The Carthage That Rome Tried to Erase
Imagine a city so wealthy it was the crown jewel of the ancient Mediterranean: six-story apartment buildings, a hidden harbor housing 220 warships, and a constitution Aristotle himself praised in a de...
10 Jun 24min
The Butcher of Uganda Who Walked Away
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 floors of a luxury Saudi hotel, eating oranges on a gene...
10 Jun 19min
The Brass Nosed Astronomer Tycho Brahe
A Danish nobleman with a brass prosthetic nose, a supposedly clairvoyant companion, and a pet elk that died falling down stairs after drinking too much beer at a castle party. Tycho Brahe sounds like ...
10 Jun 22min
The Bizarre Brilliance of Athanasius Kircher
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 inside. The same man outlined how to stop the bubonic p...
10 Jun 21min
The Big Rip Shreds Reality
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. But there is a darker mathematically valid scenar...
10 Jun 19min
The Autopsy That Proved Rasputin Was Human
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 when thrown into a frozen river. The 1916 autopsy re...
10 Jun 23min
The ancient Beta who measured the world
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 intellectual elite of his day mockingly nicknamed him "B...
10 Jun 20min
The AI blackmailing you from the future
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 most infamous thought experiment, a 2010 forum post pr...
10 Jun 22min
