Introducing: Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes
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
The Disturbing World of Mobile Game Ads with 'Panic World' Podcast
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
DEAR ABBY AND ANN LANDERS
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
Titanic in Real Time
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
Polybius: The Arcade Conspiracy
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
Not Just a Phase: Goths Through History with Christine Laskowski
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
The Imaginary Gods of ChatGPT with Journalist Miles Klee
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
