Write On! Radio - Chantel Prat + Legacy

Speaker 1 00:00:45 You are listening to write on radio on K2 event and streaming live Speaker 2 00:00:50 On the [email protected]. I'm Manny Harvey. And the first part of the hour, our man, Josh talks with Chantel Pratt about her book. Neuroscience is you how every brain is different and how to understand yours with style and wi Chantel takes us on a tour of the meaningful ways that our brains are dissimilar from one another using real world examples along with take them yourself, test and quizzes sounds fun. She shows you how to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your own brain while learning what might be going on in the brain of those who are unlike you. Speaker 3 00:01:22 And I'm Dave fed. Then in the last part of the hour, we will feature one of our reprint interviews, otherwise known as legacy interviews, tune in, as we go do a deep dive into the archives to play an interview from the past, all of this and more so stay tuned to right on radio. And now this Speaker 4 00:01:49 Chantel prat is a professor at the university of Washington with appointment in the department of psychology, neuroscience and linguistics, and at the Institute for learning and brain sciences, the center for neurotechnology and the Institute for neuroengineering. She also has a badass tiger tattoo. I found out last night. So Speaker 5 00:02:07 <laugh>, that is the coolest part of the introduction. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Speaker 4 00:02:13 The neuroscience view, it's a rollering adventure into the human brain that reveals the surprising truth about neuroscience shifting our focus from what's averaged to an understanding of how every brain is different. Chantel, welcome to Ray on radio. Speaker 5 00:02:26 Thank you for having me. That's definitely, I like the, uh, the improvised introduction quite a lot. So that's, he drew this freehand on my back and it, you know, I had a vision and, uh, and it was, you know, sort of like this tiger Tigris. Um, and he said, is she curious? Is she protective? And he, he drew it on my body and, and like, until he drew it on my body, I was like, wow, that's really big. <laugh>, it's Speaker 4 00:02:52 Huge. It's like, you're yeah, I know. <laugh> Speaker 5 00:02:55 I asked my hu I literally probably, I mean, gosh, Corey and I talked the for 13 hours, the, I sat there for 13 hours in that shop. And, um, and we talked about the brain and life and all of the ways that, you know, all the magic that I understand, but he was curious about. And, uh, but the whole time we were there, I was like, can we afford this? Are, are, am I gonna have to call my mom, like, you know, like really it was an insane, um, and wonderful experience, but yeah, that's definitely something different that you don't expect for a neuroscientist to have Speaker 4 00:03:31 Part of the subtile. This book is how every brain is different. You describe very early in the book, how, when you heard Stephen Pinker say that all normal people have the same physical organs, we all surely have the same mental organs. Your brain's response was what, a bunch of bullshit. Why are, why are minor neurological differences relevant in understanding ourselves? Speaker 5 00:03:53 Well, I think, um, I like to talk about, yeah, what does it matter? It's not that, you know, my brain is not identical to its own self when we started this conversation, right? So it's changed in, in front of you and in front of our discussion, you know, my brain, my brain is adapting. So the question becomes like, is this important? Like what is the implication of a small change? And, you know, the example I give is it really depends on what it is you're trying to understand. And at the end of the day, the chimpanzee and ourselves share 95 or 96% of our DNA, our brains are incredibly similar, but that 5% of a difference between our brain and the chimpanzee brain allows us to communicate in a shared symbolic language that lets us tell stories and share the inner workings of our minds, where chimpanzees in the wild still spend a great part of their day foraging for food, forming social bonds. Speaker 5 00:04:53 They have very complicated intellectual and social lives, right. But they're, that 5% makes a huge difference. And I think when it comes to our own intuitive understanding that we don't all work the same, you know, it's like if you have a sibling or a child or just a close relationship, it, it, it can become really obvious that two people in the same place and time can come away with really different interpretations of what happened. Yeah. And in those cases, we're just seeing something that's on the smaller scale, you know, 0.01% can have a really big impact on how you perceive the world and act in it. Speaker 4 00:05:32 The field of neuroscience. You talk about how we learned a lot by what we have in common by focusing on group averages. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, but it slowed in our ability to understand the things that make us unique. Mm-hmm <affirmative> why do neuroscientists shy away from studying individual differences? Speaker 5 00:05:47 I think that question is complicated and important, and I try to acknowledge that so that it doesn't feel like I'm shaming the 150 years of one size fits all neuroscience, that we've done. Um, a few reasons from a prag, from a pragmatic perspective, studying individual differences almost necessarily requires either studying a lot of people or studying a small group of people over multiple time points. And that's really expensive and time consuming either way. Um, then there's the fact of responsibility and what is it that somebody is going to infer. If I say your brain makes you this way, and my brain makes me this way, what is somebody gonna do with that information? Are they going to infer that that means you were born that way, that you can't change? Like how are they gonna report that data? So I think people are concerned about rep about talking about differences that they maybe misinterpreted or misused used conveniently to, you