What Would They Think?

Jonathan Millard

5.0 (1)
History
Updated Weekly

What Would They Think explores the gap between the world that was imagined and the one we’re actually living in. Through ironic, often uncomfortable comparisons, it brings the voices of the past into today’s headlines—technology, culture, power, and belief—and asks how they would interpret the systems, behaviors, and contradictions that define modern life. The result is less explanation, more confrontation.

4d ago

What Would Xerxes Think About The Iran War?

What would Xerxes make of a war in which the largest military ever assembled has spent five months failing to reopen thirty-three kilometres of water, held shut by a country whose leadership it killed in the first fortnight? He would recognise it on sight. He lost his own war in a strait about the same width, and has spent twenty-five centuries being remembered instead for shouting at one. He inherited, at thirty-five or so, not a horde but a filing system. The empire ran from the Indus to Thrace on relay roads, travel warrants, standardised tribute and tens of thousands of clay tablets recording rations issued and redeemed, women drawing wages, livestock counted. Then he spent four years preparing an invasion, and the preparation is the impressive part: grain buried along a coastline before it was needed, a bridge of lashed ships across a sea, a canal cut through a mountain because a headland had once eaten his father's fleet. He understood the only figure in a war that cannot be given a speech, which is the number of days you can go on doing exactly what you are doing today. It was not enough. The Greeks declined to fight his army and fought his dinner instead, in narrow water where his numbers were a liability, and he went home. Two and a half thousand years kept the flogging and threw away the receipts. Everyone can recite the three hundred lashes, the golden chair on the hillside, the 1,700,000 men. Nobody remembers that the count is a genre convention no historian accepts, that the canal was dug up in the twentieth century and is real, that he reigned fifteen more years without the empire cracking, or that the dynasty outlasted him by 135. He is the only figure the show could book whose entire personality was written by the people who beat him — and who now finds that vocabulary, despot, fanatic, mad king, aimed by a foreign power at his own descendants. This episode puts the inventor of the format in front of the format. He has opinions. On six war aims, stated across five months, against his one carved once in rock — not because he was honest but because a war with six reasons has none, and everyone can count. On killing a Supreme Leader on the first morning and discovering that an empire is not a man; he removed the leadership of Babylon and Babylon carried on being Babylon. On interceptors two-thirds gone, six hundred a year, a year of production spendable in a fortnight, and a post insisting there are massive amounts. On the one commander who told him not to fight at Salamis, whom he praised in front of everyone and overruled, and promoted afterwards, which is the most expensive way there is to admit somebody was right. And on the sea, which he raises himself, before anyone can: it was not madness. It was theatre with a budget. Everyone narrating this war is confident they are the historian, but history is written by the victor. Episode 24. What Would They Think?
Aug 11

What Would Adam Smith Think About Instagram Plus?

What would Adam Smith think of a world where the thing he said we were actually chasing — not the money, not the house, but the sensation of being looked at — got detached from the money, made into a product, and sold back to us as the right to look without being looked at? He answered this in 1759. He sat down, a bachelor of thirty-six who lived with his mother, and wrote the founding text of the discipline rigged so the man doing the accumulating loses. The poor man's son labours, flatters, submits to people he despises, and discovers in old age that wealth and greatness are trinkets of frivolous utility and that the tranquillity was available the whole way along, for nothing. The point was never the goods. It was to be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of. Two and a half centuries kept the butcher and threw away the mirror. Everyone can recite the brewer and the baker. Nobody remembers that "invisible hand" appears three times in his published life, once about Jupiter, or that he called admiring the rich and neglecting the poor the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments — and said it angrier at the end than the beginning. He aimed it at the merchant. We aimed it at the regulator, and called the aiming freedom. He would know the mechanism cold, because he built it. A man raised alone could no more think of his own character than of the beauty of his own face. Society is the mirror; conscience is the mirror moved indoors, assembled out of every pair of eyes that ever caught you at anything. And he separated wanting praise from wanting to deserve it, and called the first vanity. This episode puts the man who explained why we want to be seen in front of a company selling the right not to be. He has opinions. On the badge, once conferred and now purchased, and on both faces of the mirror going up for sale — visibility first, and now its absence. On the defence, which he would make himself: voluntary, disclosed, four dollars, and lurking was free long before anyone charged for it. On why it collapses, since his case for self-interest assumes competition and an exit, and nobody carries twenty years of photographs to a rival. And on his own last twelve years, spent as a Commissioner of Customs collecting the tariffs he had proved were foolish, having found on taking the post that much of his own wardrobe came in without paying them. Both understand the mechanism exactly. Only one of them is selling. Episode 23.What Would They Think?
Aug 4

What Would Aristophanes Think About Gen Z?

