Messages from the Void #2
Here’s another cold cup of coffee from your friendly, neighborhood Paul Carrubba.
It’s a brand new year. It’s a brand new day. Hopefully. We’re a week into 2026 and I find myself feeling genuinely (albeit cautiously) optimistic for the first time since the big layoff in September. Despite nearing triple digits of applications with only a single interview so far, I’m not going to slow down. January is the friggin’ month. I can feel it.
That being said, I’ll take any and all reccos if you got ‘em.
Some thoughts, observations and stuff I’ve been digging since we last spoke:
History and Trivia Podcasts
This isn’t actually a new thing for me. But a few months back, I ran out of audiobooks, so I went back to podcasts for a bit. My all-time, number-one is and will forever be No Such Thing as a Fish. It’s absolutely hysterically funny and includes so many different random and insightful facts, that I had a hard time choosing a few to illustrate just how weird and wonderful the show is (Shipworms?! Dylan Thomas?! The wild South Pacific form of cricket???!!!). I love it so much, I dragged my very jet-lagged wife, Jessi, to a live recording on the first day of our trip to London in 2024. THANK YOU AGAIN, JESSI.
A few other faves include The Ancients and Gone Medieval (both on the History Hit network).
King John and Shitty Leaders
Speaking of history, I’ve been reading King John: Treachery and Tyranny in Medieval England by British historian Marc Morris (who also authored the eminently readable The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England).
King John was such a fascinating character. He was the youngest son of a brood of right shitheads that included his older brother Richard I (you know, the lion from Disney’s Robin Hood). Because he was the baby, no one expected John to ever have to lead anything. In fact, for a good chunk of his life, he was known by the name “John Sansterre,” which most people translate as “John Lackland.”
I won’t go into the nitty-gritty. You can read the book for that. However, once John was actually thrust into leadership, he did everything in his nepo-baby power to squander whatever small amount political capital he had at every single opportunity.
Granted, he inherited a dead-broke kingdom after big bro (and I do emphasize “BRO”) Richard shed his mortal coil. But even after squeezing every shilling to get England on firmer financial footing, he kept squeezing. He pissed off the people that were best placed to help him.
And that was what made John such a failure. Leaders are supposed to be firm when necessary, but John was punitive. He just had to have his way no matter what. He doubled down when he should have pulled back. He ran away when he should have shown gumption. He wasn’t just cruel, he was craven. During the medieval period, people could usually forgive one or the other, but not both together. As David Mitchell wrote in his excellent book, Unruly, ALL kings and queens are bastards, but you have to be fair about it. John’s great-grandfather Henry I was incredibly draconian, but those laws applied to everyone.
What we should learn from god awful dicks like John is that good leadership isn’t about the leader. It’s a conversation. It’s an understanding between the leader and those in their charge. And in the end, it really does also help to not be a spoiled baby and a dick.