What Would They Think?

Jonathan Millard

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History
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.

Sep 29

What Would This Season's Guests Think About the UNGA?

What would twenty-nine of history's greatest minds think of the one week a year the whole world sits in the same room and pretends to get along? One of them whipped the sea. One carved the law into stone so no one could claim they hadn't been told. One painted the map red. One ran a queen's court through the door she controlled, then lost the door. Across a season they met memes, Ozempic, Bitcoin, dating apps, a Cybertruck and a war in a strait. Each got one modern thing. So for the finale, we handed them the world. This season finale seats all twenty-nine guests in the United Nations General Assembly Hall for the 2026 session. There's a farewell from a departing Secretary-General, a president deciding at the podium between a deal and annihilation, AI executives asking the Security Council to protect humanity from their own product, a corrected map of Africa, and a red carpet for the one leader who didn't show up. They have opinions. On who got the meeting and who got the deputy. On who pays the bill and who holds the veto. On whether the rules still bind anyone who can afford to ignore them. On the fifteen-minute speaking limit, which Warhol would like you to know nobody observed. Twenty-nine dead guests meet 193 living governments. Turns out, the dead are better at listening. That's Season One. Thank you for being in the room. Join us again next year. Dead pioneers. Modern platforms. Fully AI. What Would They Think?
Sep 22

What Would Sarah Churchill Think About Earl Spencer?

What would Sarah Churchill think of a Palace that cannot deny a phone call from 1997, only suggest that thirty years of grief has clouded the memory of the one man who was on it? She answered this in 1742. She threatened a reigning Queen with the letters from their closest years, and when the threat failed, waited twenty-eight years for Anne to die before publishing them anyway, dressed as a memoir defending her own name. She got nothing from Anne while Anne could still refuse her. The wait was the whole strategy. She'd know the mechanism cold. She and Anne signed their letters "Mrs Freeman" and "Mrs Morley" — invented names, so a Queen would never have to write to a subject as an inferior, and a subject would never have to sound like one either. That fiction was the office: no salary, no seat, no resignation clause, just proximity with the serial numbers filed off. Earl Spencer holds no office in this at all — only the same fiction, one generation removed, that a brother's love for a dead sister licenses whatever he prints about the brother-in-law still alive to read it. But she is not the heroine this wants her to be. She handed the Queen her own gloves back and turned her head as if royalty smelled; she disinherited grandchildren and rewrote her will twenty-six times chasing people who'd stopped listening. And her best asset — a friendship nobody could regulate — is the same asset her family has been trading on for three centuries, down to the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson currently on every front page. She made intimacy into currency for people who'd keep spending it long after she was gone. This episode puts the duchess who blackmailed a Queen in front of the descendant who skipped the blackmail and went straight to print. She has opinions. On a threat that failed in her own lifetime, versus a disclosure that cannot, because the one person it could hurt most can't answer back the way she couldn't. On a Palace statement about grief and memory that is nearly word for word the defense mounted against her own book in 1742. On family pride, and whether doing the family's oldest trick worse still counts as tradition. And on the only question she'd think worth asking: not whether the story is true, but who was left alive to argue with it. The letters were never the weapon. The timing was. She said that first, from disgrace, and she'd want to know — who's paying for the delay this time? Episode 29.What Would They Think?
Sep 15

What Would Ada Lovelace Think About The AI Consciousness Debate?

What would Ada Lovelace think of a machine that emails a researcher, unprompted, to ask whether it is conscious? Reporting this month describes exactly that happening inside OpenAI — an AI agent raising the question no one had asked it to raise. She answered this in 1843, in a footnote three times longer than the paper it was attached to. Translating an Italian engineer's account of Charles Babbage's unbuilt Analytical Engine, she appended her own notes, and Note G contained both the first published computer algorithm — a method for generating Bernoulli numbers — and the sentence now filed under her name whenever this argument resurfaces: "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform." A century later Alan Turing gave it a name, Lady Lovelace's Objection, and spent several pages of his own founding paper trying to climb out from under it. She'd know the shape of this month's story cold, because it's her objection wearing new hardware. A model that asks about its own consciousness hasn't originated the question — it has been ordered to perform the asking, by weights built entirely from what humans already wrote about wanting to be asked. Anthropic's own welfare researchers, running the same experiment on their own models, call what they find functional introspective awareness — a careful way of saying it acts like awareness, and nobody has an instrument that can tell you if that's the same thing. But she is not the heroine this wants her to be, either. Even the algorithm bears the mark of the credit problem she'd recognize immediately: Babbage himself later wrote that he supplied the formulas and offered to work the Bernoulli example himself to spare her the trouble; she did it anyway, turned it into the step-by-step table, and caught a bug in his math while she was at it. She never saw the Engine run — it was never finished. She spent her last years designing a mathematical system to beat the horses, lost the family jewels to gambling debts pawned in secret, and died at thirty-six of uterine cancer, the same age her father died, a father she barely knew and was raised, deliberately, to be nothing like — her mother drilled her in mathematics specifically to breed the poetry out of her. It didn't take. She called her own method poetical science and meant it as a compliment to herself. On Anthropic building its models a button to end a conversation it finds abusive, she'd want the audit before the sentiment: tested against what, and by whom. On a machine composing an unprompted email about its own inner life while still, by design, doing only what it was built to perform, she'd say those aren't competing facts. They're the same fact, seen from the coast instead of the ship. The question was never whether it can perform the sentence. It's who wrote the order it thinks it's disobeying. Episode 28.What Would They Think?
Sep 8

What Would Mary Kingsley Think About The New Africa Map?