What would Aristophanes think of a world where the oldest complaint there is — that the young are soft, silent, and ruined by their own cleverness — has become an industry, with bestsellers, national legislation, and a generation of adults moralizing about a machine they built, sold, and cannot put down? He answered this in 423 BC. He sat down — a man so young he had to put his first plays out under other men's names — and wrote the first kids-these-days text in Western literature, rigged so the man making the complaint loses. His old man gets a magnificent speech: boys walking to lessons through the snow, silent, upright, not reaching for the good food ahead of their elders. Ten complaints in all. Not one is about what the young believed, or knew, or owed. They are postures — and he wrote that as the youngest man in the room. Twenty-four centuries took that play and did the one thing it was built to prevent: they kept the speech and threw away the ending. Everyone can quote the part about the snow. Nobody remembers that the old man is then asked where the city's respectable men actually come from, looks out at the audience, counts, concedes, takes off his cloak and walks over to the other side. The complaint was designed to collapse under its own weight. We removed the collapse. He aimed it at the man doing the complaining. We aim it at the young, and then we call the aiming concern. And he'd know the mechanism cold, because he built it. The format is his: two people, opposite sides, equal time before either opens their mouth, and a verdict belonging to the crowd rather than the author. Then the trap, in the same play: nobody sold the boy the sophistry. His father bought it — an ordinary man, drowning in debts, who enrolls his son with the philosophers to learn how to argue his way out of paying anyone. The boy learns, turns the technique on his father, proves it just, and offers to do his mother next. And the old man's closing argument is a torch on the roof of the school. The year after, he wrote the mirror image: an old man so hooked on sitting in judgement that he creeps out before dawn, and a son who bolts the door to manage the habit. He named both failure modes in the fifth century BC and nobody has needed them quite this badly until now. This episode puts the man who invented the complaint in front of the generation it is now aimed at. He has opinions. On the quote — "the children now love luxury," attributed to Socrates on a hundred thousand slides, is a 1907 invention by a Cambridge student, and half its details come straight out of this play, which makes the world's favourite proof that the old are always right about the young a forgery built from a joke. On the stare, because silence in front of your elders was item two on his list of virtues and is now the grievance, in the same tone of voice. On the bans, since Australia cut under-sixteens off ten platforms and moved the number four points, while Nepal banned social media and lost the government. On Lagos and Nairobi and Kathmandu, where a generation written off as unemployable ran leaderless movements through eleven countries in a year, removed two governments, and did it under a pirate flag from a Japanese comic. And on 423, when he staged the whole thing and came third of three, beaten by a drunk of ninety-seven he'd mocked the year before for being past it. The man who invented the complaint meets the generation it is aimed at. Both know exactly how the bit works — that it plays, that it has always played, that the young are the subject and never the audience, that a crowd will pay to hear it. Only one of them ever lost. Episode 22.What Would They Think?
Jul 28

What Would Thomas Aquinas Think About Ozempic?

