Doug Sofer – Page 2 – Find Yourself in History

Crudely drawn map of two starfish dancing the tango. Printed text on the bottom reads "Mine location methodology:" and then scrawled in handwriting is written "Starfish dancing the tango would be really cool." — *Heavy-handed didactic illustration drawn in Procreate for iPad by Doug Sofer ©2025.*

Thank you savvy Economist writer(s) for explaining the appeal of these shows. Here’s what you left out.

History podcasts recently made the big-time news.¹ The Economist of London called us out and that article lays out three reasons why folks love us:

People over thirty have realized that they didn’t pick up enough good history in school. They’re now rediscovering the joys of history later in life.
Fans of history podcasts build smart, friendly networks full of smart, friendly people who feel part of something bigger than their individual, smart, friendly selves.
Good history podcasters tell great stories. Because they’re historical, those stories have long shelf lives.

Agreed on all three points, friendly Economizers. But those reasons are just the beginning. In the improv spirit of yes-and: Yes, that wacky gang from everyone’s favorite magazine-that-calls-itself-a-newspaper are entirely correct. And it should have gone further.

Let’s be boring and start with point #1. I’ve been teaching history full-time since Olden Times, way back when the Foo Fighters had only been fighting foo for some nine years.²Reflecting back over my career, I can confirm the point about the thirty-year-olds. Although many, many “traditional-age” college students who’ve only lived for some 1.8 to 2.1 decades do truly love history, sometimes young people’s passion for exploring their species’ past takes a few more years to marinate. Part of the issue is simply one of life experience. When you’re a teen or even in your early twenties,³ it’s hard to have enough time-perspective to really understand why you need more time-perspective.

Another problem is that some STEM enthusiasts have sent the wrong message to the public.⁴ Don’t get me wrong; I freaking love science and other STEM fields. But there are some administrators who have imagined STEM education as a zero-sum game, downplaying the importance of the humanities and aesthetic arts in order to allocate more attention and resources toward their more trendy subjects. In the worst-case, most short-sighted scenarios, these essential humanities programs get cut altogether.

Yet even when more enlightened educators realize the objectively true fact that history and STEM fields are complementary, some still inadvertently send the wrong message. There are many prospective students and parents who decide that required history classes feel like distractions. As a consequence, budgets get slashed, faculty get laid off, and entire departments get thwungged off campuses by some giant metaphorical STEM catapult experiment.⁵

Despite the history major’s continuing tailspin, pretty much everyone understands that history matters. When I ask my students, their parents, or the vast majority of educators why we need history, they generally get it. The short list: If we don’t understand the past, we don’t learn from our mistakes; we’re easy prey for demagogues who tell us about how things have always been without any way to verify their often bogus claims; we’re out of touch with the folks who made us who we are; we fail to appreciate the sacrifices of those who came before us; we don’t actually know who we are because cannot understand ourselves in temporal context. I’ve got a few others, but you get the gist: People do realize that history needs to be taken seriously.

Economist contention #2 is that understanding history together helps build strong communities of listeners. Yes. And that capacity for community-building goes much deeper than most other kinds of shared experiences—like, say, joining in a pickup game of SPUD, or watching a chili-pepper eating contest where obviously self-loathing people eat Carolina reaper chili peppers until they weep and vomit like sick little babies. Collective connections forged through history are more profound than those activities.

In fact, history itself is one of the most profound ways to build communities and even nations. Acknowledging ways that your ancestors shared experiences with your neighbor’s forebears helps transforms groups of individuals into unified peoples. Closely related are other unifying cultural features: Having a common language, calendar of celebrations, rites of passage, dress, music, and so forth. It’s similar to when everyone on your block agrees that the colors and patterns in your cloth rectangles are preferable to those in the cloth rectangles of other folks who live elsewhere. All of those symbols and things have origins in the past, which is why understanding their history is so important. In short, thinking historically builds community more powerfully than virtually any other ways of thinking.

Which brings us to claim #3—that good history is about good stories told by good storytellers. Yes—and not just any old stories, but true old stories. I confess I am a massive fan of the improv comedy podcast Hello from the Magic Tavern—a more traditional example of employing the yes-and approach. That show is one of the silliest pieces of audio entertainment ever forged by human beings.⁶ It’s chock-full-o-nutty stories that are, in my own nutty opinion, pretty great. But not only are their stories untrue, they’re extremely, ridiculously, deliberately untrue. And although fiction and nonfiction both enrich our lives in profound ways, there are many good reasons to house them on different shelves—more reasons than I can get into in a short paragraph that ends with this word.

To make things more complicated, some of the best history contains some storytelling elements. History is an evidence-based discipline, but historical evidence is by its nature incomplete. That means the historian’s job is to fill in the gaps, which requires some subjective, interpretative elements in reconstructing the fragments left of yesterday in order for them to make sense to us, the people of today.

Even with all of those complicating factors, our job is still to make the history as true as possible. No, history podcasts don’t typically have the same kind of peer review process as an academic publication. But most history podcasters want our audiences to learn about actual past people and stuff that really happened.