know, forward an agenda or something like that. Speaker 5 00:06:54 And within that space, you know, I get asked a lot of questions about male and female brains and so forth and so on. I think it's important from a purely scientific, you know, at the intersection of science and responsibility is the fact that most of the things that we're very curious about, individual, that we want to understand about individuals are things that we can't experimentally manipulate in the lab. That is whether I'm interested in how your memory works, or whether I'm interested in sex or gender, or whether I'm interested in bilingual life, uh, language experiences for the most part, a person walks in with a lifetime of experiences that may be related to that feature that you're interested in. And you can't separate the way they were built from the kind of experiences that have shaped their brain. You don't have experimental control over those things. Speaker 4 00:07:49 Elon Musk believes that we will be able to fully understand human brains in our lifetimes. Why do you think this is not true? Speaker 5 00:07:57 <laugh> I am very confident that this is not true. And that I think that, um, you know, I live here in Seattle. There are a lot of tech companies that are toying around with trying to understand the brain in different ways. And, uh, the brain Ivy believe is going to be a great humbler of engineers. And that's not to say that the tools of engineering and signal processing aren't really, really, really useful in studying brains, but the brain is biological. And as you're in the process of trying to understand it, it's changing right under your hands or eyes or algorithms. Right. And so I think that, um, I mean, I, you know, to be fair, I think that going to Mars is hard too, and they're making great progress there. But I think again, like the problems involved in going to Mars, aren't changing as fast as you're trying to, to solve them. Speaker 5 00:08:55 Um, our brains are, here's the deal at the end of the day, your brain is trying to understand itself. You're stuck in a closed loop loop circuit, right? And, and we have tools and we have math and we're growing, but our brains are just very complicated. They're dynamic and they're different. Like this is the thing. People haven't even started to crack open this variation piece. We've, we've, we've all of, most of the big advances we've made are what are the commonalities? How can we understand the things that are similar? And when you start to take that space and, and appreciate differences, the problem becomes like an order of magnitude more complicated. And, you know, the very basic things like the nature of consciousness, like, I don't think we've made dramatic progress on that in the last decade. So it's, you know, I feel very cautious, optimistically, pessimistic that we're not gonna solve it. I Speaker 4 00:09:54 Thinks we can't even, Speaker 5 00:09:56 We can't even predict the behavior of the sea elegance. This roundworm with like, you know, a very small number of neurons. We can't perfectly understand how they behave yet. So it's like, let's scale it up to humans. Speaker 4 00:10:07 And that's what, something like 30 neurons within the team. Speaker 5 00:10:10 I think they have a hundred. And I can't remember, I wrote it in the book, like, I wanna say less than 200, 180 or something, but we have a perfect map of their entire nervous system. We know every like neurochemical, we know all of the connections and that behaving creature, and we still can't perfectly predict how they will respond in a, in an individual environment. So we got a ways to go, Speaker 4 00:10:35 Yeah. Something I didn't consider before reading your book is our definition of typicality of brains. It's mostly informed by a very specific audience that we've tested over a long period of time. Why is this a problem? And what's some examples of your efforts in capturing true neurodiversity in people. Speaker 5 00:10:53 Mm. Such a that's a, why is it a problem? Well, we are, first of all, when we don't consider variability, we take a characterization of the group of people we're studying, and then we try and apply it to humanity, right? But the people we're studying are often white, Western educated college undergraduates at a very particular point in their life at a very particular, um, in a very particular environment. And we are using this to sort of create the norms around what average brains look like and how average brains function. And, and I think that that's problematic in and of itself. But when we then also use that group to define functionality like that group and the ecosystems, they exist in like a university or a classroom, or, you know, a, a typical Western business, you know, we're missing a lot like, you know, so if, if, if this, if somebody tells me that a behavior is atypical, I wanna know in who, and if somebody tells me that a behavior or, and a behavior driven by the brain is dysfunctional. I wanna know for who in, in what culture and what environment, because our brains, you know, the vertebrate brain has been evolving for hundreds of millions of years, depending on where you, you pick the fork. And the environments that we're asking them to operate in are, you know, only a slice of, you know, what the, the environments we're evaluating them in are really specific. When you consider all the jobs you might wanna a brain to do to help a person survive and thrive in the natural world. Speaker 4 00:12:47 Something I didn't, uh, uh, sorry, not concept I was not familiar with in neuroscience is lop side. How does it impact the way I understand the world around me? Speaker 5 00:12:57 Great question. I think a lot of people, you know, a lot of people understand that there are differences in our brains, and we might say, I'm not wired that way. Or we might say the thing I hear a lot is I'm a left brain thinker. I'm a right brain. And what they mean there is typically, there's a very strong instantiation in pop culture that our left brain is analytical. And our right brain is creative. And this work is actually born