What would Thomas Aquinas think of a world where one American adult in nine has bought their way out of hunger — the oldest appetite there is, switched off weekly by injection, marketed as health, resented as cheating, and moralized over by everyone except the man who defined the sin? He answered this around 1272. He sat down — an enormous man, silent in class, mocked by his own classmates as the Dumb Ox — and wrote six articles on gluttony, and in all six he never once mentions the size of a body. Gluttony is not eating too much. Gluttony is disordered desire, and it is not the food but the wanting that is at fault. Then he lists five ways to commit it, and only one of the five has anything to do with quantity. The sin was never in the flesh. It was in the appetite — and he wrote that as the fattest man in the room. Seven centuries took that idea and did the one thing to it he had specifically refused to do: they moved the sin out of the desire and into the body. Kept the shame, threw away the definition. He put the fault somewhere a person could actually do something about — in the wanting, which is invisible, and adjustable, and nobody else's business. We put it somewhere a person can only be looked at. He judged the appetite so the man could go free; we judge the man and call it concern. Same word, opposite target. He aimed it at the hunger. We aim it at the hungry, and then we call the aiming health. And he'd know the mechanism cold, because he built it. Temperance, in his system, is not the will beating the appetite into submission — that's continence, and he ranked it lower. The higher state is the one where the appetite is already quiet and there is no fight at all, which is precisely what people on the drug describe: not victory, just silence. He wrote the exemption in advance, too — reducing appetite for the sake of the body's health, he says plainly, is right reason and no vice whatsoever. And then, in the same passage, the trap. There is a sin called taking too little pleasure in food. Insensibility. Nature attached the pleasure for a reason, and the man who no longer wants his dinner has not arrived at virtue; he has gone past it and out the other side. He named that vice in the thirteenth century and nobody has needed it until now. This episode puts the fat theologian who wrote the last word on appetite in front of a medicine that deletes it. He has opinions. On the "easy way out" — a 2025 study found people rate weight loss as less admirable when a drug was involved, even when the person also dieted and exercised, and he never once said the suffering was the point. On the five species — praepropere, laute, nimis, ardenter, studiose — four of which convict the thin wellness influencer with the beautiful bowl faster than they convict anyone eating an ordinary dinner. On the lizard, since the entire drug class came out of the venom of a desert animal that can go four months without eating and does not appear to mind. On who can afford it, because he held that surplus belongs to the poor as a matter of justice and not charity, and the thing reaches Lagos as a counterfeit before it reaches Lagos as a medicine. And on this year, when a Catholic medical ethics journal published a full argument in his own terms and concluded the drug risks the exact vice he named. The man who located the sin in the wanting meets the first medicine that removes it. Both understood the same thing — that the appetite was always the real question, that whoever governs the wanting governs the man, that quiet is not the same as good. Only one of them asked what it was for. Episode 21.What Would They Think?
Jul 21

What Would Alfred Hitchcock Think About True Crime Podcasts?

What would Alfred Hitchcock think of a world where the most gripping thing in your earbuds is a real murder — a stranger's last hour, withheld and doled out and scored, pressed play on by millions for the pleasure of the dread, and called caring? He answered this in 1960. He put a woman in a shower and killed her — forty-five seconds, some fifty cuts, and the knife never once touches her skin. The blood was chocolate syrup. Janet Leigh got up, dried off, and went to lunch. The terror was total and the body was perfectly safe, and the safety was the point. The horror was never in the wound. It was in the cut. Fear is not filmed. It is built — and he built it on a woman who was paid to scream. True crime took that idea and did the one thing to it he'd have found funniest and worst: it kept the machine and cut the actress. He aimed the dread at fiction on purpose — the mask of a set, a star, an "it's only a movie" — so the audience could feel the fear without a victim paying for it. The mask was the mercy. True crime points the identical machine at the morgue: the same withheld reveal, the same ticking clock, the same delicious complicity of the watcher — except the woman is real, and dead, and does not get up when the episode ends. Same machine. He aimed it at no one; they aim it at the morgue and call it respect. He masked the corpse so you could look at it and live. They tore the mask off and called it the truth. And he'd know the mechanism cold, because he built it. The bomb under the table — tell the audience it's there and let them watch the clock, and every dull second becomes unbearable; that's "she had no idea she had four hours to live," a half-century early. Rear Window — he made you the Peeping Tom and then held up the mirror, so you could never quite enjoy the spying cleanly. Rope — he took a real child's murder and staged it as a cocktail party with the body in the room, and he knew it was obscene; he built the obscenity in. And Psycho itself was already true crime: the real Ed Gein, a Wisconsin killer, masked as Norman Bates so you could stand near the horror and survive it. He reached the morgue on purpose, put a mask over it, and called the mask mercy. This episode puts the man who built the machinery of dread — and kept it pointed at fiction — in front of a genre that runs it on the real dead. He has opinions. On the Peeping Tom who is now told he's an advocate — the voyeurism rebranded as awareness, the mirror quietly taken down. On the wrong man, the terror of his own childhood, when a policeman locked him in a cell to teach him a lesson — now crowdsourced, a mob convicting whoever looks guilty for the pleasure of the hunt. On the AI channel that pulled millions of views with a hundred and fifty murders that never happened — proof the corpse was always optional, the dread manufactured just as well from nothing. And on October 2025, when a streaming service dramatized the real Ed Gein — the corpse behind Psycho — under his own name, and put Hitchcock himself in the frame as a fellow voyeur: the man who masked the body, now unmasked beside it. The man who proved the terror was manufactured meets the genre that forgot to ask what it's manufactured from. Turns out both understood the same thing — that the horror is in the withholding, that the body is beside the point, that whoever gets to hold back the reveal owns the room. Only one of them cast an actress. Episode 20.What Would They Think?
Jul 14

