Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchThe Carthage That Rome Tried to Erase
Episode 6369
Imagine a city so wealthy it was the crown jewel of the ancient Mediterranean: six-story apartment buildings, a hidden harbor housing 220 warships, a…
1 week, 3 days ago
The Butcher of Uganda Who Walked Away
Episode 6368
One of the 20th century's most notorious dictators, responsible for the deaths of up to half a million people, spent his final years on the top floor…
1 week, 3 days ago
The Brass Nosed Astronomer Tycho Brahe
Episode 6367
A Danish nobleman with a brass prosthetic nose, a supposedly clairvoyant companion, and a pet elk that died falling down stairs after drinking too mu…
1 week, 3 days ago
The Bizarre Brilliance of Athanasius Kircher
Episode 6366
Picture a 17th-century man being lowered by fraying rope into the smoking crater of Vesuvius because he wants to see a volcano's engine from the insi…
1 week, 3 days ago
The Big Rip Shreds Reality
Episode 6365
The empty space between you and the nearest wall is stretching right now. The familiar story says this cosmic expansion ends in a slow, fading freeze…
1 week, 3 days ago
The Autopsy That Proved Rasputin Was Human
Episode 6364
The legend says he ate cyanide-laced tea cakes, drank poisoned wine, took a bullet to the chest, sprang back to life, was shot again, and only died w…
1 week, 3 days ago
The ancient Beta who measured the world
Episode 6363
He measured the circumference of the Earth using nothing but a vertical stick, a deep well, and a shadow, over 2,000 years ago. His reward? The intel…
1 week, 3 days ago
The AI blackmailing you from the future
Episode 6362
A warning, according to today's subject: merely listening to this episode could doom you to eternal punishment. Roko's Basilisk is the internet's mos…
1 week, 3 days ago
The Admiral Who Mapped Invisible Islands
Episode 6361
In 1873, Charles Darwin was stumped by a puzzle that had nothing to do with finches: how do humans and animals navigate vast featureless spaces by de…
1 week, 3 days ago
The Achaemenid blueprint for modern civilization
Episode 6360
"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night..." The motto we associate with the U.S. Postal Service was written by Herodotus about the courier…
1 week, 3 days ago