pplpod

Imagine being an enslaved teenager forced into a Boston room full of governors, founding fathers, and the wealthiest merchants of the era to legally prove that your own mind belongs to you. In 1772, t...

6 Maj 20min

We assume the people holding the power to end the world must be fundamentally different from the rest of us, totally rational and unshakable. This episode is a deep dive into J. Robert Oppenheimer, wh...

6 Maj 20min

Hyperrealistic art, the scientific revolution, the modern idea of individual freedom: a strong case can be made that all of it was kickstarted by a pandemic that wiped out half of Europe. This episode...

6 Maj 22min

He held more than 100 patents, won the most prestigious awards in his field, and died convinced he was a savior of humanity. Decades later, historians began calling him the single most destructive org...

6 Maj 20min

One man set a global superpower's biological sciences back by half a century, not through accident or underfunding but through political willpower, fabricated data, and a set of bizarre pseudoscientif...

6 Maj 20min

You have almost certainly seen one of her infinity rooms in your social feed: a friend or a celebrity standing in a pitch-black space ringed by glowing dots that recede forever. The artist behind thos...

6 Maj 19min

The cartoon version of the Mongol Empire is barbarian horses, smoke, and ash. The reality was a logistics machine that built the largest contiguous land empire in human history and rewired Eurasia in ...

6 Maj 45min

Two identical twins share the exact same DNA sequence. By 50, one has cancer and the other has a completely different cardiovascular profile. Their hardware is identical, so what changed? The software...

6 Maj 32min