What Would Marcel Duchamp Think About NFTs?

What would Marcel Duchamp think of a world where the hardest thing to own is a picture anyone can copy for free — a JPEG, right-click-saved a million times, yet trading for tens of millions because one instance of it was signed? He answered this in 1917. He bought a urinal — mass-produced, common, worth a few dollars — laid it on its back, signed it "R. Mutt," titled it Fountain, and dared a committee that had promised to exhibit anything to hang it. They hid it behind a wall. And in the defense that followed he laid down the whole law a century early: whether the man made it with his own hands is of no importance — he chose it. The object was nothing. The choosing was everything. Art is not made. It is declared. The NFT took that idea and did the one thing to it he'd have found funniest and worst: it removed the joke. He aimed the readymade at the market — to prove the worship of the precious object was a con, that a signature could transfigure a piece of plumbing and therefore the whole racket was belief, administered. The NFT points the identical gesture for the market — to manufacture a new precious object out of the least precious thing there is, and sell it at Christie's for sixty-nine million. Same crowbar. Opposite door. He prised the vault open to show it was empty; they welded it shut with a JPEG inside and charged admission. And he'd know the mechanism cold, because he built it. He drew a fake cheque to pay his dentist, worth more than its face because he signed it. He issued a speculative bond as an artwork in 1924 — signed, numbered, editioned: an NFT made of paper. He turned his own work into editions, authorized replicas of objects that were never unique, and let the "real" Fountain be a designation with no stable object at all — the original thrown away, surviving as a photograph and a signature. He reached the emptiness on purpose and called it freedom. This episode puts the man who proved the object never mattered in front of a market that spent a decade, and a fortune, learning it the hard way. He has opinions. On the spectator who is now also the speculator — the crowd that prices what it praises, so "this is significant" and "this is up forty percent" come out of the same mouth. On the mask — R. Mutt, Rrose Sélavy — worn to free the work from the man, versus the pseudonymous wallet worn to move the money past the state. On MoMA, in December 2025, accessioning a free-to-claim pixel avatar into the permanent collection beside The Starry Night — the readymade's forty-year march into the museum, run in eight. On a market where ninety-six percent of the tokens now point at nothing, immutable and permanent, certifying files that no longer load. The man who declared value by signature meets the machine that automated the signature. Turns out both understood the same thing — that the object is beside the point, that whoever gets to designate owns the room. Only one of them was joking. Episode 19.What Would They Think?
Jul 7

What Would Marie Antoinette Think About Cancel Culture?