out of some research that was conducted by someone in my academic lineage. My, one of my graduate advisors worked with Michael Zanega, who was on the team that first studied patients who had had their brains, um, surgically severed into Cal sodomy patients. They're commonly called split brain patients, but they you've taken the Corpus Colum away. And here's the deal. I think this is like so wild. Speaker 5 00:13:54 Every vertebra animal essentially has two brains. In one, we have two cerebral hemispheres that are largely independent processors. There's a high speed core in the middle with which they can share information. And so we perceive the world in this whole and integrated way. But in these patients, when they severed those connections, the different halfs of their body that are driven by different hemispheres would behave in different ways, but yet the verbal part of their body, which is the left hemisphere or the verbal part of their brain, which is the left hemisphere for most typically lopsided people will make up a story. It would observe the way the other side of the body and brain were behaving and would make up a story about why. And so they called this, the interpreter G anus, spar and colleagues. And from this interpreter side of the brain CA arose this pop psychology myth of a analytical left hemisphere and a creative right hemisphere. Speaker 5 00:15:06 But we still have this, you know, we have, there's a reason that we have two hemispheres. They don't do exactly the same thing they are taking in inputs largely in parallel. And they're interpreting in, in slightly different ways. So the idea of lopsidedness is really that one of the ways that humans on average differ from other vertebrate is that our two hemispheres can be pretty dramatically different in size and structure. And within human beings, some of us are more left-sided than others, meaning that some of us have bigger differences in the kinds of processing that the two hemispheres do and the kinds of jobs that they come to Excel at and by virtue and the kinds of answers they come up with when put into the same environment. And like, most of the things that I talk about in my book, there are good and bad things involved in both ways of being, having a more balanced brain or having a more, more specialized brain kind of two perspectives in, in one head, so to speak. Speaker 4 00:16:07 So I wanna delve a little further into this. Um, I, I was aware of, leftness only making roughly 10% of the population mm-hmm <affirmative> and, but I didn't know that there was a spectrum of dominance for handing this mm-hmm <affirmative> where three to 4% of the population is consistently lefthand dominant full disclosure right now. Um, I'm extremely lefthand dominant. I found out from your book. So it may be very interesting to hear what you had to say about this. So I was wondering to talk about how hand dominance impacts informational processing between detail oriented. Speaker 5 00:16:37 Yeah. So the Mo I'm gonna start with the most honest and dissatisfying answer, and that is that we don't know almost anything about your brain and you know, this, if you, if you people will learn this about my book, because my daughter is also this extreme lefty who, you know, by, by convenience sake, by the fact that I had a child, when I started neuroscience and started, you know, practicing on her brain. So just literally, because she grew up arms length away from a neuroscientist, I have this interesting rich data set on her brain. And I have tried, you know, and I try in the book to cover all of the, the research, the very few small number of studies that have studied handedness with the appropriate kind of sophistication. What, and it's, it's not enough. It's not enough to know, because what happens is this is one of the big consequences to the one size fits all approach to neuroscience. Speaker 5 00:17:32 I would say 95 to 98% of all neuroscientific studies exclude left-handers. And, um, and not even left-handedness defined in any kind of sensitive way, like you were saying, it's a continuum, right? So at some point in the continuum left, and right-handers, don't look that different from one another people who are balanced brains, although people who are, you know, anywhere, if their right hand is like close to a skilled, as they're left, you'll wind up being pushed right handed because of the world and the way tools are developed, but with really sloppy definitions, and I've been guilty of this myself, we decide that 10% of the population who identify as lefthanded are not going to be represented in neuroscience research. And the, the justification for this, you will read in a grant application is lefthanders are more variable, which I don't even, I'm not a hundred percent sure that has been scientifically demonstrated, but some purport you're certainly more likely to be having, um, reverse laterality if you're strongly lefthanded than if you're, you know, balanced or right-handed. Speaker 5 00:18:45 So, so the first and unsatisfying answer is that, you know, we don't have good models of 10% of the population and think about what that means for like surgery, healthcare, you know, education, it's just, it's, it's unthinkable, um, based on the few studies that have done this well and have overrepresented, overrepresented left-handers, um, and have looked at handedness on a continuum. It seems as though, um, the more strongly left-handed you are, the more likely you are, although this is incredibly rare to have reverse lateralization of your functions. That means that language comes to be greater over the right hemisphere of your brain than the left. And when it comes to this interpretation or storytelling in the brain, this makes me really curious, because remember that GZA again, their team found that in most of their participants, the left hemisphere was the one that had the kind of conscious dialogue about why people were doing what they were doing. Speaker 5 00:20:00 And with that comes the left hemisphere in most typically lateralized people's, um, brains, the left hemisphere