always carry our concerns with us when we study history, and pretending otherwise is artificial.
A counterargument worth considering: if every generation's preoccupations automatically get projected backward, how do we avoid simply reading ourselves into the past rather than learning from it? The danger isn't just empathy — it's self-reference. Jones acknowledges this vulnerability but doesn't seem particularly worried about it.
Bottom Line
This conversation's strongest move is its refusal to treat history as fixed or objective. When Jones prioritizes climate change, migration, disease, technology and networks in his telling of the middle ages, he's not rewriting the past — he's making the argument that these forces are what actually matter when you look at long spans of time.
The biggest vulnerability is one of scope: covering a thousand years across three continents in under six hundred pages means everything gets compressed. But that's also the point. Jones isn't offering deep dives; he's arguing for a framework — one where present concerns become lenses rather than distortions.
Carlin's comparison between Rome's slow collapse and America's potential trajectory gives the episode its most enduring hook: if you're worried about what's happening now, try looking back. The past didn't end in a single dramatic moment either.