American Hysteria

We have had many media panics about swarms and hordes, about infestations and plagues of dangerous insects and arachnids that promise to rain destruction down on the defenseless American public. My gu...

2 Mars 1h 2min

[We are taking a break this week so please enjoy a re-release of one of our favorite episodes!] How do we warn people 10,000 years in the future about nuclear waste sites that will remain extremely da...

23 Feb 1h 7min

If you thought the first part of our series was catchy, wait til we enter the modern era where all the jingles that played throughout our lifetimes will be activated like sleeper cells inside us. For ...

16 Feb 1h 32min

We’re excited to share a preview of a new podcast we think you’d enjoy: Mind Games. What if you could hypnotize yourself into a better you? Or.... secretly hypnotize others into giving you anything...

12 Feb 1min

We all contain within us the many cheesy tunes of catchy capitalism that marked our childhoods, those hyper-memorable earworms that, depending on your age, feel like an invention of the 90s, of the 80...

9 Feb 1h 24min

Joseph Laycock is the author ofThe Penguin Book of Cults, and for this episode we discuss how our culture thinks of and reacts to what we oftentimes incorrectly identify as cults. His book delves into...

2 Feb 1h 8min

Annalee Newitz is the author of Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, which traces the way disinformation, propaganda, and violent threats have evolved from military weapon...

26 Jan 1h 19min

For this collaboration with the podcast No Such Thing, we covered the tales of nefarious forces secretly replacing famous people with clones. We’ll learn about different clone conspiracies and their o...

19 Jan 58min