has this ability of, um, projecting into the future are generating cause and effect kinds of arguments. And so what it makes me wonder is, is the storytelling of extreme lefthanders, is it more likely to come from the right hemisphere? And if so, are there right hemisphere wired exactly like the typical left hemisphere, are, are they getting this more integrated whole picture approach in the way they understand the world? There's no re zero research on this, but, you know, like I said, one very lo longitudinal study of my daughter and a lot of, you know, interest and observations Speaker 4 00:20:44 In your chapter. Speaker 5 00:20:46 Go ahead. I just wanted to, to throw this out there, like part of what you, you asked about my research and what we're doing to, to fix it. And I think part of what we've been doing is trying to broaden recruitment of people in our study that aren't just coming from college campuses that are coming from other places in the city that are coming from junior colleges, et cetera. And another thing that I'm really excited to launch with my book is that, um, we are now putting different brain games on the internet that people, if they want to volunteer for research can go on, tell me what kind of, you know, do the hand Inness questionnaire. You know, if they want, they can give me demographics, it's not like name or identifying information and then do these studies. And I'm just hoping that we can have models that fit more diverse brains. Speaker 4 00:21:36 Well, cause we're pretty close to running outta time here. So I'm gonna jump forward here. I'm gonna have to ask you maybe the important question of this interview right now, what really controls our brains, Speaker 5 00:21:49 Our brains control our brains. But I think that Speaker 4 00:21:52 <laugh>, Speaker 5 00:21:53 Which is a thing, you know, I, in the book, I'm really careful to not call this the humunculous problem, but, um, there are multiple ways that our brains control our behavior, right? And, um, and I think our, the reason I think our brain controls our brain is because all of the different control systems of the brain are interested in success of the animal, right? Like all, it's it. The, at the end of the day, your brain has a very specific goal and that's to move you through life in a way that gets you the most pleasure points without getting you killed. In fact, the, the more specific goal is to find another brain that's compatible with yours. So you can reproduce and create, you know, other brains with your genes. But, um, the, the interesting thing of the human brain, when we feel like we are, we, that, that the identity part of us, when we feel like we are in control, what that means is that there's some operating goal. Speaker 5 00:22:54 There's some behavioral goal that we're consciously aware of, right? It's like, I think I'm sleepy. So I'm gonna go get a cup of coffee and I'm gonna move my body into the kitchen and execute these behaviors that get me a cup of coffee. But that system for controlling our behavior is only one of an, of multiple systems, including a large portion of our behavior. That's driven by implicit learning and by implicit goals. And so, you know, the, the implicit system is, is pretty straightforward, but not everybody. The implicit system is like learning from the outcomes of your choices and the brain stores, this database like this worked well in this context, this worked well in this context, the databases and connections between neurons, but even in that, not every brain works the same. Some people control brains are controlled by moving away from bad things, more strongly than moving toward good things. Speaker 5 00:23:54 And in other people, it works in a different way. So that's one way the brain controls itself or controls the body. And the other way is, you know, when you have this goal that you're consciously aware of, it's, it's living in the frontal lobe of your brain, it's active in the frontal lobe of your brain, but there are these little helper circuits in the middle of the brain that are also related to reward. And those parts of the brain say, Hey, if this is the way I want to behave, if this is the way I'm explicitly aware of wanting to, to be, I'm gonna make, I'm gonna maximize success by turning up relevant information and turning down irrelevant information. And I think that this is something people miss, like we want to be in control and we want to be goal directed and we want to be focused, but you might not appreciate that when you're in that state, your brain is altering reality in a way that's helping you to be success, what you've defined as success. Speaker 5 00:24:57 And that means it's not just processing what's around you. Hopefully right now everyone's brain is turning down the SI sound of the garbage truck that's outside, backing up and listening to my voice as just an example. Right. But you might have a goal of maintaining a particular belief or something about, you know, like I really like to believe that I'm an optimist. So I, my brain turns up the signals on all the happy days and, you know, turns down all the signals on the days that I'm, you know, real cranky for whatever reason. And so, you know, that control is quite literally changing the way you perceive what's actually in front of you. It's, it's altering your reality. So, you know, good or bad, it's just different for sure. Speaker 4 00:25:47 I have a lot more questions, but I think you're time here right now. You've been listening to my conversation with Chantel Pratt. Talk about her new, new book. The neuroscience of you can check it out to learn how brains engineer differently ultimately take diverse paths when it comes to prioritizing information, using what they learned from experience to other people. And so much more Chantel, thanks so much for being on my show. Speaker 6 00:26:24 When Saladin laid seas to Jerusalem in late September, 1187, an English woman wearing a borrowed coat of armor and a cooking pot for a helmet helped defend the city wars. Margaret of Beverly had been born in the Crusader