We also understand that what we’re doing actually matters. Remember that bit above about learning from our mistakes? It turns out that doing good history can be like drawing up a map of a minefield. A mapmaker who wants all of the little skulls-and-crossbones representing the mines to line up in some certain shape—like, say, a pair of starfish doing a tango—could make a really cool-looking map. But the only minefield map you really want use is the one that shows where the actual mines are. When we start inventing stuff in history, we run the risk of forgetting the most important lessons from the past. Those lessons keep us from collectively blowing ourselves to bits.

Those consequences are remarkably unfunny.

The Economist understands this fact. It’s why their writers and editors adhere to high standards of evidence. It’s why they publish corrections when they—like all of us—occasionally screw up. It’s why they still have reporters around the globe, when it would have been much easier to ignore the parts of the world that most readers don’t care about.

And it’s why they might have spent more time talking about other, sexier genres of podcasts, but instead chose to extol the virtues of history ones.

Keep up the good work, mates!

1
The fact that “recently” means “well over a year ago” to me does not bode well for my ability to write timely blog posts. I’m working on my whole podcast and blog project at a snail’s pace. And that’s not even referring to how slowly snails move, but to how slowly snails write. After all, a snail’s brain is just a couple of ganglia surrounding its eating tube, so their ability to blog rapidly is seriously limited unless they’re using ChatGPT.
2
That’s 2003 if you’re not a Dave Grohl fan or don’t feel like looking it up on Wikipedia.
3
Why do we have a noun for people in their teen years but not for people in their twenties? Should we try coining the word twent? Discuss.
4
Definitely not all, and hopefully not most of them. I’ve met many, many extraordinary STEM advocates and practitioners who are supportive of the humanities. They’re as terrified about the implications of deemphasizing history as the most hardcore history cheerleaders out there.
5
It’s worth adding here that good catapult experiments require a very strong grasp of history. Smart engineers don’t just invent catapults from scratch; they study existing catapults, take inspiration from centuries of historical designs, reflect on what’s effective and what isn’t and why, and only then do they make them more efficient. Again: complementary fields.
6
Or by shapeshifting badgers and/or by wizards summoned into existence by a conspiracy of birds who willed that a champion wouldst materialize into being out of the miasma of space-time.

Crudely made ballpoint pen drawing of a robot speedily wheeling away with a bag that reads "YOUR LUNCH" in its claw. — **Are robots stealing our lunch?**
Image crudely drawn by Doug Sofer (not by a robot, nor by a competent human artist)

@ 2025

Doug Sofer

It’s been close to ten months since I released my last podcast episode. No, I haven’t given up entirely, and I’m actually working on some new ones. Still, I feel like I owe my halves-of-dozens of listeners some kind of explanation.

This essay is some kind of explanation.

It’s definitely not a complete explanation. Writing one of those in essay form would involve a level of oversharing that neither you nor I want me to engage in.¹ But among the multiple flavors of mid-life, late-life, and get-a-life crises I’m experiencing these days, I’m also facing an artificial-life crisis:

I’ve been a little freaked out by AI.

I’ve found it hard to find value in writing blog posts and recording new episodes when AI can do many of those tasks in the time it takes a pair of standard human eyelids to close and then reopen. ² No, large language model (LLM) AI bots don’t make especially good blog posts or podcast episodes, but the fact that they can make either reasonably well has troubled me greatly. It’s simply made some of the kinds of work I do feel cheap.

On this point, I’m ready and willing to share my feelings—the main one being fear. I fear that AI writing and podcasting represents a major break in the history of humans and technology. Up to now, many of our technologies have made our species quicker at doing human tasks. A domesticated ox made it easier for people to plough. A tractor makes many of those processes still easier for humans.³ Better musical instruments allow musicians to express themselves in new ways with new sounds and techniques. The first digital audio workstations (DAWs) made it easier for humans to record the music they themselves created. Present-day DAWs like LogicPro, the one I use for my podcast episodes, are cheaper and easier to use than ever and have democratized humans’ ability to create our own polished music and other audio programming.⁴

AI itself has many uses in this realm and can play major roles in the process. To give one lesser-known-outside-of-Idaho example, take the example of an AI-powered potato grading machine. Yes, one of these ChatGPTater⁵ robo-tools can tell the difference between what the U.S. Government defines as a “fairly well shaped” U.S. Number One grade potato that’s just over the requisite one-and-seven-eighths inches minimum diameter size, and a U.S. Number Two potato that’s not “fairly well shaped,” but instead is only “not seriously misshapen” and still over one-and-three-fifths inches in diameter.⁶ Sure, humans could do that the traditional way—by poking through the old-fashioned Potato Visual Aid charts to figure out just what kinds of spuds they’ve sprung out of their soil.⁷ But I totally get why someone might want AI to get all of this tedious work out of Farmer Frankie’s fingers. Ultimately I get that AI can be useful, whether inside and outside the glamourous world of tuberous vegetable categorization.

