Podcast Episodes

The Birkin bag game

The Birkin bag made by French luxury retailer Hermès has become a status symbol for the global elite. Notoriously difficult to obtain, the world's rich obsess over how to get their hands on one. But …

Published on 4 months, 1 week ago

How AI could influence the evolution of humanity

Some of the leading brains behind generative AI have warned about the risk of artificial superintelligence wiping out humanity, if left unchecked. But what if the influence of AI on humans is much mo…

Published on 4 months, 2 weeks ago

Ancient cities had hidden disease protections

Five years since Covid, not only has the pandemic affected the way we live and work, it’s also influencing the way researchers are thinking about the past.

In this episode archaeologist Alex Bentley …

Published on 4 months, 3 weeks ago

Shipping produces 3% of global emissions. How to get that down, quickly

Ships transport around 80% of the world’s cargo. From your food, to your car to your phone, chances are it got to you by sea. The vast majority of the world’s container ships burn fossil fuels, which…

Published on 5 months ago

Prospects of lasting peace between Turkey and the Kurds

For over 40 years, the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK, has waged an armed insurgency against Turkey, fighting for Kurdish rights and autonomy.

But in late February, Abdullah Öcalan, the PKK’s impris…

Published on 5 months, 1 week ago

The surreal story of how COVID took over a remote city in the Amazon

When the first cases of COVID-19 began to spread around the world in early 2020, people in Iquitos, a remote city in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, weren’t unduly worried. They assumed their isola…

Published on 5 months, 2 weeks ago

The fossil that proved humanity's common origins in Africa

One hundred years ago, a paper was published in the journal Nature that would radically shift our understandings of the origins of humanity. It described a fossil, found in a lime mine in Taung in So…

Published on 5 months, 3 weeks ago

Scam Factories Ep 3: Great Escapes

Every day that he was locked up in a scam compound in Southeast Asia, George thought about how to get out. "We looked for means of escaping, but it was hard," he said.

Scam Factories is a podcast ser…

Published on 6 months ago

Scam Factories Ep 2: Inside the operation

A few weeks after Ben Yeo travelled to Cambodia for what he thought was a job in a casino, he found himself locked up in a padded room. “It’s a combination between a prison and a madhouse,” he rememb…

Published on 6 months ago

Scam Factories Ep 1: No skills required

Scam factories is a special three-part series taking you inside Southeast Asia's brutal fraud compounds. Hundreds of thousands of people are estimated to work in these scam factories. Many were traff…

Published on 6 months ago