kingdom while her parents were on pilgrimage to the holy land in the mid 12th century. But she grew up in the north of England helping to raise a much younger brother, Thomas, who eventually became Aurion monk later, when she was perhaps in her twenties, Margaret returned to Jerusalem on pilgrimage, it was hardly a settled realm and through bad luck and worse timing, Margaret found herself trapped in the holy city as the ibid swept in, in years to come, she would recall the terror of the siege during which citizens had to scramble whatever sort of a defense they could in the absence of able bodied soldiers. Although a woman read Margaret's account, I looked like a warrior. Speaker 6 00:27:21 She launched missiles from a Slingshot at salad's armies beneath the ramparts, and she ran back and forth between the streets and walls, fetching water for comrades all the while swallowing down her fear. At one point a rock, the size of a millstone thrown from one of salad's catapults crashed into the city and narrowly missed her. She was cut by shrapnel as it shattered, leaving her with a wound so deep its scarred quick medical attention ensured the injury did not prove life threatening, but when the city fell, Margaret was taken captive and forced like the rest of her fellow Christians to buy her freedom. Fortunately for Margaret, no sooner had she paid her ransom and left Jerusalem. Then she was captured near Laish just over a mile from the Jaffer gate and taken prisoner. Again. This time there was no easy escape. She was set to work chopping wood and gathering stones, and she endured beatings threats and the torment of hard labor throughout two bitter winters. Speaker 6 00:28:24 If I refused, I was beaten with sticks. She recalled my chains rusted with my tears. After 15 months of ill treatment, Margaret was sold to a wealthy man from tire. One of the few Crusader cities that had managed to resist Saladin Margaret's buyer in tire. Granted her freedom as a Pius act to celebrate the birth of one of his sons. But her sufferings were far from over. She was left penniless dressed in rags that barely covered her to wander a land in which Christi and authority had collapsed. God had forsaken the Franks and Margaret was suffering as much as any of them. Speaker 7 00:29:01 Excellent. You were just listened to Dan Jones, read from his new work crusaders, the epic history of the wars for the holy lands, Dan Jones, the New York times bestselling author of the Templars. Thelen NTTS the war of the roses, Magna Carta and summer of blood. He rotted secrets of the great British castles. That's also on Netflix. Dan, thanks for being on right on radio with us. Speaker 6 00:29:23 No, thanks for having me. Speaker 7 00:29:25 So I wanna begin, um, I wanna ask you about the quote that you used be at the beginning of the book from Adam of Breman it's in those days, men cared as much refers as it did for their Mo mortal souls. Why did you choose this quote? Speaker 6 00:29:39 I chose that quote because, um, it felt to me to very ly sum up two of the most important aspects of crusading and the, the relationship between them on the one hand, these wars, which very often, you know, tapped into the basic stuff of warfare, which is acquisitiveness, you know, trying to capture resources or land or in this case as Adam Breman is talking. And when he's talking about, uh, the Baltic crusades first, you know, uh, valuable goods, but it's also about religion and it's about faith and it's, it's about the overlaying of faith onto the, the sort of basic human greed that, uh, underpins warfare. And I think Adam of Breen's little quote, there, they cared as much for furs as their immortal souls tells us that this is always existing in a kind of balance. And that, you know, the cynical will look upon this and say, Hey, were these crusade really about faith? And the believers will say, yes, absolutely. They were. And, and that sort of interesting, you know, question which recurs throughout 400 years of history is, is what tapped me into, um, the crusades in the first place Speaker 7 00:30:48 You opened the book with your reasons for calling the book crusaders, uh, you say the title reflects the approach to storytelling that you took in this book. Once you could talk a little bit about your approach in telling the stories and crusaders. Speaker 6 00:31:01 Yeah. I mean, that title crusaders, as opposed to the crusade is very important because the book proceeds it's divided into three parts, each of nine chapters, there's 27 chapters total, and each one takes somebody involved in the crusade ands their viewpoint. So like viewpoint chapters, George R. Martin used these in game of Thrones. It takes viewpoint chapters and guides you through a little slice of the history from a very intimate, personal perspective. And then we switch in the next chapter to another character and, and usually someone who's whose perspective will differ somewhat. So you see that the similar part of time through a different perspective and I've, I've casted as widely as possible to reflect just how, what a huge span of territory and the, of different types of people that the crusades touched. So, um, so by calling it crusaders and by adopting the viewpoints of individuals who are crusaders or, or touched by the crusades, I feel like what I've done is create a much more kind human and immediate and, um, an immersive vision of the crusades you would normally get in a book that surveys this big sort of four centuries of medieval history. Speaker 7 00:32:15 When I was kind of, um, a kind of a funny incident while reading, um, I was with the crusades, you could arguably say, didn't begin out of a religious fervor, but out of a fart, what was the, I was wondering if you could talk about the story of count Roger ly and his cousin called, uh, Baldwin that started the events. Speaker 6 00:32:31 Yeah. You know, normally the way that we, we hear the crusades beginning is urban II Stan up and Clairemont gives a sermon, says, come on, let's go and save con and Opal and Jerusalem. You know, you'll, you'll have your sins