35
August 30, 2026
A road trip through the data center debate
Search Engine · PJ Vogt · 41 min
PJ Vogt drives to the places where the cloud actually sits and listens to the people who live beside it. Curiosity instead of a verdict.
Previous episodes
Every good conversation,
still worth your time.
One choice for each day. Nothing to catch up on — browse if you like, or wait for tomorrow.
34
August 29, 2026
Elizabeth I vs The Catholics: The Queen’s Spymaster (Part 1)
The Rest Is History · Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook · 1 hr 12 min
Espionage before there was a word for it: plots, ciphers and a state learning to watch its own people. Told at eye level, with the details that make it stick.
33
August 28, 2026
Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth
Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr · 46 min
Mokyr has spent a career on why sustained growth started where it did, and Cowen pushes him past the textbook story into culture, clans and institutions.
32
August 27, 2026
364 | Stuart Firestein on How Science Relies on Ignorance and Failure
Sean Carroll's Mindscape · Stuart Firestein · 1 hr 16 min
Firestein argues that science runs on ignorance rather than facts, and Carroll lets the idea breathe. A rare hour that makes not knowing feel like a skill.
31
August 26, 2026
The Bone Wars
99% Invisible · Roman Mars · 45 min
Two rival paleontologists turned the American West into a feud, and modern dinosaur science still carries the dents. Funny, then quietly sobering about how knowledge really gets made.
30
August 25, 2026
What Art Does For Your Brain
Hidden Brain · Daisy Fancourt · 49 min
A careful look at why standing in front of a painting changes something measurable in us. The episode resists the wellness pitch and stays with the evidence.
29
August 24, 2026
Ursula K. Le Guin interview
Between the Covers · Ursula K. Le Guin · 1 hr 30 min
A slow, generous conversation with a writer who spent her life insisting that imagination is a moral faculty. David Naimon asks real questions and then, rarely for an interviewer, gets out of the way.
28
August 23, 2026
The Destruction of Pompeii
The Rest Is History · Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook · 56 min
An ordinary morning that became the best-documented catastrophe of the ancient world. Holland and Sandbrook stay with the small human details — the bread, the dog, the letters — and that is what makes it unforgettable.
27
August 22, 2026
The Arrow of Time
Sean Carroll's Mindscape · Sean Carroll · 1 hr 24 min
Carroll explains why the past differs from the future without once losing the thread or talking down to you. It is physics, but it lands as something closer to a meditation on memory and mortality.
26
August 21, 2026
Bad Medicine, Part 1: The Story of 98.6
Freakonomics Radio · Stephen Dubner · 48 min
A quietly unsettling look at how much of medicine rests on numbers nobody re-checked. Not a conspiracy story — a story about how evidence actually accumulates, and how slowly it gets corrected.
25
August 20, 2026
TSMC
Acquired · Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal · 3 hr 12 min
The story of the single most important company most people cannot name, told with the patience of a long book and the clarity of a great lecture. By the end you understand not just a business but the physical substrate of modern life.
24
August 19, 2026
Why are drug dealers putting fentanyl in everything?
Search Engine · PJ Vogt · 1 hr 2 min
PJ Vogt takes a question most reporting answers with a statistic and follows it all the way down to the economics, the chemistry and the human decisions underneath. Curiosity done properly, without a single moment of outrage-farming.
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