Pretendians: Indigenous Identity Fraud with Robert Jago and Angel Ellis

From Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate, to the Octopus Murders and the Waco Siege, the world is full of deception, manipulation, and destruction. Listen to Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes every Wednes...

5 Sep 20258min

Warning: REALLY WEIRD EPISODE. On social media and YouTube, bizarre, shocking, disgusting, creepy, and confusing animated ads for simple mobile games have popped up over the last few years. In collabo...

1 Sep 20251h 17min

In the spirit of American advice columnists Dear Abby and Ann Landers, I am joined by Sarah Marshall of the podcast You’re Wrong About to give our own unique advice to some of the funnier questions se...

25 Aug 20251h 13min

Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren, also known as Dear Abby, were newspaper advice columnists answering questions and printing statements from their 100 million readers from the 1950s to the early 2000...

18 Aug 20251h 13min

This is a bonus episode from our subscribers-only podcast Hysteria Home Companion. Our associate producer (and my brother) Riley Swedelius-Smith is here to tell us the absolutely wild and little-know...

11 Aug 20251h 2min

This is a bonus episode from our subscribers-only podcast Hysteria Home Companion. I share the history of an 80s urban legend with our producer Miranda Zickler, one about a dangerous video game that a...

4 Aug 202540min

Christine Laskowski shares her research into how an ancient barbarian people known as the Goths came to represent everything from edgy Hot Topic fashion and the band Joy Division to the Notre Dame cat...

28 Jul 20251h 15min

Miles Klee is the author of a recent Rolling Stone article titled People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies which tells the stories of ChatGPT users who have come to believe that t...

21 Jul 20251h