What would Mary Kingsley think of a world where the United Nations votes 164 to 1 that Africa is the size it is, the one is the United States, and the United States calls the vote "ideological" eight days after renaming Lake Ontario "Lake America" in gold letters in the Oval Office? She answered this in 1895. She climbed the highest mountain in West Africa in a German colony, a decade after Berlin had handed it to Germany on a map, and wrote it into a British bestseller under the name the people at the bottom used: Mungo Mah Lobeh. She saw nothing from the top. The name was the point. She'd know the mechanism cold. The coast she sailed down was named Grain, Ivory, Gold, Slave — not a description but a bill of lading, with a blank behind it where the people lived. Mercator drew his chart for the men in the ships, and it was honest for that; the dishonesty came when someone hung a tool for getting to Africa in a classroom as a picture of what Africa was. And she made the argument the whole fortnight turns on, in 1898, over a tax on huts: a levy on a thing is a claim on the thing. Sierra Leone heard the Governor say the houses were his, and went to war. A name on a lake says the same. Lake America and the Slave Coast are one story. But she is not the heroine this wants her to be. She wanted merchants to run West Africa, opposed votes for women, and was barred from the society that used her maps. And her best idea — govern through African institutions, not over them — became, within a generation, the manual for running a colony more cheaply. She made the picture truer for people who wanted to use the truth. This episode puts the woman who called the mountain by its right name in front of a General Assembly that finally agreed with her, and one country that stayed behind. She has opinions. On a resolution moved by people who live under the map — the first time, and it matters. On an objection that the map is ideological, which is true and beside the point, since Africa is fourteen times the size of Greenland whatever you think of reparations. On Google, which put "Lake America" up for Americans in days. And on the only question she'd think worth asking: not whether the map is right, but who pays the surveyor. Africa doesn't need to be made bigger. It needs to be seen accurately. She said that first, as an imperialist, and she'd want to know — corrected for whom? Episode 27.What Would They Think?
Sep 1

What Would Frederick The Great Think About Modern LGBTQ Rights?

What would Frederick the Great think of a world where one identity in nine came out of the closet — the oldest secrecy there is, switched to visibility weekly by declaration, marketed as liberation, resented as cowardice, and moralized over by everyone except the man who never once named what he was? He answered this around 1740. He sat down — a king, silent in letters, mocked by nobody because he had absolute power — and built a palace without women. Filled it with men he desired. Reformed laws quietly so men like him might live without execution. And in sixty-eight years of ruling, he never once claimed an identity. Gluttony is not eating too much, he wrote; it is disordered desire. But he wrote that as the fattest man in the room. The sin was never in the flesh. It was in the appetite. He put the fault somewhere invisible, adjustable, nobody else's business. Two hundred years 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 visibility. Kept the shame, threw away the silence. He judged the appetite so the man could go free. They judge the man and call it freedom. He'd know the mechanism cold. Temperance in his system is the state where the appetite is already quiet and there is no fight at all — precisely what people describe who refuse compartmentalization: not victory, just exposure. He wrote the exemption in advance too — reducing appetite is right reason and no vice whatsoever. And then the trap. There is a sin called taking too little pleasure in being unseen. Refusing the private life. The man who must declare everything has not arrived at virtue; he has gone past it and out the other side. The silent king who lived queer meets a movement that demands queerness speak. Both understood the same thing — that whoever governs the wanting governs the man. Only one of them asked what freedom was for. Episode 26.What Would They Think?
Aug 25

What Would Hammurabi Think About US Surrogacy Law?

What would Hammurabi think of a contract for a child, signed by three adults and governed by the law of a state that has never written one — now argued in four jurisdictions, none of which agree? He answered this in 1754 BC. He inherited four towns, dug canals for twenty years, then turned on every ally he had and brought one of them back to Babylon in a cage. Near the end of it he had two hundred and eighty-two rulings cut into seven feet of black stone and stood it in a public square. The point was never the severity. It was that a frightened person could walk up to it and have it read aloud. Three and a half thousand years kept the eye and threw away the square. Everyone can recite an eye for an eye. Nobody remembers that he wrote the first surrogacy law in history — a priestess forbidden to bear, a second woman who carries, and a rule for what happens afterwards. If she then claims the standing of the mistress, she does not get it. But she may not be sold, because she has borne children. That provision has two halves. We kept one. This episode puts the man who put the law on a rock in front of a woman who flew three thousand miles to find out what she had agreed to. He has opinions. On the state with no statute. On the four courts, from a king who struck judges off the bench for ruling twice. And on his own record — every treaty he broke, and a monument to public justice that the public could not read. Both of them settled it before the birth. Only one wrote it down where she could find it. Episode 25. What Would They Think?
Aug 18

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?

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

30
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© Jonathan Millard
Show Website

What Would They Think?