forgiven. If you do take up arms in the name of Jesus Christ, we've heard that story a million times. I was like, who, how is this story being told by the people who had the crusaders coming towards them, rather than the people who were doing the crusading. Now you go and look at IBI theater. You know, one of the greatest Islamics chronicler of the whole middle ages running the 13th century in Iraq, he tells a very different story. He says, this is all about Sicily. Now in the 10 sixties, the Normans gone down to Sicily. You normally think 10 66, the Normans are in England, William, the conqueror, no, they were also in Southern Italy. Speaker 6 00:33:16 They come down to Southern Italy, Robert ARD, his brother, Roger, they conquer Sicily now Sicily Arab Muslim hands, which is why ithe is interested in this story. He says, once Roger has taken control of Sicily, Robert ARD had gone off to fight the Balkans. Once Roger was, has count, Roger in control of Sicily, his cousin Baldwin ill defined by affair, but in the crusade, most people are called Baldwin. Don't worry about it. Cousin Baldwin sends some ambassadors down to Roger and says, how about we use Sicily as a launch pad for Baldwin to go capture some more rich Islamic Islamic held cities in north Africa. And Roger hates the I idea. He hates so much. He doesn't even say anything. He just lifts up his leg and farts in the general direction of the ambassadors <laugh> or at least this is the story of another theater says, tell us. Speaker 6 00:34:04 And he says, no way, I've conquered consistently. It's mine. I'm not. I want to, you know, I've got an interest in the trade with these Muslims in north Africa. I'm having you ruin that by conquering them says, if you wanna go kill Muslims and Nick, their city head east my friend, and go to Jerusalem. There's loads of Muslims over there. And I theater says, that's how the crusades began. Now, there are many problems with this story. Who's this Baldwin. We don't know which African city is. It. I theater is not clear. Is he just telling us that Roger farted at some ambassadors as a way to make the Franks, you know, the Normans, the Westerners, the Christians look co and smelly and disgusting, very possibly he is, but it touches on a really important point about the beginning of the crusades, which is that it's not just one Pope who has a bright idea. Speaker 6 00:34:48 It's all over the Mediterranean Christian and Muslim powers had been at war for decades. And those wars were starting to take a specifically religious flavor rather than just being, they happen to be wars between Christians and Muslims, just as there were wars between Muslims and Muslims and Christians and Christians, that this was now becoming the point of fighting and the Christians were on the March. So that's why Ivan, our theater tells the story. And that's why I tell the story at the start of crusaders, because it tells wait, it's a funny story. Of course, it's a funny story, but it also flings you into this world from a totally different perspective than the one you normally get. Mm-hmm Speaker 7 00:35:22 <affirmative>. Um, crusaders is, uh, the first to tell the stories of women and people of color and other marginalized groups during the crusades. I was wondering if you could talk about why it took so long for this to happen. Speaker 6 00:35:35 Well, I think it's, it's the case that there are lots of disparate groups of scholarship about the crusade. So lots of academics, you know, might specialize in working on women in the crusades or on, um, Sonny or sheer Muslims in the crusades or on Jewish people in the crusades, or, you know, what have you, the sympathies, you know, the big books that put the stories together had traditionally been quite bad at, at knocking these stories together at helping them step side by side. And that's why I chose this approach to crusaders, which was deeply personal. So you can get into the space of these individuals from across the spectrum of people affected by the crusades and, and sort of ride with them through their portion of the story. It gives you a much better flavor for their world, their preoccupations, their, their point of view. And it allows them, if you like to sort of coexist with the more traditional characters that we often hear about richer, the lion heart, and, you know, um, Phil of Augusta king of France and great St. Louis, you know, going off and fighting in, um, you know, in Egypt and, and Jerusalem. So, uh, so that's what I've tried to do is put it all together. And that's been the, the, the big task that I think has alluded a lot of crusade, historians over the generations, Speaker 7 00:36:55 One person, um, I was not familiar with until I read your book was I think you probably pronounce her name wrong here, but Anna Croda, she's a person, um, glad has discovering your book. I was where you talk about who was she and why was she important for the crusades? Speaker 6 00:37:09 Yeah, Anna Kain, who's the, she's the daughter of the Byzantine Empress. So the Byzantine emperor ruling Andino over what had been the Eastern half of the, the great Roman Emper empire took in modern Greece and Turkey and, uh, into the islands of the Eastern Mediterranean, um, stretched as far east in some, at some points as, um, as modern Syria. So the, the emperor, the time of the first crusade. So in the 10 nineties through 1118 was called Alexius Cominos. He had a daughter, a very brilliant daughter called Anna Anna Kini. And she, after her, father's absolutely devoted to her father, but recognized that her father had made some dubious decisions throughout his reign. One of which the crowning, one of which in many ways was to invite the Westerners, the KTS, she calls, calls them, but she means people from Western Europe, the first crusaders to come to Constantinople and try and help him beat back the Turks who are heading from the east into, into Asia, minor, modern Turkey. Speaker 6 00:38:12 So Anna Kini, who was a brilliant historian and a great writer, composed a book called the Alexia and in the Alexia, which is full of ridiculous