Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchLi Bai: The Outlaw Poet Who Drank, Dueled, and Wrote China's Most Beloved Verses
Episode 7142
Li Bai was a sword-carrying wanderer, a legendary drinker, and the most celebrated lyric poet in Chinese literature. He claimed descent from the impe…
1 week, 2 days ago
Hafez: The Persian Poet Who Outwitted Tyrants and Became Iran's National Oracle
Episode 7135
Hafez wrote poetry so beloved in Iran that his collected works sit in nearly every household and are used as a fortune-telling oracle — you open the …
1 week, 2 days ago
J.R.R. Tolkien: How the Trenches of World War I and a Love Story Built Middle-earth
Episode 7143
J.R.R. Tolkien created Middle-earth in the trenches of the Somme, where he watched his closest friends die in the mud of World War I. The Shire was t…
1 week, 2 days ago
Guglielmo Marconi: The Self-Taught Tinkerer Who Networked the World Without Wires
Episode 7136
Guglielmo Marconi had no university degree and no formal training in physics. He taught himself from textbooks in his father's attic, transmitted rad…
1 week, 2 days ago
John Donne: From London's Most Scandalous Poet to the Pulpit of St. Paul's Cathedral
Episode 7141
John Donne wrote the most explicitly erotic poetry in the English language — and then became the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, preaching sermons of s…
1 week, 2 days ago
Bill Gates: From Software Tycoon and Monopolist to the World's Most Embattled Philanthropist
Episode 7131
Bill Gates built Microsoft into the most dominant software company in history, survived an antitrust trial that nearly broke it apart, and then reinv…
1 week, 2 days ago
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar: Calculating the Sun's Fate and the Atomic Bomb's Power
Episode 7128
The same physics that explains how stars live and die also explained how to build a weapon that could destroy cities. This episode explores the scien…
1 week, 2 days ago
Aldous Huxley: The Final LSD Trip and the Chilling Warnings That Proved More Right Than Orwell's
Episode 7125
Aldous Huxley asked his wife to inject him with LSD as he lay dying of cancer on November 22, 1963 — the same day Kennedy was shot. His death was bur…
1 week, 2 days ago
George Orwell: The Eton Rebel Who Lived Among the Poor and Wrote 1984 While Dying
Episode 7132
George Orwell was an Eton-educated colonial policeman who quit the British Empire, deliberately lived among tramps and miners to understand poverty f…
1 week, 2 days ago
Cyrus McCormick: The Reaper Baron Whose Invention Myth Was More Fiction Than Fact
Episode 7129
Cyrus McCormick is credited with inventing the mechanical reaper that revolutionized American agriculture — but the real story is messier. His father…
1 week, 2 days ago