The point is that AI can make some human work easier. But something feels different when the bots starts writing and podcasting because they can take the humans out of the creative process entirely. That’s not progress; it’s devolution.⁸ Sure, the Tater-Grader 3000 mentioned above⁹might similarly poop on the parties of those rare farmers who find satisfaction in measuring their own spuds, but it does not actually detract from farming. Writing and audio production, by contrast, are both creative enterprises that bring richness, joy, knowledge, and satisfaction to the human beings that produce them. At their best, they represent human brains thinking through problems, wrestling with difficult questions, expressing what it is like to be alive. Even the existence of a bot that can superficially appear to do these things is just this lifeless thing, a magic trick that’s only pretending to sound alive. It feels like some sneaky ploy to rob our species of something important.

For the record, I don’t think tech companies created these technologies to steal our humanity; and doing so would make for lousy PR. But there is a degree of something akin to theft that accompanies AI that is worth taking seriously. LLM AI technology comes from gobbling up entire libraries full of text.¹⁰ Natural language processing simply works like a very sophisticated version of auto-complete. The “very sophisticated” part comes from its ability to understand language in context via another exciting concept called “recurrent neural networks.” Those technologies allow AI bots to keep track of important words and concepts and ideas over the course of a conversation; that is, to keep it in memory and return to those ideas again. These are extremely clever technology bits, but the point is that they prioritize importance through training on real humans’ writings.¹¹

In some sense, we’re just like those bots; we also learn by hearing other people talking and, say, by reading books in actual libraries. The difference is that we still, in 2025, seem to be a lot better at generating original ideas than our robo-amigos.¹² And, as far as we can tell, when they write or develop audio content, they’re simply predicting the kinds of language products that a typical person would likely generate. For the most part, then, it’s not really capable of writing originally at all, instead leaning heavily on clichés. Something similar takes place with the audio content from Google’s NotebookLM. It sounds amazingly real, and the audio quality is through the roof. But the content it generates is so generic as to be almost cringe—a Gen-Z adjective that seems practically made for this development.

All of which is to say that the AI revolution has indeed cheapened writing and audio production—but mostly the generic flavors of both. What you,¹³ and I hopefully can create by writing originally may in fact be becoming rarer. And as with gemstones, precious metals, and good ideas, rare things are ultimately extremely valuable. That realization is why my current bout of demoralized sulking has not (yet) defeated me. I’m still hanging in there and I will definitely be updating the podcast with new episodes reasonably soon, simply because doing so still matters—if only just to me.

That’s what I’m telling myself anyway, at least until the bots get smarter.

1
Trust me: we’ve both really lucked out on that front.
2
I’m trying to avoid phrasing with clichés since repeating clichés is precisely what AI bots excel at. It’s possible I may have tried too hard with this one, though.
3
And much easier for the ox.
4
I love digitally editing music, but I recognize that there are some tradeoffs too. I think we create a false impression when every lick in every guitar solo gets re-timed (quantized) to perfection, and every vocalist’s pitch gets corrected to the precision of a whole drawerful of tuning forks. In short, good music expresses something about the human condition, and humans make mistakes. We therefore risk misrepresenting something fundamental about ourselves when we digitally polish our tunes to an excessive degree.
6
The AI powered machine in question may be found here https://ellips.com/grading-machine/potato/ , accessed 22 Sept., 2025. Oh, and note to the Ellips Company execs: if anyone reads my blog and happens to buy any of your awesome equipment, feel free to contact me at doug@findyourselfinhistory.com to arrange my 8% sales commission. I accept payment in hash browns.
7
An unofficial PDF of the U.S. Department of Agriculture potato grading visual aid charts may be found here: https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/potatoes-grades-and-standards , accessed 22 Sept., 2025.
8
It’s exactly what Devo, those wacky guys in the 80s who wore plastic seed-starter pots on their heads, warned us about.
10
I asked ChatGPT 5 how many New York Public Libraries of information a current model LLM has. It offered many different ways of estimating that number, but the amount of information is, in fact, equivalent to an entire NYPL full of text. The texts are different, of course, and less coherent than the books and other materials at the library, but very, very roughly, that’s the nearly impossible to comprehend scale we’re dealing with right now in 2025.
11
See, e.g., Christopher Summerfield, These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means (New York: Viking, 2025), Ch. 12, Kindle Edition.
12
Psychologist and AI researcher Christopher Summerfield argues that it’s not that large language model AI can’t think for itself per se. It’s just that it can’t think in ways that are nearly as sophisticated as human beings can—yet. They also lack the kinds of biological needs, aesthetics, and sensors that humans have. He writes “…to say that LLMs do not think at all requires a new and rather convoluted definition of what it means to ‘think’.” See Summerfield, These Strange New Minds, 178 and Ch. 22, passim, Kindle Edition.
13
I’m assuming you’re a fellow human. If you’re a robot and are interested in being trained by me in how to think originally, I am available for hire. Please link up with your potato grading colleagues and arrange my payment in hash browns (see above footnotes on this recurrent hashbrown theme).