biases and sort of score settling and total sort of, uh, you know, whitewashing of her father's reign, but it's is brilliantly written. You get the personalities just pulsing through this book of who Anna Kini was. And her, her view, a sort of Greek view on the crusaders, which we, we so often overlook, you know, the, the view of the Greeks who sat between the Muslims of the middle east near east and the Christians of the west is absolutely critical. They're sort of the pivot point that the, the, they they're at the center of the story in many ways. So I use Anna Cini story as a old viewpoint, as a way to get us into an unfamiliar kind of Greek view of the first crusade, because it's very important historically, we get that. Speaker 6 00:39:07 And it's also wonderful to have this, this, this voice that's so lively that, you know, she could be alive today. You know, she could have her own sort of reality TV show today. She's such a, she's got an opinion on everything she's incredibly glamorous. Um, she's, she's sharp as attack, you know, uh, so this is a wonderful character who I just, you know, love living with and love writing through the eyes of so much. So I was almost like very, very sad when she finally dies in the middle of the 12th century. And you don't have her voice to guide you through this history anymore. Speaker 7 00:39:38 In chapter four, you spent a lot of time talking about this Pope, urban second, as one of the, as the main kind of force of the first crusade and its great success in recruiting people to fight for the cause of Christiandom. What was so appealing about urban sermons that were, that made, that were so persuasive and intoxicating to the people who hurt him. Speaker 6 00:39:59 I think it's the spiritual calculus. I think it's the, it's the offer. I mean, this is transactional. He says, come on, we've gotta go and help the Bazant. We've gotta help Alexia come in us to win back his territory in Asia minor. And we've gotta go and liberate to Jerusalem. I mean, that's, that's, that's promising anyway, but urban offers a deal. He says everybody who, who takes the vow to go crusading, who sews a, a cloth cross onto their clothes will be granted remission of sins and in a world that is even more religious than our world today, this stuff really matters. He's saying, you know, you do this and your sins will be wiped away. I mean, literally you will have a faster, if not immediate passage into heaven after your death. And you'll be spared, you know, centuries of torment in hell or, or in purgatory. Speaker 6 00:40:47 Uh, if you are, if you, if you do this. And so this is incredibly appealing offer that he makes and, and it, it, I think it's more appealing than he is even days to dream because as soon as he's made this, this sermon and gone on a short preaching tour, um, 10 95 into six, we see all over west Europe, you know, not just armies being raised, but ordinary people leaving their homes and going on this crazy March of a thousand miles, which they're ill equipped for on almost every level, uh, with this, this almost apocalyptic end of day's mission to go and, and save Jerusalem. Um, I think, I don't think urban had had banked on this. I already don't mm-hmm, Speaker 7 00:41:33 <affirmative> the biggest mixed misconception on people have when, think about the crusades that it was centered entirely around Jerusalem, but that wasn't the case. Was it, it was stretched across many parts of Asia and Europe and north Africa. What made the crusade such a global phenomenon? Speaker 6 00:41:50 You're absolutely right. I mean, so the crusades spill out almost immediately once, uh, they've hit Jerusalem. Um, I think partly because the promise of, of what it means to be a Crusader is as we've just been talking about is so attractive. And remember the word crusade is a, a relatively modern term. So note at the time the first crusade said, oh, Ahan crusade or the second or the third I'm off on crusade, but they did know what a Crusader was, crus IATI, it's a contemporary term. It meant you'd taken your crusade of ours. Now, as it turned out after the fir in fact, almost at the same time as the first crusade pop was saying, look, you can take your crusade of ours and you don't have to go to Jerusalem. You can just fight Christ's enemies where you find them. So first this is Spain and Portugal because of course the second, the sort of the Southern half of the Iberian peninsula was largely Muslim held Aus, but it quickly expands in the 1140s to mean Nealta as well. Speaker 6 00:42:48 You know, it was modern Poland, Lithuania Laia Estonia. And then after that, you know, the end of 13th century, and it's, you know, we it's going fighting against the Mongols in Eastern Europe or it's, you know, it's going, fighting against pagans, uh, in, in the Baltic states, it's going, fighting against, um, her in south, the Khas, you know, in, in Southern France. And then eventually it's just fighting whoever the Pope says as an enemy Christian or Jewish or Muslim, or just unbelievable, or just, you know, or just someone the paper's taken a dislike to. Um, so at that point we were, you know, by the early 13th century crusading really detaches from its mourns. And it's only really about where you, where wherever you find crusaders, you find the crusade and that by the 13th century can sort of be any way you, like, Speaker 7 00:43:41 I was wondering if you could talk about this character you mentioned, um, I think it's Seager one of Norway. He was a Scandinavian king by 13 and then 17 set sail for Mediterranean. What compelled him to take this journey? Speaker 6 00:43:55 Well, Seagers a fascinating character, you know, as you say, he he's king by the age of 13 and at the age of 17, well, his father called Magnus bear legs had left his kingdom to three sons, which was really, you know, two too many. So by the age of 17, I think SIGAR was filled with, uh, a, the natural Viking Vand list and, you know, desire to get out and, and go and do some plundering elsewhere and be just a sense that there were, there were too many Kings in the kingdom. And