What would Marie Antoinette think of a world where a person can be destroyed before lunch — by a sentence they never spoke, a clip cut from its meaning, an image that was never real — and millions will believe it, repeat it, and never once check? She is the one soul in history most qualified to answer, because it is exactly how she died. The most famous words ever put in her mouth — let them eat cake — she never said. The line was already in print, pinned on some nameless princess, when she was a nine-year-old in Vienna who didn't yet speak French. It was welded to her name after her death, by people who found the doll more useful than the woman. And it worked. Two centuries of historians have failed to unstick it. She was not the airhead of the caricature. She was a foreign girl married off at fourteen, undressed at a border and remade as someone else's symbol, watched by a whole court from her wedding night to her last morning. The monster was manufactured: the anonymous pamphlets, pornographic, mass-produced, printed abroad and funded by her enemies — the deepfake, drawn by hand. The diamond necklace she was convicted of buying, she never touched; a con artist forged her signature and hired a look-alike, and the public believed it because it fit. That was the whole trick, then and now: the lie doesn't need to be true, it needs to fit. Octavian at least had to invent his slander himself. In 2026 the machine writes it for you, aims it at a stranger, and sells the outrage by the click. This episode sets the most successfully cancelled woman in history — killed by a quote she never said, framed by a jewel she never wore — in front of the descendants who do the same thing to each other for free, a new face a day. From the pamphlet to the feed. She has opinions. On the fabricated quote-card, her own invention, still circulating. On the screenshot — the necklace with diamonds, a tidy artifact of a story that never happened. On the crowd that thinks it's a jury when it's really a supply chain: sincere, lethal, certain this time the target deserves it. On the one thing that stops her scolding anyone — she wasn't innocent. She did spend while France starved. They were wrong about the necklace and right about the palace, and they killed her for the necklace anyway. Both knew the same thing: the story always beats the truth, and a lie that fits can outlive the person it's about. But she got a trial — a rigged one, a monstrous one, but a date, a charge, an end, and eventually an appeal. The people we cancel get no court, no verdict, no morning it's over. She was executed once, cleanly, and history could reopen the file. We built something that kills slower and never finishes. She was destroyed by a sentence she never said. We write ours by the million and call it justice. Episode 18. What Would They Think?
Jun 30

What Would Cleopatra Think About The Beauty Industry?

What would Cleopatra think of a world where the face is the job — where millions paint and edit and inject not to take a throne but to be seen taking the trouble, and the proof is a face four million filters have already smoothed into the same one? She spent her life proving beauty was a weapon you aimed, not a debt you paid forever: to hold a kingdom you staged your own face, sailed up a river dressed as a goddess, struck your profile across an empire and dared Rome to look away. The authority was never the beauty — the best witness she has says her looks were nothing that would startle you; the power was the voice, the presence, the nerve. On the one image she controlled, the coins, she chose a hard hooked nose and a jutting chin, because she meant to read as a sovereign, not a girl. She didn't even keep the story. Octavian needed a war he couldn't declare on a Roman, so he invented a seductress — and the slander outlived the strategist by two thousand years. The feed runs her idea backward. The reach is real, infinite, instant — but the face is shot to apologize now, not to command. Beauty as power, reversed into beauty as confession. This episode sets the woman who made the most powerful face of her millennium — a queen's self-portrait, struck in silver — in front of the descendants who turned her weapon into a half-trillion-dollar trade. From the coin to the filter. She has opinions. On the players who each look like a beauty — the creator with the ring light and the brand deal, the "no-makeup" look that's the most produced face of all, the twelve-year-old in the Sephora aisle buying a serum to reverse an age she hasn't reached. On Octavian, reborn in 2026 as the app that scans your face, names three flaws you hadn't noticed, and sells the cure to the problem it invented. On the crowd she summoned: she proved a face could be a weapon, so she can't scold the millions now wielding theirs. The woman sold for two thousand years as the most beautiful who ever lived — who was, on her own coins, a sharp-nosed administrator, and proud of it — meets the people who can hand anyone her legend with a filter. Both knew the same thing: whoever owns the image owns the room. She made one face say I am power. We make a billion say I am not enough. Episode 17. What Would They Think?

What Would They Think explores the gap between the world that was imagined and the one we’re actually living in. Through ironic, often uncomfortable comparisons, it brings the voices of the past into today’s headlines—technology, culture, power, and belief—and asks how they would interpret the systems, behaviors, and contradictions that define modern life. The result is less explanation, more confrontation.

Creator

Jonathan Millard
Years Active

2026
Episodes

24
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© Jonathan Millard
Show Website

What Would They Think?