Previous episodes
One choice for each day. No ranking, no infinite feed — just past conversations that earned our attention.
02
August 6, 2026
Fall of Civilizations · Paul Cooper · 2 hr 4 min
Paul Cooper writes history the way a novelist writes a slow ending, and this is his most patient work: an empire that took a thousand years to fall, told without hurry and without hindsight cleverness. It is the rare long episode that never asks for your patience twice.
03
August 5, 2026
99% Invisible · Roman Mars and Katie Mingle · 34 min
Long before anyone argued about AI, aviation had already learned what happens to human skill when the machine does most of the work. This episode turns one flight into a quiet, unforgettable argument about the cost of handing over control.
04
August 4, 2026
Conversations with Tyler · Daniel Kahneman · 56 min
A conversation with one of the few thinkers who changed how we understand our own minds, held by an interviewer who refuses to ask the obvious questions. Kahneman is unusually willing to say what he still does not know, and that honesty is the reason this hour keeps its value.
05
August 3, 2026
Hidden Brain · Sheena Iyengar · 49 min
Sheena Iyengar spent her career studying why more options don't necessarily make us happier, and this conversation distills that research into something usable. It reframes daily decision fatigue as a design problem rather than a personal failing. Recorded during early pandemic uncertainty, its insights about control and choice have only grown more relevant.
06
August 2, 2026
Dan Snow's History Hit · Dan Snow with historical experts on the Anglo-Spanish War · 69 min
Dan Snow walks through why Philip II launched history's most famous invasion fleet and how weather, tactics and English seamanship combined to unravel it. It's a rare case where a single week of naval maneuvering reshaped the balance of power in Europe for a century. The storytelling makes strategy and consequence equally vivid.
07
August 2, 2026
Search Engine · Kashmir Hill · 61 min
PJ Vogt and journalist Kashmir Hill trace the strange, largely unregulated rise of facial search engines back to one mysterious first builder. It's an investigation that manages to be gripping without sensationalism, and it leaves you with a genuinely unresolved ethical question rather than an easy verdict. This is narrative journalism at its most patient.
08
August 1, 2026
Hidden Brain · Matthew Walker · 36 min
Sleep scientist Matthew Walker explains why the average adult's habit of trading sleep for productivity is a quiet act of self-sabotage. The conversation moves past generic advice into what actually happens in a dreaming brain and why it matters for memory, mood and health. It's the rare health segment that changes behavior without moralizing.
09
July 31, 2026
EconTalk · J. Doyne Farmer · 65 min
Physicist J. Doyne Farmer argues that standard economic models miss what chaos theory and agent-based simulation can capture about real human behavior. Russ Roberts pushes back throughout, which keeps the conversation honest rather than one-sided. It's a genuine debate about what economics is even trying to predict.
10
July 30, 2026
Acquired · Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal · 119 min
Long before Nvidia became a trillion-dollar AI bellwether, it was a scrappy graphics chip company that nearly died more than once. Ben and David trace those near-collapses and the stubborn technical bets that eventually paid off, which makes today's AI boom look far less inevitable and far more earned. It's a masterclass in how founders survive years of being almost wrong.
11
July 29, 2026
Sean Carroll's Mindscape · David Chalmers · 82 min
David Chalmers coined the term 'the hard problem of consciousness,' and here he and Sean Carroll spend an unhurried hour testing where physicalist explanations of the mind actually break down. The conversation is rigorous without being dense, and it treats simulation theory seriously rather than as a gimmick. Few philosophy-of-mind conversations manage to be both this careful and this fun.
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