so he goes on this incredible adventure, which takes from Norway to England, to France, to Spain, to Portugal, you had plunders Lisbon on the, you know, the way, uh, down the Atlantic coast of what's now Portugal Tobia and Formentera, and Menorca to Sicily. And finally to the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, where he visits Saudi separ, where he helps the great SGE at side, which is in modern Lebanon, then he goes off to and Opal afterwards. Speaker 6 00:44:49 And so he does a sort of world tour of the Crusader world, um, and is actually a fascinating character for, for me as a narrative historian to use. Because by if you, if you'll forgive the analogy, sort of sitting the, the, the camera on the shoulder of this character, you get a vision of that entire Crusader world, and you get a, you get a free ride around it through his eyes. And that is such a more effective way of telling this story than simple, sort of dry dusty pros, which takes it territory by territory without any sort of interlinking, um, without any connective tissue of switch analogies already. Uh, so cigarette is, is one of my favorite characters in the whole of, of this book crusaders, I think because a he's just so unlikely a Crusader, I mean, there's Viking going on crusade. Um, but he's also just such a fantastically helpful character within the story to show this world, rather than, you know, me having to sit down a laboriously, tell about it. Right. Speaker 7 00:45:51 All right. I'm I have one last question for you, Dan. Um, there are still fanatics and terrorists who, uh, do killing the name of God these days. And the last line in your book you have is that as long as there are crusaders real or imaginary in the world, the war goes on and on from your research and running crusaders. Were there any kind of lessons you thought that could be applied to the world of today? Speaker 6 00:46:15 Yes, there are. And I think that the what's these fanatics fanatics and terrorists, and, you know, whether there is Islam as terrorist or white supremacists, you know, AltRight would have this belief is that this is, uh, an eternal zero sum game. That one side has to Trium from the other side has to lose. And the, the repeating truth throughout history of this era is that peace has been made when a spirit of compromise between all sides has been reached. If you take Frederick ho staff and the great holy Roman emperor and Al Camil nephew of salad in Salton of Egypt, they, they power. They made a power sharing deal effectively in the 13th century in Jerusalem, the sort of thing that today would earn you a Nobel peace prize, their reward. Well, Frederick AFF was excommunicated by the pipe four times and had a crusade preached against him. Uh, it tells you a little bit about how peace gets made, which is through sensible friendship and diplomacy, but also I'm afraid a little bit about the, uh, the, the Savage nature of the world, which is that, um, no good deeds goes unpunished. Speaker 7 00:47:30 Yes. You were just listening to my interview with Dan Jones, talking about his new work crusaders, the epic history of the war for the holy lands. Dan, thank you for being here with us. Speaker 6 00:47:40 That's been a pleasure. Thank you. Speaker 7 00:47:42 And now this, Speaker 2 00:49:22 Hi. I hope you enjoyed that interview from the archives. Um, we're your we're right on radio pals. We're all here in studio today. This is Annie, Speaker 3 00:49:31 And this is Dave, Speaker 7 00:49:32 And this is Liz. And this is Josh. Speaker 3 00:49:34 Thanks for joining us this evening. You want to tell you that next couple weeks, some of us are gonna be out Speaker 2 00:49:41 It's a little summer vacation for some of us eye surgery for some of us. And we're gonna be bringing back some of our favorite episodes from the past few months. Yep. So if you've been on vacation at all this summer and might have missed something you're interested in, um, it'll be coming back around one more time. Speaker 3 00:49:59 <laugh> right, Josh. Speaker 7 00:50:00 That's right. <laugh> I was just going through my mind right now. So we have programming. That's gonna be, yeah, so we'll be out of office next Tuesday. None of us will be here, but I think that maybe next two weeks we'll be out playing some fun, interesting interviews that we have deepen our archives that we have now played a long time. And we're really excited about this. And Speaker 3 00:50:19 Speaking of archives, you remind everyone that we do have a podcast. Yes, you should. Uh, look that up wherever you get your podcast and scroll around there. And, um, I don't know how many, how deep you go back. Annie. We have a lot pass this calendar year co Speaker 2 00:50:32 Yeah. I mean, I've been uploading to the podcast for over a year. So if there's, oh, that's great. Cool. Anything you wanna re-list to anything you missed? There are a couple pod exclusives on there from when we were super, super busy Speaker 7 00:50:43 And especially know as well. There is, I think some special episodes where we have maybe little longer cuts that we couldn't, or maybe some Speaker 3 00:50:51 Extended play we call Speaker 7 00:50:52 Them. I think extended play is. And also maybe certain language you probably couldn't do on the radio. I've included on those cuts. Well, so you wanna hear some, some obscene language. That's a place to go check and yeah, Speaker 2 00:51:02 Really, really no Speaker 7 00:51:05 Beeps, no beeps, Speaker 2 00:51:06 No, no beams. Speaker 7 00:51:07 Thanks so much everyone for being and checking us out. Speaker 2 00:51:11 Uh, we are so glad to be here. This has been right on radio on K 90.3 FM and streaming live on the [email protected]. I'm Annie. I'd like to thank our special guest tonight, Chantel Pratt, um, her Intrepid, interviewer, Josh, and all of our listeners without your support and donations cafe, I would not be possible. You can find more news and info about right on radio at K i.org/right on radio or looking us up on your favorite podcast app. Um, please stay tuned for Bojo Minnesota and have a good night.